Advocate For Peace And Justice Deats grew up in a Methodist family in Texas and attended McMurry College in Abilene, Texas, in the early 1950s. There he became active in the Methodist Student Movement which was beginning to voice concerns about civil rights and racial justice, holding its first interracial meeting at McMurry. A visit […]
Preacher of the first Spanish-language Methodist sermon in Argentina By 1866 the Argentine mission was prospering but the most important step had not yet taken place. This was such a constant preoccupation for Rev. Goodfellow, the Superintendent of the Conference, who in his report of April 1865, a kind of premonition abruptly erupted: We need […]
First Executive Of Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society Nathan Bangs, 1778 -1862, was the primary organizer and first administrator of the Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society, founded in 1819. He was concurrently for almost a decade the head of the denomination’s Book Concern. Thus, Bangs had a major impact on the origins of two of the United […]
Missionaries To India And Malaysia Leila (Lee) come out of Middleville Methodist Church in Michigan, a small-town rural congregation that was on the cutting edge of theology and was proud of its contributions to Methodist ministry and mission. She first heard about the short-term program from the Reverend Charles Swann, her college sociology professor, whose […]
Methodist Missionary to Gbarnga, Liberia The Rev. Ulysses Samuel Gray served as a missionary with the Methodist Board of Missions at the Gbarnga Mission Station in Bong County, Liberia, for nearly 27 years (1948-1974). His wife, Vivienne Newton Gray, also served the station as a teacher and administrator (see her biography https://methodistmission200.org/gray-vivienne-newton-1917/). Ulysses, known as “U.S.,” […]
Outstanding Early Missionary To Liberia Ann Wilkins was a missionary to Liberia from 1837-1857. She was the first American Methodist female missionary sent out by the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a missionary herself and not as a missionary spouse. She founded the first Methodist girls’ school outside of the United States […]
First Ordained African-American Methodist Woman And Missionary To Appalachia Sallie Crenshaw was twice a ground-breaker in African-American women’s ordination in the Methodist tradition. In 1936, she was one of the two first African-American woman ordained as a local elder in the Methodist Episcopal Church, in the East Tennessee Conference. Then in 1956 she was one […]
Missionary To Korea And First Woman Fully Ordained In The Methodist Church In 1956 the General Conference granted full clergy rights to women by voting that they could be admitted into full ministerial membership in Methodist Annual Conferences. On May 18, within a month of this action, Ms. Maud K. Jensen, a missionary to Korea, […]
First Ordained Latino Methodist And Missionary To Mexico In 1873, the first train on the new line out of Vera Cruz carried a Methodist bishop and Alejo Hernandez, the first Latino to be ordained in Methodism, who was the bishop’s choice to establish a mission in Mexico City. But the throbbing power in the locomotive’s […]
First Priciple Of Chicago Training School And “Archbishop Of Deaconnesses” It is said of the first college in the United States to award degrees to women, Oberlin (1841), that it is peculiar in that which is good. A compliment equally applicable to an Oberlin graduate, Lucy Jane Rider. She became a physician when most medical […]