News

Daggett, Linda Hill (?? – 1901)

First Continuous Methodist Presence In Alaska

Lydia Hill Daggett was a native of Boston who played a pivotal role in introducing Methodism into Alaska in the late 1880s. Her labor resulted in the opening of the Jesse Lee Home and School in Unalaska, the first successful Methodist outpost with continuity in the territory. She also championed the founding of schools for Native Americans in Washington State and worked to establish education opportunities for African American children in Louisiana following the Civil War.

Mrs. Daggett was editor of the Heathen Woman’ Friend, the magazine of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, from 1871 to 1882. In 1886, she became secretary of the new Alaska Bureau of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society (WHMS) and worked tirelessly to realize the founding of an educational institution serving indigenous Alaskan youth. An earlier effort by the society in Unga was short lived because of funding challenges.

Mrs. Daggett persuaded a commercial company to buy her a ticket to Alaska and was successful in laying the groundwork for the Jesse Lee Home and School, which opened in Unalaska 1890. She convinced both the WHMS and the denomination’s Missionary Society to contribute to the project and, working with Alaska’s commissioner of education, figured out a way to combine public and private support for the school. She also cultivated individual private donors.

Lydia Hill Daggett died in 1901. The minutes of the WHMS for that year, recorded this testimony: “Having lived in the fear of God, in her extremity she was rewarded by a sense of his tender love. No woman more upright in spirit has ever been associated with us in missionary work.”

The Jesse Lee Home and School operated in Unalaska until it was relocated to Seward in 1926. It would become part of the Alaska public school system, being moved to Anchorage in 1964 when a massive earthquake damaged the Seward building. The Seward building still stands, and the name “Jesse Lee School” continues in use in Anchorage.

Adapted by Elliott Wright from information in Six Decades of Service: 1880 to 1940, a history of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church by Ruth Esther Meeker, and data from the internet site of the Alaska Department of Education, https://education.alaska.gov/DOE_Rolodex/SchoolCalendar/Home/SchoolDetails/57060, and Alaska Child and Family, http://www.akchild.org/our-story/history.html; and Appletons’ Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events …, Volume 41, https://books.google.com/books?id=KhQbAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA418&lpg=PA418&dq=Lydia+Hill+Daggett+Alaska&source=bl&ots=WnkVokv8l6&sig=lVIaf4H-wApfpLx05FgsUj2b5ho&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjYufacgf7aAhXoTN8KHRG2B0EQ6AEISzAJ

Williams, Hester

Pioneer In Establishing Schools For Women And Girls

Hester Williams, “Aunt Hester,” was a former slave who had little formal schooling, yet she pioneered in establishing schools for women and girls in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1882 Hester Williams addressed the Louisiana Annual Conference and told of her work among the freedwomen. She had “a missionary hen named Dorcus,” which produced eight dollars for missions, and a row of sugar cane, which produced six dollars. This fourteen dollars was presented to the conference as a challenge to the church to match her funds in order to start more schools. Hester traveled to Detroit to speak to the annual meeting of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society in 1886, and to plead for funds to open the Hester Williams Industrial Home in Baton Rouge. She was granted two hundred dollars and was instrumental in starting five schools in her home in addition to the Hester Williams Home. These schools taught Bible, catechism, and sewing. Traveling by horseback, by wagon and mule, train, foot, and boat, she started other schools in at least seven other communities. She was a member of the Bureau of Youth People’s Work of the Louisiana Home Missionary Society.

Taken from They Went Out Not Knowing… An Encyclopedia of One Hundred Women in Mission (New York: Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries, The United Methodist Church, 1986). Used with permission of United Methodist Women.

Spreng, Minerva Strawman (1858-1924)

Founder Of Woman’s Missionary Society Of The Evangelical Association

At age twenty, Minerva Strawman was invited to a missionary tea given by the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Brethren Church. Delighted with what she saw and heard, she asked her father, a minister and member of the Board of Missions of the Evangelical Association, if the women in their church could have such a society. She was advised that a petition would have to be presented to the Association’s Board of Missions for approval. One was written and signed by fifty women of the Evangelical Association and presented to the Board in 1880. It was approved, and Miss Strawman and the women of the Lindsey, Ohio church immediately organized the first Woman’s Society in the Evangelical Association. Minerva Strawman Spreng was elected third vice-president of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the Evangelical Association when it was organized in 1884. From 1892 to 1922, she was its president and then president of the Women’s Missionary Society of the Evangelical Church from 1922 to 1924, a total of thirty-two years. During the church’s Centennial Celebration in 1940, a $50,000 Memorial Chair of Missions was established at Evangelical Seminary, Naperville, Illinois, in recognition of her missionary zeal.

Eldridge, Mary Louise Deming (1849-1933)

Pioneer Missionary Among The Navajo

Widowed at an early age, Mary Eldridge entered the United States Indian Service and went to work at Haskell Institute, a training school for clerical and commercial work, in Lawrence, Kansas. From there she went to a school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to work among the Lakota Indians. In 1891, she moved to the San Juan Valley, west of Farmington, New Mexico, where she and missionary Mary A. Tripp put up a tent and started the first Methodist mission for Navajo people. It was later moved to a small house, and is today the Navajo United Methodist Mission School. Mary Louise Eldridge worked for forty-two years in New Mexico as a field supervisor for the Woman’s Home Missionary Society. Due to her efforts, the Cambridge Ditch was built, making it possible for the Navajos to farm. Her hardest work was in using her influence and resources to provide food, medicine, and clothing for the people she served. Never was a storm too severe, the night too dark or cold for her to go to the assistance of persons in need. After retirement, she continued in the cause of humanity, never losing interest in the people of their needs.

Fabro, Prudencia L. (1910-1996)

First Filipino President Of Harris Memorial College

Taken from http://www.harris.edu.ph/about-harris/history/

Prudencia L. Fabro, the first Filipino President of Harris Memorial College, was one of the most outstanding woman leaders in the Methodist-related institutions whose major contribution was the training, molding and forming of young women who answered the call to serve as deaconesses in the Methodist Church.

She was sent as Crusade scholar to Drew University in New Jersey for her Master of Arts Degree in Rural Sociology. She returned to join the Harris faculty in 1948. In 1951, Ms. Fabro was appointed as the first Filipino director of Harris Memorial School, replacing Ms. Mary Evans, the last American missionary to head the school. In recognition of her outstanding leadership in the training school, she was conferred an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Kansas Wesleyan University.

In 1968, the school community celebrated its recognition by the government as a four-year college institution. Dr. Fabro became its first president. With courage, integrity, spirituality, quiet dignity and humility, Dr. Fabro was the most influential figure in shaping the direction of Harris Memorial College, particularly in the formation and transformation of young women for deaconess service during her time.

Taken from Methodism in the Philippines: A Century of Faith and Vision, ed. by Bishop Jose Gamboa, Jr., Gamaliel T. de Armas, Jr., Roela Victoria Rivera, and Sharon Paz C. Hechanova. (Manila: Philippines Central Conference of The United Methodist Church, 2003).

Spottswood, Curran L. (1912-1995)

Evangelist And “Flying Parson”

Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church , “Mission Photograph Album – Portraits #07 Page 0114,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed July 11, 2018, http://catalog.gcah.org/omeka/items/show/60726.

Rev. Curran L. Spottswood, popularly called Spotty, was well known, first for his work in evangelism, in opening up new areas for church mission, and secondly, as a “flying parson” because he used a plane to carry out his work in many distant places. He started as a missionary in the Cagayan Valley, traversing hills and valleys, working with pastors in mission evangelism.

His work in Palanan was pioneering. He brought a whole mobile medical team and pastors who initiated mission evangelism in Palanan. He suffered a plane crash that almost cost his life. Methodist settlers in Mindanao did not find it congenial to join the churches which had already been operating there under the Comity Agreement. They wanted to retain their Methodist faith and practices. Bishop Valencia sent Rev. Spottswood, who could travel quickly from place to place in his plane, to organize the “lost tribes” of Ilocano Methodists. In 1952, he started to direct the extensive evangelism campaign of building the Methodist church in Mindanao with the aid of his plane that he flew all over the province. At that time Mindanao was undeveloped. Roads were limited and hardly passable. People traveled by water, using rivers as highways. But the “flying parson” was not hindered by these obstacles. He landed in ricefields hurredly cleared by people, by the river banks, and on highways. He always brought out the townspeople who would watch his bold maneuvers and light bonfires and torch lights to guide his landing when darkness caught up with his flight.

During the first session of the Mindanao Annual Conference in 1955, thirty-five congregations constituted the roll, many of which were organized under Spotty’s leadership. Rev. Spottswood also founded and developed a rural center in Kidapawan, now named Spottswood Methodist Center in his honor.

Goodwin, John Charles (1941-2017)

Mission Photojournalist

John C. Goodwin began taking photographs for publication in 1960 at age 19. In the 1960s and 70s, he actively photographed aspects of the civil-rights and antiwar movements. His first photographs to appear in World Outlook magazine, General Board of Global Ministries, were published in 1968. From 1966 to 1974, John worked as a freelance photographer. His subjects included the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Daniel Berrigan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Thich Nhat Hanh, and countless others.

After working for eight years as a freelance photographer during the US Vietnam War years, Goodwin accepted the job of photojournalist with the General Board of Global Ministries in 1974. For the next 20 years, he traveled to more than 70 countries to cover mission work and missionaries. His work was featured in hundreds of magazines, and later, online and in documentaries. He excelled at illuminating the face of shared human experience, connecting people around the world. When asked how he got his photo subjects—meaning people—to relax and let their guard down for a good photo, he said, “Love them. You just have to love them.” John, as much a good-will ambassador as a professional photographer, developed and nurtured long-lasting friendships with people all around the world. He also photographed 10 general conferences (1976-2012) for both Global Ministries and United Methodist Communications.

John was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1995. From 1999, he served on the executive committee of New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty—the death penalty in New Jersey was successfully abolished in 2007. He remained active in the Demarest Nature Center, performed in the choir at Demarest United Methodist Church, and was a familiar figure driving his electric scooter to the Demarest Swim Club every day in the summer. He was a popular model at The Art School at Old Church and others, and portraits of him can still be found in art fairs across Bergen County.

In 1995, Goodwin was named to the United Methodist Communicators Hall of Fame. “My chosen profession, photojournalism, allowed me a lifetime of discovery and celebration of the wonderful differences and profound similarities to be found in our human community,” John wrote in an article for New World Outlook magazine in 1996. “Since my first published photographs appeared in 1960 when I was 19, it has been my dream that my photographs would work against racism and other prejudice and would work for understanding and reconciliation.”

Compiled by Christie R. House, editor New World Outlook magazine.

Sources: Obituary published in The Record/Herald News on March 24, 2017.

“A Photojournalist Celebrates Diversity” by John C. Goodwin, New World Outlook September-October 1996, P. 34.

Memorial Service for John Goodwin, Demarest United Methodist Church, March 25, 2017, Demarest, New Jersey.

Roberts, William (1812-1888)

Circuit Rider Of The Far West

In 1847, before the California gold rush and in the early years of the Oregon Trail migration, the Reverend William Roberts arrived in the Willamette Valley, to become the third superintendent of the Oregon Mission.

William M. Roberts was born in Burlington, New Jersey in 1812, was city reared and educated, and entered the Methodist ministry in the Philadelphia Conference in 1834. His early pulpit work marked him as a man destined to become a leader in his church. He was a friend and peer of Jason Lee, and entertained Lee in his home in Paterson, New Jersey in 1839, when Lee went east to ask for reinforcements; and Mr. Roberts was present as a member of the Missionary Board in July 1844, when Jason Lee made his defense of the Oregon Mission. Roberts was familiar with the Oregon Mission situation and was a logical choice for the post of superintendent.

Sailing on the way to Oregon they reached San Francisco, then known as Yerba Buena. William Roberts and James H. Wilbur had been charged by the Board of Foreign Missions to make a survey in California en route to Oregon. They landed at Yerba Buena April 24, 1847, and took stock of the land and the people. In May a Methodist Class and Sabbath School were organized. This is the first Protestant church of record in California.

William Roberts set energetically about his work as Superintendent of the Oregon Mission, preaching wherever people gathered, supervising the pastoral work, traveling to the scattered settlements within his field of responsibility.

In the early summer of 1849, Roberts again visited California. Asa White, a local preacher, had reached San Francisco May 10, 1849, with a blue tent which he pitched on the ground later chosen as a site for the Powell Street Church, and engaged in evangelistic preaching. On June 26, Roberts went on to Sacramento, Stockton, San Jose, and other principal places, and also visited the mines, preaching wherever opportunity offered. At several places he secured lots on which to erect churches. Before leaving Oregon he had assembled lumber for a church building, and had it framed and shipped. It arrived before he left California.

Oregon became a Territory in 1848, as did California. The Oregon Mission memorialized General Conference for the creation of an Annual Conference. The General Conference decided to include Oregon, California, and New Mexico in a single Mission Conference. The organizing session was held in Salem, Oregon, on September 5, 1849, in the chapel of the Oregon Institute. As no bishop was present, William Roberts, Superintendent, presided.

The General Conference of 1852 authorized division into two Conferences, Oregon and California. The Oregon Conference was organized on March 17, 1853, by Bishop Ames. The area of the conference was “the Territory of Oregon,” which in 1852 included the entire region of which the title of the United States had been confirmed by the Treaty of 1846 with Great Britain, including the present states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana. Jason Lee had established a mission, which served its day; William Roberts had organized a Church.

At the Conference of 1854, Bishop Simpson appointed William Roberts as Superintendent of the Puget Sound Missionary District, where Methodism was still in its infancy. William Roberts was appointed “Missionary to Idaho” in September, 1865, a post-conference appointment. In October, 1866, Roberts went to Utah. He was perhaps the first Methodist preacher to make a survey of religious conditions in Utah and to report his findings to the bishop and the Church.

Roberts left Idaho in 1869. Some of his fields of service not yet mentioned included pastor at Salem one year; agent of the American Bible Society, seven years; Presiding Elder of Portland District, six years. He was superannuated in 1875 because of impaired health, but later he was restored to the effective relation and was pastor at Forest Grove, Astoria, and Dayton.

In 1879, when Roberts was 67 years old, we find him taking an aggressive interest in the problems of the Chinese on the Pacific coast. Roberts established a night school for the Chinese, which met six nights each week.

William Roberts died in Dayton, Oregon on August 22, 1888, at the age of 76. To his fourteen years in the Philadelphia and New Jersey Conferences are added 41 on the Pacific coast, or a total of 55 years in the Christian ministry.

Erle Howell, Northwest church historian, stated that during William Roberts’ years in the church as superintendent of the Oregon Mission, and later as pastor, presiding elder, and missionary to the Indians and Chinese, he traveled more than 200,000 miles, a record equaled by no other American circuit rider except Francis Asbury.

Adapted from Elizabeth M. Smith, “William Roberts: Circuit Rider of the Far West,” Methodist History 20 no. 2 (January 1982): 60-74.

Matthews, James K. (1913-2010)

Bishop With A Passion For Mission

United Methodist Bishop James K. Mathews had a lifelong passion for mission and evangelism across his long life of 97 years.

The son-in-law of noted evangelist E. Stanley Jones, Mathews traveled the world as a Methodist missionary. He made more than 60 trips to India, 28 to Africa, 16 to Latin America, and a dozen to Korea and Japan during his lifetime.

However, the office of bishop was not a distinction he sought.

Mathews declined the post when he was first elected to serve as bishop in India in 1956. He suggested that Indians should be ministered to by their own people.

In 1960, he was on a mission trip in India when he was elected to the episcopacy again [in the United States]. This time, he accepted. He served as bishop of the New England Area for 12 years and then the Washington (D.C.) Area for eight years before retiring in 1980.

In 1985, Mathews came out of retirement to serve as bishop in Zimbabwe for a year, and during his tenure, he helped establish Africa University. He was called into service again in 1990, leading the newly created Albany Area in upstate New York until 1992. He later served as bishop of the New York Area starting in 1995, when its bishop went on medical leave. Mathews retired again in 1996 as one of the longest-serving bishops of The United Methodist Church. He died on September 8, 2010.

In many ways, Mathews embodied what was best about Wesleyan thinking, friends say.

David McAllister-Wilson, president of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington and a longtime friend, said Mathews combined John Wesley’s ideal of “knowledge and vital piety.” He was equally passionate about giving an altar call and calling for civil rights, McAllister-Wilson said.

As a bishop, he participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. In 1978, he participated in “The Longest Walk” in Washington, which drew national attention to the plight of Native Americans.

On Easter Sunday in 1964, he and African-American Bishop Charles Golden were barred from entering an all-white Methodist church in Jackson, Mississippi.

Decades later, he was invited to preach at that church, which was by then integrated.

One of eight children, Mathews was born February 10, 1913, in Breezewood, Pennsylvania. His father was an itinerant Methodist preacher, but Mathews initially aspired to become a physician and was a pre-med student at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee.

While in college, he had a profound conversion experience, and his brother, the Rev. Joseph W. Mathews, convinced him to enter the clergy. Mathews received a second bachelor’s degree from Biblical Seminary in New York City, earning his way teaching newly arrived immigrants at the Five Points Mission on New York’s Lower East Side.

He was ordained a Methodist minister in 1937. He then earned a master’s degree in theology from Boston University School of Theology, where a lecture by an Anglican bishop from India inspired him to become a missionary.

In 1938, he set sail for India. The following year at the Sat Tal Christian Ashram in northern India, he met E. Stanley Jones and, just as importantly, Jones’s daughter Eunice. The two married in June 1940.

After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Mathews returned with his wife to the United States where he pursued his Ph.D. in theology at Columbia University under the G.I. Bill. He also took a post with the Methodist Board of Missions, the predecessor of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries.

As a missionary, he crossed the Atlantic Ocean some 220 times and mastered several languages, including the Indian languages of Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit.

He was “one of Methodism’s mission stalwarts of the 20th century,” said Thomas Kemper, the top executive at the Board of Global Ministries.

“His mission was the message of God’s love in Jesus Christ, proclaimed in acts and words,” Kemper said. “He wrote, preached, taught and traveled for the gospel.”

Adapted from an obituary by Heather Hahn, a multimedia news reporter for United Methodist News Service, September 9, 2010.

Matthews, Eunice Jones (1914-2016)

“Bent Toward The Love Of God And Care Of Others”

She was many things across the decades of her 101-year life span. The plaque in her honor in the Metropolitan United Methodist Church, Washington, DC, reads:

Eunice Jones Mathews, wife, mother, author and noble soul whose life was ceaselessly bent toward the love of God and the care of others.

She was the daughter of famed evangelist/missionary E. Stanley Jones and the wife of missionary/bishop James K. Mathews, but she reminded the United Methodist General Conference of 2004—which marked her 90^th birthday—that she did not need to be identified with her father or husband because in the freedom of Jesus Christ she had the freedom to be herself.

Eunice Jones Mathews may or may not have ever been a commissioned missionary, but she was a mission force in 20^th century United Methodism. As noted by Thomas Kemper on her death in early 2016, Mrs. Mathews was a pivotal figure in the shaping of contemporary United Methodist mission theology and practice. Her great contributions in writing and speaking, along with collaboration with her husband, was “on understanding the context of mission when proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This included showing respect for indigenous cultures and indigenous church leaders. And they [the Mathews] encouraged social and health services.”

Eunice Jones was born on April 29, 1914, in Sitapur, British India, and grew up in Lucknow. Her mother taught her English to supplement her native Hindustani, and her mother served on the governing board of Asia’s first Christian institution of higher learning for women—now known as Isabella Thoburn College. Eunice attended Wellesley Girls School in Naini Tal, India, and American University in Washington, D.C., before starting her own career in humanitarian work and missionary service. She married a young American missionary, James K. Mathews in 1940 and the couple would have three children and six grandchildren.

She accompanied her husband on missionary trips both before and after they relocated to the United States and he was elected to the episcopacy in 1960. She made more than 60 trips to India and dozens of visits to other parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Her written works included The Divine Yes, a book about overcoming personal tragedies, written in collaboration with her father; Selections from E. Stanley Jones: Christ and Human Need, edited with her husband, and Drug Abuse: Summons to Community Action, of which she was sole author.

Eunice Mathews told interviewer Tracy McNeal in 2004:

She and her husband fashioned their marriage as an equal partnership; Bishop Mathews wrote in his autobiography, A Global Odyssey, that “these very memoirs should be titled, “We Did It Together.”

Together, Bishop and Mrs. Mathews have advocated for peace and good will, moving among personages such as President George and Barbara Bush; President Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton; Pope Paul VI; Mahatma Gandhi; Indira Gandhi; and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

King once told Mrs. Mathews of his deep appreciation for her father–who was a personal friend and biographer of Mahatma Gandhi–because it was reading Jones’ biography that prompted King to adopt a doctrine of nonviolence in the civil rights movement.

Narrative by Elliott Wright from material adapted from the files of United Methodist News Service, Global Ministries and the Washington Post, notably:

Delegates honor Eunice Mathews’ life, legacy by Tracy McNeal, April 29, 2004, United Methodist News Service

Eunice Jones Mathews dies at age 101 by Kathy L. Gilbert, March 1, 2016, UMNS

Global Ministries Remembers Eunice Jones Mathews, February 29, 2016

EUNICE JONES MATHEWS: April 29, 1914 – February 27, 2016, The Washington Post, March 13, 201