News

Nast, Wilhelm (1807-1899)

The First German Methodist Missionary

Wilhelm Nast is appropriately known by German Methodists today, by the title of “The First German Methodist Missionary,” as well as the founder and organizer of the German branch of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

Nast was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1807 and confirmed in the Lutheran Church at fourteen as was customary. Through a combination of strong family Christian influence and exposure to Lutheran pietistic prayer meetings, Nast felt an early and strong call to missionary service. He even talked seriously about attending a missionary training institute, until his family convinced him of the advantages of a more traditional theological education and his gifts for pastoral service. He subsequently entered a lower seminary as preparation for his entry to Ttibingen University. After some struggle with his pastoral call, Nast declined to take a pastoral appointment in the state-supported Lutheran Church. Nast’s desire to become a teacher of classics led him to emigrate to America, where the dearth of available persons to teach classics became Nast’s opportunity. After teaching for a number of years, most notably as German teacher at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Nast became attracted to the same pietistic elements in Methodism which had also so impressed Wesley in Savannah: the German protest against ecclesiastical formalism, the stress on inner regeneration, and an emphasis on the “priesthood of all believers.”

With an outstanding theological education already in hand, Nast was ready to answer Bishop Emory’s call for German-speaking Methodist preachers. Nast, thereby, became the formal founder of the German-speaking Methodist movement in 1835, when he was sent by the Ohio Conference to be a German missionary on probation in Cincinnati.

Nast quickly synthesized in a vigorous way his teenage ambition to be a missionary, along with realizing the promise of his pastoral and theological gifts. Through his long ministry, many German immigrants were gathered around him in Methodist classes, which formed the basis of the German Districts of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Some of his first contacts who met with Nast in these class meetings were K. H. Doering and L. S. Jacoby, who later became District superintendents for the Pittsburgh German District, and the St. Louis German District, respectively. Even more significantly, L. S. Jacoby was later to return to Germany to take up a post as Superintendent of the fledgling Methodist Episcopal Church in Germany.

Apart from the individuals who were influenced by Nast to enter the ministry to German immigrants in America, Nast engaged in other activities which had the effect of consolidating the German districts in their mission in America. His work at the General Conference of 1848, gave the German districts their vision and legal standing to become integrated, but separate Conferences within American Methodism, charged with the task of reaching the 5 million German immigrants that would arrive.

Nast provided the first translations of foundational Methodist documents to sustain the German-speaking movement. He was the first translator into German of complete parts of the Methodist Book of Discipline, such as the “Teaching and Church Order,” “Articles of Religion,” and “The General Rules.” In addition, he translated a collection of Wesley’s forty-four standard sermons, as well as a forty-part collection of German hymns (1839), not to mention various other administrative documents which nourished connectionalism among the German districts within the wider American Methodist body.

Also significant for creating a shared sense of mission and connectionalism was Nast’s work as editor of regular theological publications. Most importantly, Nast published and edited the influential German language Methodist weekly periodical Der Christliche Apologete, first published in January 1839 and continuing under his editorship until his son took over in 1889. This weekly periodical, along with Nast’s multiple series of German catechisms, were widely read and influential theological documents for German-speaking Methodists both in America and later in Germany. The tone and theology of Der Apologete was thoroughly missional-with Nast’s primary concern always to ”save souls among all German immigrants.”

The relatively quick spread of Methodism in Germany was clearly due in large part to Nast’s leadership in the North American Methodist mission and his role as a bridge figure between English-speaking Methodism and Continental world-views.

Nast’s pioneer missions to German-Americans prospered so quickly that as early as 1844 the Methodist Episcopal General Conference considered ways to explore mounting a mission back to Germany itself. Thus, Nast and the other German-American Methodists wasted no time organizing a mission to their homeland, although it began informally enough. Letters back home to family and friends had provided for many years the first Methodist preaching in Germany.

Nast embarked on a tour of Germany in 1844 under commission of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. On this tour he sought persons and families with whom he had some prior connections in order to scout the prospects of mounting a sustained Methodist mission in Germany supported by the German-American Conferences.

Nast and his German-speaking American Methodist Episcopal Church followers entered Germany remarkably quickly and with a lasting mission contribution. L. S. Jacoby, early protege of Nast and the superintendent of the German district in St. Louis, was sent to Bremen in December 1849 at age thirty-six, against his wife’s wishes and armed with only five dollars worth of tracts to found and oversee the work in that city. Jacoby’s successful work in Bremen soon spread onward. Another German-American who had been trained by Nast, Ludwig Nippert, was sent to Berlin in 1858 as the first ordained Methodist pastor in that great capital.

By 1860 a flourishing publishing house was established in Bremen, and by the 1890s German Methodism had become so vigorous and self-supporting that it mounted further missions into Switzerland, Austro-Hungary, and Russia. The success of the small, but growing band of German-American Methodist missionaries could be traced back to Nast’s leadership training and his mission scouting tour of 1844.

Adapted from W. Harrison Daniel, “Wilhelm Nast (1807-1899): Founder of German-Speaking Methodism in American and Architect of the Methodist Episcopal Church Mission in Europe,” Methodist History 39:3 (April 2001): 154-166.

Gilbert, John Wesley (1865-1923)

CME Pioneer Of MECS Congo Mission

John Wesley Gilbert, a minister in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CMEC) and professor at Paine College, accompanied Bishop Walter Russell Lambuth on his exploration trip to establish a Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS), mission in the Congo.

Both in 1865, Gilbert, who held B.A., M.A., and D.D., was the “first” student, first graduate, and first African American member of the faculty of Paine College founded in 1882. A graduate of both Paine College in Augusta, Georgia, and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Gilbert won a scholarship to study Greek at the American School of Classics in Athens, Greece. A gifted linguist and very able classical scholar, Gilbert was appointed chair of Greek and Modem Languages at Paine College in 1903. Though he had repeatedly had more lucrative offers, Gilbert had taught in or been connected with Paine College until his death in 1923. He saw in Paine College his best opportunity to aid in the uplift of African Americans and he continued his work there for one more year prior to his taking up his duties in his new field of the African Mission.

Gilbert and Lambuth prepared carefully for the mission they were about to undertake. Before leaving the United States, Gilbert had sought out William A. Sheppard, a black minister from Virginia, who began the American Presbyterian Congo Mission, to learn from him all he could about the work in the Congo.

After arriving in the Congo, they traveled by small river trading boats on the Congo, the Kasai, and the Lulua Rivers for nearly nine hundred miles to Luebo, the headquarters of the Southern Presbyterian Mission. It was at Luebo that the Congolese gave African names to their American guests. Gilbert received the name of Mutombo Katshi.

On February 1, 1912, Lambuth and Gilbert reached Ewangu, the village of Chief Wembo-Nyatna and received an enthusiastic welcome. One of the members of the caravan, Mudimbi, had been a boyhood friend of the chief, and while they had not met for many years, they immediately recognized each other. It was largely through the influence of Mudimbi, who was an evangelist in the Presbyterian Church at Luebo, that Chief Wembo-Nyama received the southern Methodists so cordially. After consulting with his headmen, Chief Wembo-Nyama declared his entire kingdom open to the Methodist mission and invited Lambuth and Gilbert to establish a station in his own capital.

Having obtained Wembo-Nyama’s consent to open a mission in Central Congo, Lambuth applied for a concession to the Colonial Office in Brussels in March 1912. Lambuth said that Gilbert had been very helpful in securing the concession of a site for the mission. Gilbert had written letters to the Belgian authorities and the work was so well done that the Colonial Minister inquired who wrote the letters and remarked that they were the most correct and elegantly expressed among those received at his office from one who was not a native of either France or Belgium. A grant of twenty-two acres of land was subsequently secured from the Belgian government.

Lambuth and Gilbert returned to the United States on March 13, 1912, to seek recruits to begin work. The first group of missionaries included Daniel L. Mumpower, a physician, and his wife, a registered nurse, both of Missouri; Charles C. Bush, preacher, and his wife, a teacher, both from West Virginia; and Mr. and Mrs. John Stockwell, from Louisiana. On his second visit to Africa, Bishop Lambuth officially inaugurated the first Methodist Mission in Central Congo on February 12, 1914. Chief Wembo-Nyama and all the members of his council attended the opening ceremony.

When Dr. John Wesley Gilbert died in 1923, and despite Bishop Lamouth’s efforts to maintain a close cooperation between black and white church leaders, no black person was sent to Central Congo as missionary. Inspired undoubtedly by the southern Presbyterians who had a fifty-fifty plan of black and white missionaries, Lambuth had proposed in 1913 that both black and white missionaries be sent to the Congo Mission. Some influential southern Methodist officials refused to go along with the idea, however. In February 1935, the Belgian government informed the American Missionary Societies that black missionaries would no longer be welcomed to the Congo. Consequently, no African American missionary had served in Central Congo Conference before the independence of the Congo on June 30, 1960. Nevertheless, it was an African-American, John Wesley Gilbert, who was one of the pioneers in this important mission work.

Adapted from Michael O. Kasongo, “A Spirit of Cooperation in Mission: Professor John Wesley Gilbert and Bishop Walter Russell Lambuth,” Methodist History 36:4 (July 1998): 260-265.

Cannon, James (1864-1944) 

MECS Bishop Who Supervised Mission In Congo, Brazil, And Mexico

The name James Cannon, Jr., usually conjures up vivid and often unflattering historical images. One thinks, for instance, of the militant crusader for prohibition during the Progressive era, the political preacher who campaigned against Al Smith in the presidential election of 1928, and the beleagured cleric accused in the 1930s of stock-market gambling, financial wrongdoing, and adultery. Such dramatic events, however, have obscured other aspects of Cannon’s career. Largely forgotten, for example, are his activities as a missionary bishop and champion of the ecumenical movement. A strong Wilsonian internationalist, he supervised southern Methodist missions in Mexico, the Congo, and Brazil, promoted world prohibition in Great Britain and on the continent, and participated in the international temperance and ecumenical conferences of that period. He also played an active role in humanitarian agencies, notably Near East Relief, the massive American philanthropy to aid the Christian victims of Turkish atrocities.

Although most prominent in the United States as a vigorous defender of prohibition in the 1920s, Cannon spent much of the decade abroad. Of his many trips overseas, one of the most memorable was his first visit to the Congo in 1922. The late Bishop Walter Russell Lambuth, the southern Methodist church’s foremost missionary leader, had founded the fledgling Congo Mission in 1914. As a church journalist and educator, Cannon had been a vigorous advocate of missions, and after Lambuth’s death, he reluctantly consented to make the difficult trip to central Africa. Cannon was burdened with other responsibilities, but no bishop had visited the Congo mission since its inception, and he considered such neglect to be unfair to the missionaries in the field, who needed episcopal attention and support.

An intense combatant and controversialist in the political and ecclesiastical arenas in America, Cannon was perhaps happiest when travelling overseas. The missionaries, dedicated to a life of Christian sacrifice and service abroad, admired his toughness, activism, and sense of duty. They also valued his internationalist perspective and vigorous advocacy of their cause. During the bitter struggle in the southern church over Methodist unification in 1925, Cannon strongly defended his church’s missionaries against charges of modernism and heresy.

At home, no one worked harder than Cannon for the Centenary, the southern church’s campaign in the 1920s to raise funds for missions. As a result, no one was more disappointed at the church’s failure to support that cause adequately. Despite setbacks, Cannon continued to believe that missions was the most important work of the church.

Adapted from Robert A. Hohner, “A Southern Methodist in Africa: Bishop James Cannon, Jr. and the Congo Mission,” Methodist History 31:1 (October 1992): 3-15.

Photo of Bishop James Cannon, Jr., taken from Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Cannon_James_1864-1944

Mason, Mary M. (1791-1868) 

Founding Director Of New York Female Missionary Society

Mary Mason was among the leadership of such New York charitable organizations as the Female Assistance Society, the Asylum for Lying In-Women, and the Female Benevolent Society. She was a founder of the Sunday school movement in New York City, taught at the Five Points Mission, and for more than thirty years ran a day school in her home. She is also remembered as a founder and director of the New York Female Missionary Society of The Methodist Episcopal Church.

Mary W. Morgan grew up in Philadelphia, where she graduated from the Young Ladies’ Academy at the age of 17, prepared to be a teacher. After converting to Methodism, Mary Morgan accepted an invitation to teach at a new Society of Friends school for girls in New York.

Mary Morgan’s life-long concerns were education and women’s needs. Her first organized benevolent effort was a spontaneous reaction to the needs of destitute women in her neighborhood. The women named their group the Female Assistance Society. Morgan was elected its secretary and remained an active member for nearly 50 years.

Better known to Methodists is her involvement in the Sunday school movement. Mary Morgan’s contemporaries credited her with founding the first Methodist Sunday school in New York. As a result of her efforts, a regular Methodist Sunday school opened in November 1815, and Mary Morgan was the school’s female superintendent.

In April 1817, she married the Rev. Thomas Mason, a South Carolinian who had been appointed Assistant Book Agent of the Methodist Book Concern at the 1816 General Conference. The Masons had ten children; four girls and five boys lived to adulthood. She left the Friends’ School in 1818 when pregnant with her first child, but soon opened a private school in her home, which she continued for 34 years.

When the Missionary Society was formed in the New York Conference on April 5, 1819, Thomas Mason, book agent and Mary’s husband, was elected the corresponding secretary. Two days after the constitution was approved at the public meeting, the Board of Managers met for the first time. Joshua Soule moved that “the females attached to the Methodist congregations be invited to form a Society auxiliary to this.”

The organizing meeting of the New York Female Missionary Society was held on Mary Mason’s 28th birthday, July 5, 1819, at the Wesleyan Seminary on Forsyth Street. One of the first orders of business was the election of officers. Mary Mason was elected First Directress. The Female Society’s object was “to assist the several Annual Conferences more effectually to extend their missionary labors throughout the United States and elsewhere.” Where “elsewhere” might be was as yet undetermined in 1819. The auxiliaries’ primary duty was to raise money for the Parent Society, usually in the form of memberships.

Under Mason’s direction, the Society began developing relationships with specific missions and missionaries. They began with the largest Methodist mission of the 1820s, that of James B. Finley and the Wyandotts of Ohio.

The New York Female Missionary Society was one of the earliest supporters of missions to Liberia. In 1831, before anyone had heard of Melville Cox, the Female Society gave $100 to the Parent Society for the planned Liberian mission. Mary Mason’s own interest in Liberia was not limited to the work of the Female Society. In December 1834, she helped organize the “Female Society of the City of New-York for the Support of Schools in Africa,” and was named to its Executive Committee. Early the next year, she and her husband formed a Juvenile Missionary Society at the Greene Street Church. Its main focus was Africa. At least three of the Mason children were active in the Society.

Another who responded to Liberia’s call was a school teacher named Ann Wilkins. She served a remarkable 19 years in Liberia. She is best known for the girls’ school she established at Millsburgh, north of Monrovia on the St. Paul’s River, but her most important contribution may be in demonstrating that a single woman could be an effective missionary, even in a deadly climate.

Like the other missionaries and teachers, Ann Wilkins was employed by the Parent Society, which in turn relied on the auxiliaries for the necessary funds. The connection between missionaries and auxiliaries could go far beyond the simple collection and distribution of funds once a year. This was particularly true of the relationship of Ann Wilkins, Mary Mason, and the New York Female Missionary Society. For nearly 20 years, Mason and the Society served Ann Wilkins as lobbyists, confidantes, outfitters, and advisors.

Adapted from Susan E. Warrick, “’She Diligently Followed Every Good Work’: Mary Mason and the New York Female Missionary Society,” Methodist History 34:4 (July 1996): 214-229.

Decherd, Mary (1874-1954)

Tireless Fundraiser For MECS Mission To Brazil

Mary Decherd was born in Bastrop, Texas in 1874. Her devout mother, Kate Decherd, developed a strong interest in missions. She was active in the local chapters of the Woman’s Home Missions and Parsonage Society, and the Women’s Foreign Missions Society. Additionally, she was “Lady Manager” of the girls’ missionary group sponsored by the congregation. This Juvenile Missionary Society was organized in 1888. Kate’s daughter Mary was a charter member and an active participant in these meetings. The lessons she learned there were to bear important fruit later. The congregation organized an Epworth League chapter in 1892, one of the very first in the state. From the Epworth League, Mary Decherd imbibed still greater missions consciousness, plus an awareness of the power latent in a youth group.

Graduating from high school at the age of 15, the precocious Mary entered the University of Texas. She completed her bachelor’s degree in three years, graduating in 1892 and going on to become the first female to earn an M.A. degree from the University. She also did graduate work at the University of Chicago. After ten years of teaching at Austin High School, Miss Mary began work at the University as a mathematics instructor. As a professor, she continued her interest in religious matters. In 1931, she was instrumental in inaugurating the University’s Committee on Student Religious Life. For several decades, she taught a young woman’s Sunday school class that usually

numbered around a hundred.

The significant work for which Mary Decherd will be most remembered began just before World War I when she launched a one-woman crusade to support Methodist missions in South Brazil.

The mission board’s foreign secretary, Edmund F. Cook, dispatched a form letter to Miss Decherd in January, 1914, inquiring about former student Jerome Daniel’s character and suitability for mission work. She responded immediately, describing Daniel in glowing terms. Later that spring, Daniel went home to raise funds to underwrite his mission. Dropping by Austin, he mentioned his needs to some friends in the student body and the faculty. They responded that he need go no further. Initiatives also later came from the Board of Missions asking that $750 be raised for Daniel’s salary for the first year. There happened to be 750 Methodist students enrolled at the university and they pledged the whole amount in one dedication service.

When Daniel sought to build a school in his missionary appointment in Passo Fundo, Brazil, mission board head W. W. Pinson notified Mary Decherd, asking her to keep working on funding. Miss Decherd and her students came fully to the rescue, expanding their pledge of $750 a year (though they had already exceeded this sum in helping with Daniel’s travel expenses) and raising an additional $5,475 in support of the proposed school. They rallied other Texas colleges to pledge their support.

“Texas Hall” was ready to receive students in December, 1919. It was a large two-story building made of dressed stone. The pediment of the Greek façade included a replica of the seal of the University of Texas. The school song was set to the tune of “The Eyes of Texas.” Two years after Daniel left, the institute erected a second major edifice called “Daniel Hall,” financed through funds raised by Mary Decherd and her Epworth League. Daniel Hall was a brick, two-story structure nearly as big as Texas Hall. The campus also included fields for “foot-ball, basket-ball, tennis, and other games.”

The support given to Daniel and Passo Fundo by the University Church Epworth League came to the attention of the mission Centenary directors and prompted them to hire a special “educational secretary” to promote this sort of thing all over the denomination.

At first, Miss Decherd marshaled her students at the University Church Epworth League to work among themselves. She soon expanded her horizons to include the entire state, recruiting other schools to add their weight to the Passo Fundo project. After 1918, however, the Austin group undertook the Passo Fundo project alone and asked the others to take up other missionary tasks. To cover this expanded burden, Miss Mary organized letter writing campaigns, by means of which her students blanketed the state, especially University of Texas alumni, with letters requesting financial aid for the project. The results were astounding. After the 1914 and 1915 donations of $750 each, the students raised $2,200 in 1918-1919, $3,300 in 1919-1920, $6,200 in 1920-1921, and continued at that level throughout the decade. The 1928-1929 giving reached $6,700.

By 1922, the Centenary excitement was subsiding across the church, but not at the University of Texas. The students there continued their interest unabated. Under the spell, and sometimes the whip, of Mary Decherd, they forged an enduring organization to continue support of the Brazil mission. They held fund raising drives at all seasons of the year, but especially in the springtime. Not only did the students canvass the University community, they wrote letters by the hundreds to solicit funds.

Miss Mary dragooned whatever human resources were at hand to assist in the paperwork and bookkeeping such a large undertaking generated. Students in her university classes, students in her Sunday school class, her young nieces, and anyone else who happened within her reach were pressed into service for an hour or two of work. In 1927, there were over 200 students actively involved, with 914 donors on the rolls.

The remarkable aspect of the whole enterprise was the way it was sustained over a decade-and-a-half. Successive generations of student leaders passed the interest and enthusiasm on to the next generations without interruption. That this happened was due to Mary Decherd, the single continuous element in the project. She rewarded herself, and gathered ammunition for further promotion of the Brazil project, by traveling at her own expense in 1923 to visit the mission field she was supporting.

Three events conspired to bring the Texas-Brazil connection to an end. One was the onset of the great depression, which was already present in the rural areas of the southwest by 1927. It eventually forced a major missionary retrenchment. A second blow was the establishment of an autonomous Methodist church in Brazil. While the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, continued to fund missionary work in Brazil and elsewhere, the connecting link was strained-if not quite broken-by this act.

These two events were compounded by the most serious problem of all – the withdrawal of support by University Methodist Church. In 1928, pastor H. Bascom Watts48 became convinced that the Texas-Brazil mission was a drain both on the congregation and on the student work in general. Together with George Baker, the associate pastor assigned to the Bible Chair work, he yanked the rug out from under Miss Mary and her team. This came in the form of a reorganization plan approved by the Board of Stewards in February, 1929. All Methodist student work in and around the University of Texas would now be placed under Baker as head of the new entity called the Wesley Foundation. The Texas-Brazil Committee would continue to promote missionary endeavors, but with a much reduced budget.

The program struggled on for a few more years and then was dropped. Miss Mary loyally turned her efforts to the support of the local church (under a new pastor) and to the establishment of a campus-wide interdenominational program called “Religious Emphasis Week,” which continued the mission interest.

After World War II, poor health forced Mary Decherd into retirement. At her home near the campus, she raised flowers, studied history, and maintained a steady correspondence with friends. In 1954, the mainspring finally ran down and Mary Decherd at last got a well-deserved rest. But the work in Passo Fundo endured into the 21^st century.

Adapted from Robert W. Sledge, “A Model Home Base for Missions: Mary Decherd, The University of Texas Epworth League, and the Brazil Mission,” Methodist History 45:1 (October 2006): 4-15.

Daniel, Jerome Walter

MECS Missionary To Brazil

Jerome Walter Daniel was one of eleven children born to a family living in Cotulla, on the broad cattle ranges of southern Texas. He arrived at the state university in the fall 1907 and was soon drawn into the life of University Methodist Church. When the prominent northern Methodist layman Dr. John R. Mott spoke in Austin in 1908, Daniel attended the meeting, was converted, and felt a call to preach. Upon graduation in 1911, he entered the seminary of the ME Church, South, at Vanderbilt University. By March, 1912, he felt an amplification of his call, an urge to offer himself for the foreign mission field. Applying to the Mission Board, he asked, if accepted, to be sent to Africa or Brazil. He was appointed as a teacher at Union College in Uruguayana, province of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazi1.

Daniel arrived in Brazil in time for the meeting of the South Brazil Annual Conference, was admitted on trial, and was formally appointed to Uruguayana. The following year, he received appointment as pastor in Passo Fundo, a town in the Uruguayana District. Daniel remained in Passo Fundo from 1915 through 1921, and it was here that he did his most intriguing work.

The new pastor had not been at his post for long when he became aware of the total absence of educational advantages in Passo Fundo; even the most rudimentary schooling seemed to be lacking. Setting out to meet this need, Daniel applied to the mission board for funds to buy lots on which to erect a mission school. The school opened its doors as “Passo Fundo Institute” in March, 1920.

As the school developed, it began teaching higher level classes until, by 1925, it was renamed “Instituto Gymnasial do Passo Fundo” with students enrolled in two years of primary work, five years of elementary work, and four years of either secondary work or commercial studies.

The Instituto Gymnasial became a magnet for other missionaries, many of them new recruits from the University of Texas. Prominent among the enhanced staff was a Californian who was already in Brazil. Maggie Lee Kenney was a pastor’s daughter from Los Angeles who had wanted to be a missionary since she was ten. The missions board sent her to American College in Porto Alegre, the principal city of Rio Grande do Sul, in 1912. She met Daniel soon after his arrival in Brazil, love bloomed, and they were married on New Year’s Day, 1917. From that point on, her assignment became Passo Fundo where her husband was pastor and director of the new school then developing.

In recognition of Daniel’s accomplishments at Passo Fundo, the conference met there in 1921. At that session, Bishop Moore appointed him to the nearby Cruz Alta District as presbytero presidential (presiding elder) and to pastor at Cruz Alta.

The Daniels remained in Brazil until 1934. While he was very successful- serving as pastor of the largest churches; presiding elder of two districts; treasurer of the mission; and once, as the conference’s presiding officer- Brazil was not entirely happy for the Daniels. One son died while they in the field, and Maggie Daniel nearly died of a miscarriage in California on the way back after a furlough in 1929. But Daniel led the way for many of his fellow students to follow him to lives of service in Brazil.

Adapted from Robert W. Sledge, “A Model Home Base for Missions: Mary Decherd, The University of Texas Epworth League, and the Brazil Mission,” Methodist History 45:1 (October 2006): 4-15.

Haines, J. Harry (1917-2007) 

Missionary And Relief Agency Director

The Rev. J. Harry Haines, 1917-2007, was director of the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) from 1966 to 1983 and a missionary for 21 years prior to that.

At his passing, Haines was described as “a saint, a model of Christian commitment, hard work, and inspiration” by the Rev. R. Randy Day, chief executive of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries, the parent organization of UMCOR. “For years he was Mr. United Methodist Relief, rallying the church to aid people affected by natural disasters, wars and poverty.”

Haines, a native of New Zealand, was a missionary in China in the 1940s and later in Malaysia. He then worked in the division of interchurch aid, refugees and world service of the World Council of Churches.

At UMCOR, he was an advocate for service to those in need and for education about the impact of poverty and political oppression on millions of people.

“He was a man of great energy and contagious hope,” Day said. “He wrote widely on the themes of mission and humanitarian assistance and their inseparable identities. He was a dynamic speaker, and loved nothing more than to visit congregations to tell them the story of how the church responds to disasters and humanitarian needs.”

He wrote seven books published by Abingdon Press, a part of the United Methodist Publishing House, including an analysis of China and its 20th century political revolutions. Haines continued to be active on behalf of mission after his retirement.

Haines was a strong supporter of economic self-development of people in poor countries and among the marginalized in more affluent regions. He was quick to observe the growing global gap between the richer North and the poor South. In 1984, shortly after his retirement, Haines made an urgent appeal to the church to “realize that we’re living in a bitterly divided world (and) we have limited resources; therefore, we have to be specialists in designated areas in the least developed countries.”

J. Harry Haines was born June 29, 1917. He and his wife, the former Loma Housley, the daughter of missionaries, married in 1944. The couple had four sons, two of whom preceded him in death.

Haines received his early schooling in New Zealand, Australia and England. He was awarded a bachelor of arts degree from Western Maryland University, Westminster, and his theological degree from what is today Wesley Theological Seminary. He earned the master of arts and doctor of philosophy degrees from Princeton University.

He held membership in several United Methodist annual (regional) conferences during his ministry. At the time of his death, he was a member of the Oregon-Idaho Conference. Haines served for 38 years — including the 21 as a missionary — with the Board of Global Ministries and its predecessor organizations.

Initially written in 2007 for United Methodist News Service (UMNS) and adapted in 2017 by Elliott Wright, one-time information officer of the General Board of Global Ministries.

Dodge, Ralph Edward

Mission Bishop Promoted Indigenous Leaders

Ralph E. Dodge was an outspoken advocate for racial justice in Africa and the last white bishop of the United Methodist Church in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) during that country’s colonial era.

Dodge’s 1956 election as a Methodist bishop for central and southern Africa marked the only time that an American Methodist missionary was elected bishop by the denomination in the colonial territories of Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

He led the church in Rhodesia for eight years before being expelled in 1964. He had long advocated for an inclusive church and representative rule in the white-minority-led country. The government of Prime Minister Ian Smith gave no reason for expelling him from the country. He was re-elected in exile and served another four years.

“The reason I was expelled,” he said in a 1997 story by United Methodist News Service, “was that I had written a book that criticized the church on racial matters and said the church should be preparing to take over or train (indigenous) people to take over responsibilities. The assumption was that if the church could prepare people to take over, then why couldn’t the government do the same thing? There was the assumption that the time had come for a transfer of authority … and the government did not like this.”

In 1979, Bishop Abel T. Muzorewa, the first black United Methodist bishop of Zimbabwe, asked for Dodge’s return to lead the church in Zimbabwe to enable Muzorewa to serve as his country’s first black prime minister.

Muzorewa had served under Dodge as a young pastor. In his 1978 book, Rise Up and Walk, Muzorewa recalled his impressions of the bishop:

“In former years, missionaries and African church workers ate in separate dining rooms during church conferences, only joining together for worship and discussions. Saying nothing, Bishop and Mrs. Dodge merely went to eat with the African ministers and laymen. One day, the annual conference delegates were going to the dedication of a new church. Missionaries jumped into their cars while Africans boarded a hired bus. Many were embarrassed as the bishop boarded the bus with his African pastors.” Old patterns of segregation in the church were breaking down, Muzorewa wrote.

A native of Terril, Iowa, Dodge attended Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1931. He received a Master of Arts degree from Boston University in 1933 and a Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree in 1934. Shortly afterward, he married the former Eunice Davis of Little Valley, New York, in a home wedding.

Ordained a deacon in 1933 and an elder two years later, Dodge served briefly as a pastor in Mohall, North Dakota.

In 1936, the Dodges went to Angola to serve as missionaries. They were there until 1950, except for a four-year period during World War II, when travel restrictions prevented them from returning to Africa from a furlough. While stateside, Dodge served as a pastor in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and continued his studies at the Kennedy School of Missions in Hartford, Connecticut, where the couple had trained before going to Angola. He earned a Master of Sacred Theology degree in 1943 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1944.

The Dodges returned to Africa in 1945, and in 1950, Ralph Dodge was asked to serve as secretary for Africa and Europe on the staff of the Methodist Church’s Board of Missions.

Dodge was elected a bishop by the Africa Central Conference in October 1956 and assigned to the Rhodesia Area. He led Methodists in what were then the countries of Southern Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa. After his deportation in 1964, he continued leading the Rhodesia Area in exile, primarily from Zambia. He also was given interim responsibility for most of the church’s Geneva Area.

After retiring in 1968, he served as chaplain of the Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation in Kitwe, Zambia. The Dodges moved to Springfield, Missouri, in 1971, and retired in 1980 to the Advent Christian Village of Dowling Park, Florida. Two years later, Eunice Dodge died suddenly. The Dodges had four children, all raised in Africa. In late 1983, Bishop Dodge married Elizabeth Law. She died of a stroke in 1998.

In addition to his ministry career, Dodge wrote three books, The Unpopular Missionary, The Pagan Church, and The Revolutionary Bishop.

His career came full circle, in a sense, when he was recognized during the December 1997 centennial celebration of the church in Zimbabwe, held in Old Mutare.

“It’s nice to be back,” he said in a UMNS story. “To see the development of the church is amazing, and it’s gratifying.”

____________

Adapted from obituary by Tim Tanton, United Methodist News Service, August 11, 2008

More information on Dodge is available from Samuel Dzobo's dissertation, "Toward a New Church in a New Africa: A Biographical Study of Bishop Ralph Edward Dodge, 1907-2008."

Newton, J.C.C. 

Christian Statesman, President Of Kwansei Gakuin

The life of Dr. J.C.C. Newton, one of the founders of Kwansei Gakuin, is a very inspirational. Not only was he a kind and skilled educator and pastor, his physical presence was so impressive, that even one week before his death, at the age of 83, a person attending a large ecumenical conference, saw Dr. Newton in the midst of the crowd, and asked his neighbor, “Who is the tall, dignified man, with the face of a saint?”

Dr. Newton could easily have spent his entire life in the small-town of Pendleton, South Carolina where he was born in 1848. He served as a soldier during the last year of the Civil War, in the Confederate army, when he was only 17 years old. This could have been an experience to sour his view of fellow Americans living in the northern states, but he became a model of intercultural understanding and the best Christian ideals.

After the war, J.C.C. Newton attended the Kentucky Military Institute, and was ordained as a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1874. Dr. Newton served several churches in Kentucky for ten years, and then went to Maryland, where he studied at Johns Hopkins University, where the famous Japanese thinker, Nitobe Inazo and Woodrow Wilson, who would later become U.S. President, were among his classmates. Even during this graduate study period, Dr. Newton served a church in Baltimore, Maryland.

It was during this time that Dr. W. R. Lambuth and his wife, Daisy, were trying to encourage young Americans to join them in mission work in Asia. Daisy Lambuth wrote to their home church, “Are you all dead? Is that the reason you do not come to our help?” Evidently, these words inspired Dr. Newton and his wife, Lettie, to consider working abroad. They reached Yokohama on May 21, 1888, with two daughters, Ruth and Annie. Sadly, the Newtons lost their one-year-old daughter Annie on September 17, 1888, less than four months after they arrived in Japan.

Newton had been appointed to the Philander Smith Biblical Institute, Tokyo, which was run cooperatively by the Methodist Episcopal and the Canadian Methodist missions. The Southern Methodist Church was to join this management. Two months after their arrival, Newton visited Kobe and wrote to his wife, “I have never seen men more zealous than the Drs. Lambuth. They are unceasing in their labors by day and night.” One year after arriving in Japan, the Newtons moved from Tokyo to Kobe, where they joined the Lambuths and others to begin Kwansei Gakuin in 1889 with just a handful of students. Dr. Newton served as the dean of the School of Theology, a position which he held for many of the years he spent here. After founder W. R. Lambuth left Kwansei Gakuin at the end of 1890, Newton remained at the institution to impart the founder’s spirit and build a firm foundation, and eventually to become the third president.

His deep faith and emphasis on scholarship established a firm foundation for Kwansei Gakuin and the School of Theology. Many of the early Methodist leaders of Japan were students of Dr. Newton. Newton’s students admired the foster father more than they had the true father. He called them “Brother,” in a warm tone. By contrast, C. J. L. Bates, the fourth president, addressed the students formally as “Gentlemen.” “All present!” Newton would say joyously each time he took the roll call, even if two-thirds of the class was absent. It was said that Newton’s evaluation depended on how many times a student had written the word “God” in his examination paper.

Although poor health – both Dr. Newton’s and his wife’s – forced them to spend 1897 to 1904 back in the United States, they then returned to Kwansei Gakuin until 1923 when they were both 75 years old. In 1916, Dr. Newton reluctantly agreed to serve as president of Kwansei Gakuin after the long, capable leadership of Professor Yoshioka. His tenure as president was less than four years, but he worked hard to prepare for Kwansei Gakuin’s qualification as a university and to adapt to changing needs both inside and outside the school. He also supported the Canadian, Dr. C.J.L. Bates, who became his successor, and served for twenty years as president.

When officers from the Students’ Union claimed that Newton was too old to be president, he asked them to help such an old president as he by praying with him and supporting him until the next one could be elected. The more mischief students raised, the more kindness Newton would show them. He never scolded them for not attending the chapel, and he paid individual attention to each student – even though he was so absent-minded that he could never find his own umbrella among others in an umbrella stand. In the face of such kindness, even the Middle School students, who were at the most mischievous age, would reflect on their misdemeanours and try to be better behaved.

Throughout his career, Dr. Newton worked hard to bring understanding between his home country and his adopted country, Japan. He wrote books and articles introducing Japan to the English-speaking world. In Japan, his humility, quiet leadership, and sense of ethics were appreciated, not only by those in the Christian community, but by government officials and business leaders in Japan. Just before his death, a representative of the League of Nations visited Dr. Newton in Atlanta to ask advice on an international matter, demonstrating that his global perspective was respected very widely.

Article compiled from material written by Yuko Ikeda and Ruth Grubel.

Hester, Elizabeth Fulton (1839-1929) 

Long-Serving Missionary To Native Americans In Oklahoma

Educator, nurse, civic and church leader, Elizabeth Fulton, at age seventeen, braved the dangers of traveling West to answer the call to become a teacher at the mission school at Tishomingo, Indian Territory, which is now Oklahoma. It is claimed that five of her pupils became chiefs of their respective Indian nations. In 1859 she married George B. Hester, a prominent merchant. After attending General Conference with her delegate-husband in Atlanta in 1878, she returned home to form the first unit in her area of the newly-authorized Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, and helped to form auxiliaries throughout the Indian Territory. When honored in 1928 at the Jubilee Celebration of the East Oklahoma Conference Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, Elizabeth Hester had served as its president for fifteen years. She was also conference treasurer of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society for eighteen years, and a member of the Woman’s Missionary Council. Mrs. Hester was a nurse during the Civil War, spoke for women’s suffrage, and was active in many civic organizations. In 1928, she was the first person inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

Article 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.

Please view more at United Women in Faith (formerly known as United Methodist Women). United Women in Faith is the official organization for women within The United Methodist Church. 

Photo taken from Hester’s profile on the Oklahoma Hall of Fame website: https://oklahomahof.com/member-archives/h/hester-elizabeth-fulton-1928