News

Jones, Jr., Tracey K. (1917-2007)

The Rev. Tracey K. Jones Jr., was among the last Christian missionaries to enter China before the country was closed to outside church personnel in 1950; he would serve as head of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries from 1968 to 1980, and he authored of the most widely used mission study book in the history of the denomination.

“Tracey K. Jones, Jr. was a giant of the mission movement of the church,” said Bishop Joel N. Martinez, former president of the mission agency. “He lived on the mission frontiers and then gave leadership to the whole mission community through his roles in our mission organizations. He was known for his global mission and his ability to communicate that vision to both laity and clergy.”

Betty Thompson, who was on the communications and education staff of the mission agency in Jones’ day, said, “Tracey’s leadership came at a time when new patterns of mission around the world were emerging as colonialism ended. He knew that you did not need to cross salt water to be in mission.”

Jones, the son of Tracey and Marion Flowers Jones, was born in Boston in 1917 and spent his boyhood between Syracuse, N.Y., and Canton, China. His father was a YMCA missionary and executive. The young Tracey was educated at Mount Hermon Academy, Ohio Wesleyan University, and Yale Divinity School.

He spent his early professional years flying from Delhi, India, to Chungking, China, to work as a liaison between American and Chinese troops. In 1945, he joined a group of Methodist missionaries working in the Nanking area. He witnessed the takeover of China by communist forces, and was able to remain for six months after the change. He joined his wife in Hong Kong for a time, and in the early 1950s was pastor of a Methodist church in Singapore.

Jones returned to the United States in 1955. He joined the staff of the then Board of Missions of The Methodist Church and would become the head of the agency’s World Division and of the entire agency in 1968. He was active in both the National and World Councils of Churches, leading ecumenical delegations to numerous places, including the Middle East.

Jones help to craft the development of The United Methodist Church, formed in 1968 by the union of The Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren churches, and to combine the mission work of the two denominations. This effort came at a time when attitudes about mission were changing and when the civil rights and women’s movements were engaging both church and society.

“Tracey Jones was a firm supporter of opening all doors in the church to people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds,” Thompson said. “And he was a genuine feminist, understanding and appreciating the contributions that women have to make to the church and its mission.”

Jones’ 1963 book, Our Mission Today: The Beginning of a New Age, published by the mission board, sold 300,000 copies, the largest press run of any mission study resource in denominational history.

After his retirement, he served as a professor at Drew Theological Seminary, Madison, N.J. His first wife, Martha Clayton Jones, who was also the child of a missionary family, died in 1975. The couple had three children. He later married Junia Moss. Jones died on December 16, 2009.

By Elliott Wright. Elliott Wright is information consultant for Global Ministries. Adapted and supplemented by the author from a Dec. 18, 2009, obituary/profile distributed by the United Methodist News Service.

Photo: Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church , “Mission Photograph Album – Portraits #07 Page 0027,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed July 11, 2018, http://catalog.gcah.org/omeka/items/show/60639.

Wehrman, Richard and Eva

Mentors To Filipino Clergy

Dr. Richard and Mrs. Eva Wehrman were outstanding evangelists and stewardship development mentors. During the many years that they served in the Northwest Philippines Annual Conference, many clergy and lay leaders were trained in stewardship and especially in tithing’

When Dr. Wehrman was assigned to teach in Union Theological Seminary, he was everybody’s father and grandfather. His compassionate spirit and practical ministries endeared him to many students and professors. With Dr. Richard Schwenk, he consistently pursued Aeta mission work. Because of this, we now have an Aeta People’s District.

Dr. Wehrman supported Bishop Peter Torio’s studies at Duke Divinity School. He was the first pastor to invite the now bishop as a preacher in one of his churches when he was 14 years old. Since Peter Torio was appointed a District Superintendent in 2010 and elected as Bishop in 2012, Dr. Wehrman continued to be his mentor. Along with his dad, he provided the best positive influence in his life as a pastor. Bishop Torio says he owes his stewardship lifestyle and evangelistic passion to him.

The Wehrmans preached to us in our Filipino languages—Tagalog, Ilocano, Kapampangan, and Pangasinense.

Adapted from a submission by Bishop Peter Torio

Photo: Board of Missions of the Methodist Church , “Mission Photograph Album – Portraits #09 Page 0003,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed July 11, 2018, http://catalog.gcah.org/omeka/items/show/60941.

Piggott, Henry James (1831-1917)

The Founder Of Wesleyan Missions In Italy

The founder of Wesleyan Methodist missions to Italy was born in Lowestoft, England, in 1831, the son of a former missionary to Sierra Leone. He was educated at Kingswood School and Wesley College Taunton, before attending the University of London where he obtained a first class degree in Classics. He entered the ministry of the Wesley Methodist Connexion and served in local churches in Oxford, Hastings and Hammersmith in London. He resisted the call to overseas work until challenged to respond to the new opportunities for mission to Italy following the Risorgimento.

In 1861 he and Richard Green came to Italy. Piggott initially worked in the north, and then the Veneto, founding churches in Ivrea, Intra, Cremona, Parma, Padova and La Spezia. Then in 1873 he moved the centre of his work to Rome where he remained until his death in 1917. He was superintendent of the work of Methodism in the Italy District until his “retirement” in 1903, during which time he travelled and preached throughout the country. With the demand for more ministers, as the denomination increased in numbers of members and preaching places, schools and a theological college were established.

Piggott was a great advocate for Protestant missions in Italy, writing articles in the British religious press. He also contributed to the work of biblical scholarship in Italian (he was President of the Italian Bible Society as well as its Sunday School Union). He admired the work of the great orator and founder of the Italian Free Church, Alessandro Gavazzi, former chaplain to Garibaldi (buried here in Zone 1.13,15), whose Rome base at Ponte Sant`Angelo Church came into Wesleyan Methodism in 1903 when the churches merged. It is there that the memorial tablet, formerly housed at the church in Via della Scrofa where he lived, is now displayed, recording his death in Rome on 30^th November 1917 after 56 years of ministry in Italy. In his grave (Zone 2.14.22) there are also buried his wife and daughter Mary. This great preacher and pastor, scholar and theologian, was the bedrock upon which Methodism in Italy was established and grew.

Contributed by the Revd. Dr Tim Macquiban

Collins, Susan Angeline (1851-1940)

Missionary Worker In Quéssua, Angola

Miss Susan Angeline Collins was the daughter of Isaac Collins—born in North Carolina in 1808, emancipated in 1845, and served in the Civil War, 1864-1865—and Sarah Ann Joiner Collins—born in 1825 and emancipated in 1839. Miss Collins was their fourth daughter. As a young woman, she worked for a pastor, who encouraged her to attend Upper Iowa University for Normal Training. At the age of 24, she enrolled and became the university’s first African-America student. Later, while living and working as a laundress in the Dakota Territory, she noticed—among some clothes wrapped in newspapers—an ad for foreign missions training in Chicago. In 1886, she sold her laundry business and moved to Chicago to attend the Chicago Training School.

In 1887, at age 36, she was recruited as a missionary by Bishop William Taylor, the first American missionary bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Africa. The same year, she set sail to the Congo near Banana Point. After two years, Miss Collins went to Angola, beginning her service in Dondo.

From 1889 to 1900, Mission Collins served in Malange, Angola, then relocated to Quéssua, Angola, where she taught and established a school for girls, which eventually grew to house more than 50 boarding students. After nearly 13 years in Africa, Miss Collins returned to America and was told that, because of her age, she would not be able to serve as a missionary to Africa any longer. She spent the bulk of 1901 raising money to support a return trip and, with the help of the Pacific Branch of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, returned in 1902, at the age of 50, to Quéssua and stayed another 18 years.

In 1895, she wrote: “Praise God for continued health, and strength, and contentment in the work that He has given to me to do…You may imagine my surprise and delight when I found that the new missionaries who came last fall were all from the training school.”

Reprinted with permission from “Susan Angeline Collins,” The Center for the Church and the Black Experience, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, https://cbe45.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/susana-a-collins/

Bibliography

Garrett sources this article to The Message and Deaconess Advocate; “Official Journal of the North Central Africa Mission Conference;” and “Susan Collins, from the Lima/Albany and Fayette County, Iowa, an extremely successful M.E. Missionary for 33 years in Quessua, Angola, Africa,” http://www.iowaz.info/surname/collinssusan.htm

See also, Upper Iowa University Blog, The Bridge Online. Dec 12, 2014 post, https://uiubridge.com/2014/12/12/susan-angeline-collins-grace-gumption-and-grit/#prettyPhoto

Drummer, Martha (1871-1937)

Medical Work And Care For Orphans, Quéssua Mission, Angola

Martha Drummer was born in 1871 in Barnesville, Georgia, the third of eight children in her family. Her father, a Methodist preacher, died of typhoid fever when Martha was 15. Mrs. Drummer moved the family to Griffen, Georgia, where the children had access to public education. Martha finished sixth grade and then had to work to support the family as a domestic worker. After a few years, her pastor recognized her scholarly potential and recommended her to the president of Clark College, an institution founded for African American students by the Methodist Episcopal Church Freedman’s Aid Society.

To attend the college, Drummer, at age 22, first needed to complete preparatory school to catch up on the secondary school she had missed. She then entered the college on partial scholarship and worked to provide for herself and the rest of the tuition. In the summers, she taught in rural schools and tutored African-American children. It took Drummer eight years to finish her preparatory and college degrees at Clark College—today known as Clark-Atlanta University.

In 1891, she entered the Methodist Women’s Training School for Deaconesses in Boston, Massachusetts. After two years of deaconess training, she continued at the Women’s Training School three more years to finish a nursing course.

In 1906, the Pacific Branch of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society employed Martha Drummer as a nurse deaconess and sent her to serve at the Quéssua Mission in Melange, Angola, thus a daughter of the southern Methodist church was sent out by the northern church. Bishop William Taylor was enlisting African-American women to work with African women and children in several new stations in Africa—in Liberia, Angola, and the Congo. In Quéssua, Martha began work with an African-American teacher sent from the Chicago area, Susan Collins.

Drummer worked on the campus of Quéssua, but when the rains allowed, she also went out into the villages on medical visits, often accompanied by Quéssua’s Angolan Bible woman, Dorcas. Drummer’s reputation as a nurse was well known. Shortly after she arrived in Quéssua, 38 children of the orphanage came down with fever. Drummer lost only one. In addition to her Angolan patients, she cared for other missionaries and, at times, for family members of the Portuguese colonizers.

Drummer worked at Quéssua for 20 years before returning to the Untied States in 1926 because of her own poor health. She settled in Atlanta, Georgia, and died there in 1937. She never lost her love for her African home, and she encouraged Methodists to support the work long after her retirement. Her missionary coordinator, Florence Hooper, described her as “irrepressible, her spirit was not dampened, even by prolonged illness.”

By Christie R. House, editor, New World Outlook magazine.

Sources

“Martha Drummer, a Study in Achievement,” by Florence Hooper, World Outlook, July 1952.

“United Methodist Women in Mission Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” address by Dana L. Robert to the Mission Forward Symposium, United Methodist Women, April 19, 2010, St. Louis, Missouri.

Reed, Mary (1854-1943) 

Teacher, Nurse, & Administrator Who Spent More Than 50 Years Ministering To Lepers In India

Mary Reed was born in 1854 in Lowell, Ohio, to Wesley W. Reed and Sarah Ann (Henderson) Reed. After graduation from Ohio Central Normal School in Worthington, Ohio, she began a teaching career. When she was 30, she applied to join the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) of the Methodist Episcopal Church to serve in India.

Reed was accepted into service and set sail for India in 1884. Her assignment was with zenana visitation, an evangelistic outreach to sheltered and secluded women in Cawnpore, India. She continued in this work for six years, but she had bouts with poor health. In 1890, she returned to the United States for medical tests and recovery. The doctors had difficulty making a diagnosis, but Reed herself suspected she had leprosy, a diagnosis that was later confirmed. Nevertheless, Reed went back to India to continue working.

At her request, Bishop James Thoburn of the MEC work in India decided to reassign Reed. He approached the British interdenominational Mission to Lepers in India and the East, which assigned her to work in the Chandag Leper Asylum in the Himalayan foothills. She remained as a district missionary of the WFMS and in 1892 was assigned as the director of the Chandag Asylum.

In addition to personally seeing to the needs of the patients of the asylum and teaching reading and religious classes, Reed greatly improved their living situation. Over time, she replaced huts with cottages and oversaw the construction of a new water-supply system, a chapel, a school, a small hospital, and a dispensary. She acquired 48 more acres of land for the leper colony. For seven years with the WFMS, she also supervised six village schools and three Sunday schools within a five-mile radius of the asylum.

By 1897, of 85 lepers in the colony, 67 had become Christian. In 1898, Reed refused to return to the United States for medical treatment and severed ties with the WFMS, but she continued her missionary work with the British Mission to Lepers in India and the East. By 1899, her health was much better.

In 1917, the Government of India awarded Reed the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal for her work with lepers in Chandag. She rarely left the leper colony and only returned to the United States once more in her lifetime. Leprosy resurfaced for Reed in 1932, but she continued to supervise the leper asylum until 1938 for a total of 47 years. She lived and worked there until she died in 1943 at the age of 89. Her death was the result of an accident caused by her failing eyesight, but her poor eyesight was likely the result of her years living with leprosy.

In 1941, Mary Reed was honored by the American Mission to Lepers (later renamed the American Leprosy Missions, Inc.). Six years after her death, the Chantag Leprosy Hospital was renamed the Mary Reed Memorial Hospital by the American Mission to Lepers.

By Christie House, editor, New World Outlook magazine.

Sources

John Jackson, Mary Reed: Missionary to the Lepers, written in 1900. Available online through Boston Theological School https://archive.org/details/maryreedmissiona1900jack

“Reed, Mary (1854–1943).” Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. . Encyclopedia.com. 6 Oct. 2017 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

Marinez, Andres (? – 1953) 

A Castilian Boy Who Became A Captive, A Kiowa Son, And A Methodist Minister In Oklahoma

The Rev. Andres (Andele) Martinez and J. J. Methvin (The Rev. John Jasper) were described as “fast friends and Christian workers for more than 40 years” by author and fellow missionary, Robert Satterfield.

Andres Martinez and his Kiowa kinsman, Kicking Bird, are credited, along with missionary the Rev. John. J. Methvin, with bringing southern Methodism to the Kiowas. Both converted to Christianity and became native pastors, but each also continued participating in their Kiowa cultural and spiritual practices, according to Tash Smith.

The Martinez family, from Spain, lived among Mexican families that settled in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Don Juan Martinez, Andres’ father, was a rancher. When Andres was a boy, he and his 4-year-old nephew, Pedro, were sent out to watch the cows while the rest of the family and hands brought in the wheat at threshing time. But the boys were not heard from again. They were picked up by a Mescalero Apache band, tied to warriors, and carried off as slaves. Pedro did not survive the trip, but Andres made it back to the Apache encampment where he was severely abused for four months.

But then the Apaches sold him to a Kiowa chief, Heap O’ Bears. Heap O’ Bears’ daughter, Hon-Zip-Fa, had lost a son and adopted Andres as her own, and Heap O’ Bears served as his father. They called him Andele because they could not pronounce his Spanish name.

Andele thrived in his new home, learning the Kiowa language and spiritual and cultural practices. He grew up to become a good warrior and a favorite son. But after Heap O’ Bears was killed by neighboring Ute raiders, Andele went to work for the U. S. government as a blacksmith. At this point, he discovered he could reconnect with his original family. After several tries, he contacted Dionicio, his brother, and he returned home to meet his mother, whom he had not seen for 20 years. His father had died just three years after Andres disappearance.

Andele could not adjust to life among Americans and Mexicans and in 1889, he returned to Kiowa country in Oklahoma. After arriving in Oklahoma, he met the Rev. John Jasper Methvin, assigned by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, as a missionary to the Indian Missionary Conference. Methvin had difficulty making headway with the Kiowas in Anandarko. His first Kiowa assistant, Etayle, who had returned from the Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, had died suddenly, and the Kiowa attributed his death to the fact that he was helping the missionary.

According to Methvin, he first encountered Andres by a river bank and invited him to a church service. Andres replied: “I am not a stranger here. I have been away, but this is my home.” Methvin and Martinez became and remained close friends for the next 40 years. Andele served as Methvin’s interpreter. It was Andele who convinced Kicking Bird to accept Christ. Many of the Kiowa became Methodists through their work.

After the Methvin Institute was established, Martinez taught industrial arts there and married its matron, Emma Wharton, the daughter of a Methodist pastor. They did not have children of their own, but adopted two Kiowa girls. Eventually, Martinez was ordained in the MECS and oversaw the Indian churches in Oklahoma. He died in 1935.

“Under a sense of God’s pardoning love and redeeming grace,” Martinez wrote, “there came to me a sense of right and wrong, and what was real in religions and what was mere pretense…I rejoice that you (Methvin) came. I now realize the blessedness of His pardoning love and His redeeming grace.”

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

Sources

“Andele, Mexican Indian, Christian Minister,” by Robert S. Satterfield, World Outlook, June 1936.

“The Kiowa Captive,” by Betty Burleigh Scudder, World Outlook, January 1945.

Andele, the Mexican-Kiowa Captive, by J. J. Methvin, 1899.

Capture These Indians for the Lord: Indians, Methodists, and Oklahomans, 1844-1939, by Tash Smith, University of Arizona Press, 2014.

Harley, George and Winifred

Founders Of Ganta Methodist Mission Station In Liberia

Dr. George Way Harley and Winifred Frances Jewell Harley, a botanist, founded and served the Ganta mission station in Nimba County, Liberia, from 1925 to 1960. Dr. Harley was a prolific and dedicated man whose interests could not be confined to one profession. An article in World Outlook, June 1945, describes Dr. Harley as “a doctor, preacher, carpenter, engineer, and machinist.”

Originally from North Carolina, Harley earned his medical degree from Yale University and then studied anthropology and culture at Harvard. In addition to his missionary assignment, he also served as a field officer for Harvard’s Peabody Museum, writing half a dozen or so books on his studies of Liberia’s northeastern tribes. Collections of Harley’s papers and Liberian artifacts, most notably the masks of the northeastern tribes, can be found at Duke University, Harvard University, and William and Mary University.

The Harleys arrived in Liberia in 1925 with the Methodist Episcopal Church to begin a carefully planned venture into Liberia’s interior. Much of Liberia’s population, and particularly its government (which was dominated by freed slaves from the United States using English as their common language), resided along the country’s western coastline. The United States had “bought” land from one of the chiefs on Liberia’s west coast to set up this colony for freed African-American slaves. However, as with most colonial transactions, the sale did not consider the rights of the already numerous indigenous tribes and peoples living in the country. It was for the indigenous people that the new Ganta mission was founded. The Harleys were so concerned about the unwitting transfer of western culture to the northeastern people that the first buildings of the mission station (constructed with local workman, materials, and technology) were all built in the same style as native Liberian structures.

As World War II drew to a close, the Ganta mission station picked up two medical women who had to be evacuated from their work in China. Dr. Hyla Watters arrived in 1950 to become the hospital’s first surgeon, and Ms. Dagmar Peterson, an RN from Denmark, started the nurses training program. Peterson stayed only a year, but her work was taken up by Loretta Gruver, a US missionary nurse who devoted 25 years of service to the students of the Winifred J. Harley School of Nursing at Ganta, as it became known. The first Liberian doctor to serve at Ganta was Dr. Wilfred S. Boayue, from 1970 to 1976. He was also the first Ganta student to go on to college and graduate school. He later worked for the World Health Organization as Liberia’s country representative.

By Christie R. House, editor, New World Outlook magazine.

Sources

“Ganta in Liberia,” World Outlook, June 1945.

“As I See It Now,” by George W. Harley, World Outlook, May 1959.

The George Harley Way Papers, 1911-1975, are part of the Duke University Library collection: https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/harley/

Photo

George Harley. Taken by Mrs. Harley, August 1958, World Outlook, p. 24.

Lambuth, Mary Isabella Mcclellan (1832-1904)

50 Years Of Service: “I Give Five Dollars And Myself For Work In China.”

Mary Isabella McClellan, from the Hudson River Valley of New York, first met the Lambuth clan in Mississippi at the age of 20, when she became governess for the J. R. Lambuth and Pettus families on adjoining plantations. The Rev. J. R. Lambuth was an early missionary to Native American peoples in the formation of the Indian Missionary Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. It is said that when his son, James W. Lambuth, was born, the Rev. consecrated him to mission service from the beginning.

Before James W. Lambuth entered missionary service, he married Mary McClellan. When she and her betrothed attended an annual conference missionary meeting in Canton, Mississippi, she wrote a pledge on a folded slip of paper and placed it in the offering basket: “I give five dollars and myself for work in China.” Mary became an invaluable asset to the mission endeavors in both China and Japan.

J.W. and Mary Lambuth sailed for China in 1853 to begin work in 1854. This was before the MECS had organized their Woman’s Missionary Society. Mary accompanied her husband to China basically as a mission volunteer—for 35 years she received neither title nor payment for her service. Not until the last 15 years of her service was she recognized as a missionary in her own right. Mary was described as “having rare sagacity, wonderful strength of will, unusual organizing ability, calm self-control, wonderful capacity for continuous work, and a refusal to be discouraged,” in a 1932 article by W. E. Towson, a fellow missionary who worked with the Lambuths in Japan in the 1890s.

Mary Lambuth founded the Clopton School, later renamed the Clopton-Lambuth School, in Shanghai. At first, they could not afford classroom space, so Mary opened the school in her home and taught the Chinese children with her baby son, Walter, on a pallet in the middle of them. In a few years, Walter was joined by siblings Nettie, Nora, and Robert.

In 1886, J.W. and Mary Lambuth and their son Walter, who had received secondary and graduate education in the United States and had returned to China as a pastor and medical doctor, were asked to open work for the MECS in Japan. They started out in Kobe but moved to establish missions in other cities. Mary opened the Hiroshima Girls School as well as the Lambuth Training School for Christian Workers in Osaka. She learned the Japanese language in addition to Chinese, taught English, Bible, sewing, and cooking, received visitors, hosted other missionary families, and kept up a lively correspondence with churches in the United States. She died in China in 1904 and was buried in Shanghai.

By Christie R. House, Editor, New World Outlook magazine.

Sources

“Mrs. Mary Isabella Lambuth,” by W. E. Towson, World Outlook, November 1932.

“Pioneering the Gospel,” by Walter R. Lambuth, Missionary Voice, September 1920.

Park, Nora Kate Lambuth (1863-1949)

Missionary To China For Forty-Eight Years

Nora Lambuth, daughter of Rev. J. W. Lambuth and Mary McClellan Lambuth, was born in 1863 while her parents, who were missionaries in Shanghai, China, with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, were home on furlough in Mississippi. She was born in a log cabin on her grandfather J.R. Lambuth’s property because the Civil War had begun and staying in the plantation house was not safe. During her first year of life, her family made a harrowing journey out of the southern United States through enemy lines up to New York harbor—so they could sail back to China.

For her first 11 years, Nora grew up in Shanghai learning Chinese and English and attending school with her mother’s Chinese students, her friends and sisters. In 1874, her mother sailed with her back to the United States and traveled to Nashville, Tennessee. There Nora was turned over to the care of Dr. D. C. Kelly’s family so that she could finish her secondary education. She remained in Nashville until, at the age of 17, she graduated from Ward Seminary. She returned to Shanghai to join her family, where she taught British and American expatriate children.

In 1882 the MECS sent a young doctor to China named William Hector Park. He stayed with the Lambuth family while he and Nora’s brother, Dr. Walter R. Lambuth, worked on a plan to open a new medical mission in Soochow, China. In 1886, William and Nora were married in a little church in Kobe, Japan, where her parents had since been appointed. Nora and William left Kobe for Soochow, where William and Walter founded the Soochow Hospital. The Parks lived and worked in Soochow for the next 40 years.

In addition to hosting Chinese, American, and international visitors, Nora taught English to Dr. Park’s Chinese medical students and was active in the Woman’s Missionary Society. She led Bible study and visited both the Soochow Hospital and the Mary Black Hospital and organized the first anti-footbinding meeting for Chinese women in Soochow. She and William had one child, Margarita Mary Park.

In the spring of 1927, many missionaries were evacuated from China and the Parks took up residence in Florida. But later that year, Dr. Park passed away. His body was cremated so that Nora could return his remains to Soochow for burial, which she did at the age of 65 in 1928, once the political situation had calmed down. She lived in Soochow with her daughter Mary and son-in-law, Dr. D. L. Sherertz, who carried on the work of Dr. Park at Soochow Hospital. Nora lived in Soochow for another 21 years until her death in 1949 at the age of 86.

By Christie R. House, editor of New World Outlook magazine.

Source

“Nora Lambuth Park, Missionary to China for 48 Years,” by Margarita Park Sherertz, World Outlook, March 1933.