Educator and Leader for Abolishing the Central Jurisdiction Thomas was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and was ordained and became an elder in the South Carolina Conference of the Central Jurisdiction in 1944. After serving as a pastor, he taught at Gammon Theological Seminary. He became associate director of the Department of Education Institutions of...
Missionary, Mission Board Staff, and Mission Advocate From her early years of growing up in a parsonage to her years as a professional person, and later a lay woman active in church affairs, Kathryne Bieri Sears was devoted to mission. At age twenty-four, she was the first single woman appointed by the Methodist Episcopal Board...
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...
Founder of Norwegian Methodism and Co-Founder of Norwegian-American Methodism Methodism in Norway owes its introduction to a single founder, Ole Peter Petersen. As a young Norwegian sailor, Petersen had his first contact with the Methodists in Boston in 1843. The next three years brought much serious reflection and a strong feeling of spiritual need. In...
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,...
Missions and ecumenical statesman Mott was born in Livingston Manor, New York. Raised in Postville, Iowa, in a pious Methodist home, he graduated from Cornell University in 1888 with a bachelor of philosophy degree and later received honorary degrees from Yale, Edinburgh, Princeton, Brown, Toronto, and other universities. While a Cornell undergraduate, he passed from...
