Leader among Central Conference Bishops Born in Tagudin, Ilocos Sur Province, in 1898, Valencia grew up as a Roman Catholic, although he became acquainted with Protestants through the United Brethren mission near his home. He came from a family involved in the Filipino struggle for independence. His uncle was a guerrilla in the conflict with...
Church and Community Worker Serving as Parish Nurse My journey into Church and Community ministry began (without my knowledge), when I was a young teen. I enjoyed going to the local school on Sunday after church to help register community residents for oral Polio vaccinations. I thought it was an honor to be asked by...
Holistic Rural Ministry The Bennettsville-Cheraw Area Cooperative Ministry (BCACM), established in 1966, is a specialized ministry with rural residents of South Carolina’s Marlboro and Chesterfield counties. With four pastors and a combined church membership below 2500, the cooperative includes one station church (Trinity UMC), two parishes (Cheraw and Bennettsville), and one circuit (Bennettsville Circuit). All...
UBC Hospital in Sierra Leone In 1891, the Women’s Missionary Association of the United Brethren in Christ sent Dr. Marietta Hatfield of Miami County Ohio to the Rotifunk mission station in Moyamba, Sierra Leone. There Dr. Hatfield’s medical work eventually led to founding a hospital. Dr. Hatfield was joined by two other medical women sent...
Missionaries and Mission Supporters David Kelley was born in Tennessee to a prominent Methodist family in 1833. A precocious lad, he was graduated from college at eighteen, entered the Methodist ministry at nineteen, and received a medical degree at twenty. His mother, Margaret Lavinia Kelley, founded the first women’s missionary support group in her minister-husband’s...
Rural mission founded by Evangelical Church Red Bird Mission was founded in 1921 in the southeastern corner of Kentucky to provide education and Christian evangelism ministries to residents of the area. The Mission was started by the Evangelical Church on a small piece of property, at the confluence of Cow Fork and the Red Bird...
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...
Advocate of Holy Boldness Bishop Felton E. May often spoke of the need for “holy boldness” — and his admirers said he lived the phrase. He was a forceful preacher and a force away from the pulpit. “You did not have to ask him to enter the fray,” said James H. Salley, associate vice chancellor...
Deaconess Who Served the Poor of Saint Petersburg, Russia In 2014 the United Methodist Church in Eurasia has celebrated its 125th anniversary since the first Methodist congregation started in Eurasia. It was in the year 1889, when a small Methodist congregation began to meet in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. For over 125 years the Spirit has moved...
“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...
