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...
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 Founded and Mission Serving Congregation in Hawaii Aiea UMC has a heart for going into the world and engaging with partners to assist in their outreach. Aiea was first a preaching point of the Japanese Methodist Church in Honolulu. In 1900, the Aiea Japanese Methodist Church was established. The church began as a mission...
Congregation with Historic, Extensive Support of Varied Local and Global Mission At Rolling Hills United Methodist Church in Rolling Hills Estates, California, we have a long history of support for mission, both locally and globally. Our congregation has a few members who served as missionaries. The Rasmussens served in Japan. They bring a rich understanding to...
Early Women’s Home in Hawaii Home and foreign missions, as known in the early days, met in Hawaii, the national Corresponding Secretary announced that Mrs. Angie Newman had organized an auxiliary of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society in the First Methodist Church of Honolulu. A significant sentence followed: “A Japanese woman has been employed to...
Mission Bishop and Founder of Relief Agency Herbert Welch (1862-1969), the longest serving Methodist bishop, played multiple roles of lasting significance in the mission and social history of the church. His accomplishments included: Originator and first executive (1940 to 1948) of what is today the United Methodist Committee on Relief, the disaster response and development...
Methodist Episcopal missionary to China and Japan Born in Concord, Pennsylvania, Maclay graduated from Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1846. He arrived in China in 1848 and was secretary, superintendent, and treasurer for Methodist missions in China from 1852 to 1872. In 1861, he wrote Life among the Chinese. He also helped translate the Bible into...
Founder of Japanese-American Methodism; missionary to Hawaii and Japan In 1877, when only fifty or sixty Japanese had arrived in San Francisco, Kanichi Miyama and K. Nonaka began to receive Christian instruction from Otis Gibson of the Chinese Mission, and later united with the Church. Kanichi Miyama was a native of Japan, born in Choshu...
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...
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....
