Advocate for Peace and Justice Deats grew up in a Methodist family in Texas and attended McMurry College in Abilene, Texas, in the early 1950s. There he became active in the Methodist Student Movement which was beginning to voice concerns about civil rights and racial justice, holding its first interracial meeting at McMurry. A visit...
First United Methodist Bishop in Russia When Bishop Rüdiger (Ruediger) R. Minor became the first United Methodist bishop to reside in Moscow, he was uniquely qualified to head a mission to oversee the denomination’s fledgling congregations there and in other parts of the former Soviet Union. As a child, one of his earliest memories was...
May Peace Abound: The Legacy of Georgia Harkness “May truth and freedom come to every nation; may peace abound where strife has raged so long; that each may seek to love and build together, a world united, righting every wrong; a world united in its love for freedom, proclaiming peace together in one song.” The...
Peace Award-Winning Missionaries to Algeria Pastor Hugh Johnson and his wife Shirliann (“Fritzi”) received the 2014 World Methodist Peace Award. Hugh and Shirliann dedicated their lives to the United Methodist Church for more than 40 years – 1963 up to 2005 – working in Algeria. The couple operated under a simple slogan: The church must be where...
“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...
Champion of Social Justice Thelma Stevens, 1902-1990, became a mission legend across the 28 years (1940-1968) she served as secretary for Christian social relations of the Woman’s Division of the Board of Missions of The Methodist Church, her years in that office exactly paralleling those of that denomination’s existence from its unification of northern and...
Blessed Are the Peacemakers After World War II it was all too clear to the nation’s churches that the world needed a viable institution to help avoid the horror of war. United Methodist Women predecessors sent cards to the U.S. State Department urging the United States to join a world peace organization founded in 1945...
Bishop of Zimbabwe and National Leader Bishop Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa, Methodist bishop and nationalist leader, was prime minister of the coalition government called Zimbabwe Rhodesia, which failed in its attempt to create a biracial government to end the civil war in formerly white-controlled Rhodesia. In 1947, Muzorewa was appointed a lay preacher for five tiny...
![Templin, Ralph T[odd]. (1896-1984)](https://methodistmission200.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Templin-1-300x300.jpg "Templin, Ralph T[odd]. (1896-1984)")
Missionary, Peacemaker, Activist Although exempt from military duty because of his pastoral duties in Vinton, Kansas, Ralph Templin waived that right and became a “Preacher-Soldier” in the 4th U.S. Navy Aero Squadron in 1917. After his return from World War I, Templin entered Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas. In 1920 he graduated and married Lila...
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...
