Deaconess Leading Rural Ministry Ann McKenzie’s entry into ministry matches that of many women who chose to become deaconesses in The Methodist Church. When she heard about women doing church work, nothing was said about ordination – women could not be full members of annual conferences at that time, and no one mentioned mission work;...
Leader of Deaconesses and Women’s Mission Work Ewing came out of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, although it became part of The Methodist Church when she was a teenager. As she was growing up, she planned to go to Scarritt College. She not only completed her education there but stayed on for fifteen years to...
Mission Educator and Administrator Howell was born in New Jersey in 1874 and earned her Ph.D. degree in sociology from Cornell in 1896. She completed her formal education with a seminary degree from University of Chicago. She taught in Richmond, Kentucky, for four years, coming under the influence of Belle Bennett. In 1903, Bennett persuaded...
First Single Woman Missionary of MECS Lochie Rankin was the first unmarried woman to be sent abroad as a missionary by the MECS. She was also the first missionary supported by the Woman’s Foreign Mission Society of the church. She was born in Milan, Tennessee, in 1851. Upon reaching young womanhood, she volunteered herself for...
Mama Yema in the Congo Growing up in Harrison, Arkansas, Edith wanted to become a missionary and serve in Africa. After graduation from Peabody and Scarritt Colleges in Nashville, Tennessee, she was commissioned in 1931, and spent the next thirty-six years in Zaire (Congo) involved in Christian education, women’s work, social evangelism, directing schools and...
Prominent US Leader of Women’s Mission By the 1960s, Sadie Wilson Tillman, who was born in Tennessee, and grew up a member of a small rural church near Lewisburg, had become one of the nation’s most prominent church women. From 1924 to 1927, she was Director of Christian Education at Laura Haygood Normal School, in...
Mission educator in Japan Gertrude M. Feely was a Methodist Episcopal Church, South, missionary in Japan. She served under the guidance of the Women’s Division of the MECS and after 1940 of the Methodist Church. Feely received her B.S. from the University of Missouri in 1927. She earned an M.A. from Scarritt College in Tennessee...
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...
