Maria Woodworth-Etter biography

Maria Woodworth-Etter: For Such a Time as This, by Wayne Warner. Gainesville, FL: Bridge-Logos, 2004.

The author, Wayne Warner, has done intense, investigative work to bring his readers Woodworth-Etter’s true life story, and it is a thorough story at that. Maria Woodworth-Etter was a phenomenal woman evangelist who strongly opposed racial and gender discrimination. She believed the only way to be saved from sin was through Jesus Christ and the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Not only does he share her accomplishments and successes, but also moments when her faith was weak and when life was not fair. He also displays her with power brought on by the Holy Spirit. Warner compares her in many ways to several important, powerful followers of God in the Bible who also had a calling specifically for that period of time.

The book includes detailed descriptions of significant events in Woodworth-Etter’s career and life along with excerpts from her own book, Marvels and Miracles. The author gathers several newspaper stories and editorials along with descendants’ accounts of her life and her powerful meetings. He gives both the positive and negative newspaper reports. Warner takes several primary sources and even personal accounts and ties them together into a detailed, yet exciting review of Woodworth-Etter’s life and the influences she had during her time. He also includes valuable pictures of her, her meetings, and her family members.

Warner shares of Woodworth-Etter’s struggles before she was able to fulfill her calling as a female evangelist. He also explains, with the help of excerpts from Woodworth-Etter’s book, that the basis of her ministry was her desperate prayers before every sermon. He goes on to describe her ministry extending outside of Ohio and the oppositions that came with this from her family and several others. Most of the time, he goes through her life like he’s following a time line. But there are a few times that he jumps back to a significant event to add or elaborate on it.

Readers are taken on a detailed journey through not only the trials and ministry of Woodworth-Etter but also her heart and influences on her time and those around her. She dramatically changed the view people had of women and their roles in the Church and God’s work. She paved the way for the Pentecostal movement and for many after her, including several women such as Aimee Semple McPherson and Kathryn Kuhlman, and also influenced men like Smith Wigglesworth.

Reviewed by Sarah Ahmed, Evangel University student

Paperback, 359 pages. $12.99 retail. Order from amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com

My first 100 years

My First 100 Years: Counting My Blessings, by Frances Etta Wilson. N.p.: the author, 2008.

When Frances Eastes Wilson was in her 80s, she felt inspired to write a short biography to acquaint her children and grandchildren with her family history. The writing was slow and tedious at times. But eventually she took her scattered notes, organized them, and came up with a book.

She grew up on a farm near Wylie, Texas. In 1921, her father, George Eastes, attended a revival conducted by Aimee Semple McPherson at Fair Park Coliseum in Dallas. At that meeting, he went forward for prayer and was saved, filled with the Holy Spirit, and healed of an arthritic back condition. Because of his new-found Pentecostal faith, he was excommunicated from the Christian Church he had faithfully attended.

For awhile the Eastes family attended a church that was the beginning of First Assembly of God in Dallas. Later Frances’ father helped to establish a church in Sachse, Texas, near where they lived. Frances was converted in 1938 and started attending Gospel Tabernacle (later First Assembly) in Dallas. There she met Evangelist Vernon Wilson who was known as “the Baptist preacher who received the baptism in the Holy Spirit.”

Vernon Wilson and Frances were married in 1939, and went forward in ministry. Vernon evangelized in Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and other places. He also pastored Assemblies of God churches in Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida. They had three children. Vernon passed away with a heart attack in 1965. Their daughter, Mary, was only 15 at the time of Vernon’s death. Frances worked as a secretary to make ends meet, and the Lord provided.

Interspersed with personal memories of her own life and of extended family members, Frances Wilson shares testimony after testimony of answered prayer within her family and people she has known through the years. She is the mother of Dr. Tom Wilson, longtime pastor of The Oaks Fellowship in Red Oak, Texas.

Rev. Scott Wilson was elected as senior pastor of The Oaks Fellowship in 2003, and Dr. Tom Wilson has continued ministry in The Oaks Fellowship as Senior Pastor of Development. He founded Life School, a public Charter School housed in The Oaks Fellowship facilities, in 1998. The enrollment has grown to over 3000 students in the 2008-2009 school year.

Her son Eddie is also an Assemblies of God minister. Her daughter, Mary Wilson Keener, is a soloist and a prayer minister. Frances Wilson is still very active, having made several trips to the Holy Land, Europe, and other places. She recently went on a bus trip to Branson and Springfield, Missouri. This volume is informative and inspirational, and a real testimony for all to read.

Reviewed by Glenn W. Gohr

Softcover, 221 pages. $20.00. Order from Mrs. Frances Wilson, Apt. 2200, 1020 Pecan Crossing Dr., De Soto, TX 75115

Women in ministry

Pastoral Letter to Theo: An Introduction to Interpretation and Women’s Ministries, by Paul Elbert. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008.

Restricting women from leadership and ministry in the church is, as Church of God Theological Seminary professor Paul Elbert deftly argues, based in faulty exegesis and naive proof-texting. The more serious, underlying issue is that proof-texting combined with dispensational cessationism is ultimately a form of eisegesis, a way of making Scripture say what you want it to say. A more faithful hermeneutic listens to the whole counsel of Scripture and interprets the Bible in its context, but with sensitivity to the contemporary world. Pastoral Letter to Theo is practical and encouraging advice for all ministers and is rooted in a contextually sensitive reading of the New Testament.

Reviewed by Peter Althouse, Instructor in Theology, Tyndale University College and Seminary

Softcover, 97 pages. $15.00 retail. Order from: amazon.com

Charles F. Parham and the Apostolic Faith Churches

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, by Charles F. Parham. Baxter Springs, KS: Apostolic Faith Bible College, [c1944].

Selected Sermons of the Late Charles F. Parham and Sarah E. Parham, Co-founders of the Original Apostolic Faith Movement, compiled by Robert Parham. Baxter Springs, KS: Apostolic Faith Bible College, c1941.

The Everlasting Gospel, by Charles F. Parham. Baxter Springs, KS: Apostolic Faith Bible College, c1930.

The Life of Charles F. Parham: Founder of the Apostolic Faith Movement, by Sarah Parham. Baxter Springs, KS: Apostolic Faith Bible College, c1930. (this volume not pictured above)

Out in the Fields with God: My Life Story, by Pearl Menke. Kingman, KS: The Author, [1970s].

Bible Doctrine, by Jacob Regier. Baxter Springs, KS: Apostolic Faith Bible College, c1963.

The Apostolic Faith Churches, with its headquarters in Baxter Springs, Kansas, holds a unique distinction among Pentecostal churches.

Its founder, Charles F. Parham, provided the doctrinal framework for the young Pentecostal movement. Parham’s identification in scripture of speaking in tongues as the “Bible evidence” (later called the “initial evidence”) of Spirit baptism became a defining mark of the emerging Pentecostal movement. After students at his Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, began speaking in tongues at a prayer meeting on January 1, 1901, Parham, through his Apostolic Faith Movement (later called Apostolic Faith Churches), had some success in promoting the restoration of the gift of tongues. While the Apostolic Faith Movement was largely confined to the south central United States, the 1906 revival at Azusa Street in Los Angeles catapulted Pentecostalism before a worldwide audience.

The Apostolic Faith Churches today consist of several dozen congregations, located primarily in the south central United States. The church also operates The Apostolic Faith Bible College, a ministerial training school located in Baxter Springs. The school does not charge tuition — a common practice among early Pentecostal groups but rare today.

The influence of the Apostolic Faith Churches has extended far beyond its own organization. Most famously, William Seymour, the leader at the Azusa Street revival (1906-09) in Los Angeles, was trained at an Apostolic Faith school in Houston, Texas, in 1905 before he moved to Los Angeles in 1906. The Assemblies of God also has roots in Parham’s Apostolic Faith — the largest group of ministers at the 1914 founding meeting of the Assemblies of God was part of an organization that parted ways with Parham in 1907.

Four extremely important early books by or about Parham have been reprinted by the Apostolic Faith Churches: The Life of Charles Parham, a biography by his wife, Sarah Parham; A Voice Crying in the Wilderness and The Everlasting Gospel, two theological works by Charles Parham; and Selected Sermons of Charles Parham, compiled by his son, Robert Parham. These four book are essential primary sources for serious students of the Pentecostal movement.

Two additional books, important for the understanding of the development of the Apostolic Faith Churches after Charles Parham’s 1929 death, are also available: Bible Doctrine, by Jacob Regier; and Out in the Fields with God, by Pearl Menke. Regier’s book, since its first publication in 1963, has been the Apostolic Faith Churches’ standard doctrinal work. Menke’s autobiographical volume provides firsthand insights from an Apostolic Faith minister, from her recollections of the Parham family to her faith-building experiences as a female preacher in the Midwest.

Maine Pentecostal history

Prevailing Westerlies (The Pentecostal Heritage of Maine): The Story of How the Pentecostal Fire Spread from Topeka, Kansas to Houston — to Los Angeles — to Bangor, Maine, written by James E. Peters, researched by Patricia Pickard. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 1988.

Prevailing Westerlies documents the early history of the Pentecostal movement in Maine. This 604-page book features hundreds of photographs, as well as accounts of Holy Ghost meetings and supernatural movings of God in tents, downtown missions, Bible schools, and street meetings in New England.

Read about firebrands preaching until the rafters rang. During one tent meeting, rain came down in buckets and water poured into the tent. One sister hollered, “Look out for my piano!” Pa Sweeney kept right on preaching and said, “It ain’t pianos we want to save—it is souls!” It will light a fire in your bones for the renewed move of God in your own life.

Prevailing Westerlies, importantly, recounts the breadth of the early Pentecostal revivals, which crossed the various divides. Stories about early believers — Trinitarian and Oneness, Assemblies of God and independent, male and female — are all included. Years of research yielded previously unpublished information about significant early Pentecostal leaders such as Mattie Crawford, Aimee Semple McPherson, the Crabtree family, and a host of others. This volume includes 34 interviews with people who recounted the early Pentecostal fire which entered Maine in 1907 and spread throughout the area. Includes comprehensive index.

The author, James Peters, served as pastor of Glad Tidings Church (Bangor, Maine), which was founded by Rev. Clifford A. Crabtree and the Davis Sisters. Patricia Pickard, who did the research for this volume, is former archivist for Zion Bible College (Haverhill, Massachusetts) and has authored numerous historical books and articles about New England and the Pentecostal movement.

Softcover, 604 pages, illustrated. $15 postpaid to U.S. addresses. Order from: Patricia Pickard, 144 Poplar Street, Bangor, ME 04401 (email: primrose301@msn.com)

Sister Aimee biography

Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America, by Matthew Avery Sutton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

One cannot help but wish to have been there, centrally seated in the first row of Angelus Temple’s lower balcony, to view the spectacle up close. Imagine the intensity of the moment, the palpable pangs of spiritual bliss, anguish, and surrender all around as Sister Aimee draws your seatmates into her fanciful world of biblical prophets and priests, heroes and villains. And what must it have been like to stand with thirty thousand others gathered at Los Angeles’ train station on that June day in 1926, cheering rapturously at the first sight of Sister Aimee after her return from a mysterious disappearance; or to sit nervously in the court room later that same year as she attempted to answer the mystery and defend herself against charges of conspiracy?

That such sentiments stir frequently when reading Matthew Sutton’s biography of Aimee Semple McPherson is tribute to his rare story-telling abilities. By pricking the emotions as much as intellectual curiosity, Sutton provides us with an opportunity to appreciate McPherson sympathetically as someone trying her best to negotiate the cultural opportunities, pitfalls, and blessings of her day. At the same time, he offers room to feel what it would have been like to be part of McPherson’s multitude of followers or cadre of critics. McPherson was, to say the least, a polarizing figure. All who encountered her during her lifetime thus seemed compelled to declare publicly their feelings of loyalty or loathing for the female evangelist.

Sutton asks us to suspend such judgment and instead carefully measure the intensity of these responses against the realities of the day–against the constantly expanding range of possibilities that seemed only to encourage Sister Aimee’s exploits, well meaning and successful, poorly conceived, or otherwise.

Women in the Church of God in Christ

Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World, by Anthea D. Butler. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

We have all heard the saying “behind every great man is a great woman,” but within the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) in the early twentieth century, the great women did more than just stand behind the men. They carved out leadership positions alongside the men, often surpassing the “brothers” in education, prominence, and spiritual and temporal authority. In doing the “women’s work” under the separate structure of the “Women’s Department,” female leaders created a powerful space for themselves. Anthea Butler’s book, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World, expertly presents the tales of these leaders between 1911 and 1964.

These narratives are pieced together from information gathered digging through many “musty closets and bedrooms,” where much of the denomination’s historical documentation remains, waiting to be discovered by scholars or thrown out by careless relatives. Butler rescues denominational pamphlets and books, newspaper articles, meeting minutes, tape recordings, photos, and other textual relics which prove invaluable in illuminating the role of women in COGIC. She supplements this data with interviews of elderly church members who were often able to thicken the descriptions of various historical events. The resultant narrative highlights the ways in which COGIC women strategically used their beliefs and their role as “mothers” to empower themselves within the denomination, and eventually outside of it.

Key to Butler’s understanding of COGIC women is an “emphasis on how belief–in this case, belief in sanctification–acted as the impetus for what church mothers actually accomplished” (p. 4). This approach takes issue with other treatments that have suggested that practices like sanctification led to a disengaged and otherworldly stance on social issues. Quite the opposite happened with the second generation of COGIC leadership, among whom Butler sees the focus on sanctification leading to social engagement on issues like education, politics, and civic interaction. Here Butler hopes to push beyond an earlier analysis of sanctified women offered by Cheryl Townsend Gilkes by suggesting that, through their religious beliefs and world view, “it was COGIC women themselves who shaped the denomination’s engagement with the community … through their alliances outside the denomination” (p. 119).