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Matthews, Alma
Home Missionary Who Worked With Immigrant Women
They were strangers in a strange land.
The story is as old as time, as biblical as Genesis and Revelation and as contemporary as today’s headlines. Human history is a story of migrants and immigration.
People left home, wherever or whatever home was, in search of safety, economic betterment and a fresh start.
They arrived alone, friendless, perplexed and poor. Often they were sick and in need of comfort or a guiding hand.
Beginning around 1885, the Women’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City (predecessor of today’s United Methodist Women) identified a serious problem. Immigrant women, often traveling alone or with children in tow, arrived on American shores to join their husbands, brothers, fathers or other relatives who had come to the U.S. ahead of them.
Alone, they had to navigate the challenges and complexities of the immigration system and the dangerous docks of New York. Alone — except for Helen Mathews; her husband, James; their daughter, Alma, and another person who found a small house to rent in lower Manhattan where they began a new ministry.
Two managed the house while the other two combed the docks seeking single women disembarking the ships. Without regard to language barriers or concerns for their own safety, they approached these women and their families and guided them through the immigration process. They offered them free lodging at the house — now called the Immigrant Girls’ Home. They helped them on the next stage of their journey, getting them to the train station or helping them to connect with family in New York or beyond.
Single women at deadly disadvantage
Why bother? The Methodist women in New York realized that single women in a strange land were at deadly disadvantage. There were people who would steal their luggage and their money. The women themselves might then be forced into a life of prostitution.
The goal of the Immigrant Girl’s Home was to prevent such injustices and help immigrant women transition to a new life in America.
When Helen and James Mathews had to leave this ministry, Alma and others filled their place.
Alma worked in this ministry for a generation — from the 1890s to 1922.
By 1887, the work had grown so much that it was turned over to the Woman’s Home Missionary Society. The successful program was replicated with houses in Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, New Orleans and San Francisco. The matron in San Francisco, Katherine Maurer, was described by newspapers as the “Angel of Angel Island.’ Angel Island is the largest island in San Francisco Bay and was home to the Angel Island immigration station.
Back at the Immigrant Girls’ Home in New York, the work continued to grow. In 1887, there were 482 lodgers. By 1897, the two women met 808 ships and there were 3,004 lodgers at the home. They served 10,823 meals. In 1908, they met more than 970 ships (a little less than three a day) for the year. The reports filed by these women and now kept at the United Methodist Archives and History Center, are brief, but touching.
Today, the brownstone that once served as the home for immigrant women and girls in the early 20th century is now the Alma Mathews House.
Christmas at Ellis Island
Shortly after Ellis Island was opened in 1905, Alma Mathews writes, “I wish I had space to describe taking Christmas presents to the detainees on Ellis Island.”
There was also the oddly humorous. Alma came across a young couple who had been swindled by a thief who exchanged the money they brought from ‘the old country’ for only pennies. Ms. Mathews writes that she knew where the thief was and went to his ‘office’ with her umbrella and got their money back!
The 1889 diary of a Mrs. S.M. Ford, then manager of the house, tells a story of meeting a young homeless woman one evening who needed a job and a safe place to sleep.
Ford talked with the young woman, making plans for the next day to see if she could help her find employment. She learned that the young woman had no money.
“I made her a bed on a lounge (couch) and gave her a bowl of cold oatmeal to eat — as I had nothing else prepared.” The following morning the woman said she needed to step out to see a friend for a moment and never returned.
Why the young woman chose to abandon the house and hope of a job for the streets of New York will never be known.
What is true is that this young woman, and all of these immigrant women, were touched, even if only for a night, by the ministry of those Methodist women.
When visitors come to the United Methodist Archives and History Center in Madison, New Jersey, they are greeted by a banner that once adorned the 1968 General Conference as a reminder of United Methodist history and heritage. One of the banner’s panels depicts two women in a reflective pose, representing the struggle of women for representation and ordination.
The current debate in the United States over immigration brings that banner and these stories of long-ago immigrant women into focus as we connect and reconnect with our denominational DNA.
Considering the personal and social holiness that is in the deepest, most intertwined strands of our heritage, nothing frees that holiness more than when we are in relationships that banish fear, loneliness and alienation.
By Alfred T. Day III. Day, top executive of the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History, reflected on this history of Methodist work with immigrants the day after President Obama spoke about executive orders relating to undocumented immigrants. Dale Patterson, archivist for the commission, contributed to this story.
Taken with permission from UMC.org: http://www.umc.org/news-and-media/a-united-methodist-story-of-welcoming-the-immigrant
Stevens, Thelma (1902-1990)
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 southern branches of American Methodist to the action forming The United Methodist Church. She was an unrelenting champion for racial justice, international peace, and women’s rights. Both prophet and gadfly, she became social action heroine to young Methodists engaged in the civil rights and feminist struggles of the 1960s.
She grew up in Mississippi in a family she described as “poor white farmers.” Three of her nine brothers and sisters died before she was born. From an early age, Thelma was bothered by the difference between the treatment of blacks and whites in her rural community. She was especially troubled by the treatment of the black inmates on a prison farm down the road from her home and of the poor quality of education offered to African American children. She worked as a teacher even before graduating from the then State Teachers’ College in Hattiesburg.
At college, she set her heart on working for the YWCA, one of the few organizations working to overcome the impact of segregation and Jim Crow laws in the South of the 1920. She was surprised to receive an invitation to do graduate work in preparation for becoming a deaconess from Scarritt College, newly organized in Nashville by the women’s mission organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. She recalled in a lengthy 1972 interview that the thought of the church as a career track had never occurred to her; she found the church she knew irrelevant to her concerns for race relations. But she accepted the offer to earn a master’s degree from Scarritt, only to be told upon graduation that she was unqualified on health grounds to be commissioned as a deaconess; ironically, she lived to be 88 years old.
She was offered the job of director of the Bethlehem Center in Augusta, Georgia, which in 1910 had become the first of a network of African American community centers established by the Woman’s Missionary Commission of the MECS; she held the post for 11 years, until in 1939 she became director of Christian social relations for the women’s missionary organization of the Southern Church. That assignment led in 1940 to the comparable role in the Woman’s Society of Christian Service and its administrative unit, the Woman’s Division of the Methodist Board of Missions.
Thelma was unceasing in here opposition to segregation and racism within both church and society. She became active in the Southern Regional Council, an early civil rights organization, while living in Augusta. Within the Woman’s (later Women’s Division), the mission board, and the church at large she crusaded for full racial inclusion.
She was sometimes ridiculed for her proposals and passions. Bishop Charlene P. Kammerer, recalled in a sermon to the 2004 General Conference:
“At the 1944 General Conference Thelma Stevens, a young woman from Mississippi, stood and spoke in support of a request that 
committees of the church meet in places where African Americans could be hosted as well as whites.
“During the debate on the floor of General Conference, a male member of the conference ridiculed Ms. Stevens, saying, ‘We provide suitable and adequate entertainment but not along the lines the sister indicated. We can’t, and you move us too fast.’ The General Minutes reflect that delegates of General Conference laughed during his remarks and rejected the proposal of Thelma Stevens. She would live to see her idea adopted by many agencies in the church, including the General Conference.”
Thelma was instrumental in 1951 in persuading the Women’s Division to prepare and publish a ground-breaking publication, “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” a compilation and comparison laws on race that contributed to the formation of the United Methodist “Charter for Racial Justice in an Interdependent Global Community,” which emerged from the Women’s Division and was adopted by the General Conference as denominational policy in 1980 (read the charter at https://www.unitedmethodistwomen.org/racialjusticecharter.)
In 1978, the Women’s Division published Thelma’s book, Legacy for the Future: The History of Christian Social Relations in the Women’s Division of Christian Service, 1940-1968, that is part organizational history and part personal memoir.
By Elliott Wright
Camphor, Alexander Priestly (1865-1919)
African-American Missionary Bishop For Liberia
Alexander Priestly Camphor was an African American missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He was born to slave parents in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. They died while he was a small child, and he was adopted and raised by Stephen Priestly, a white Methodist minister. Camphor was educated in Methodist Freedmen’s Aid schools, established in the South after the American Civil War. In 1887, he graduated from New Orleans University. He taught mathematics there for four years and organized the Friends of Africa Society. He was graduated from Gammon Theological Seminary in 1895, after which he did postgraduate work at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, New York.
Camphor and his wife, Mamie (Weathers), whom he married in 1893, were commissioned by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1896 as missionaries to Liberia. He served as superintendent of Methodist schools in Liberia from 1896 to 1907. He also served as president of the College of West Africa (formerly Monrovia Seminary) until 1907, when he and his wife returned to America, where they remained for nine years. In 1916, he was elected the last missionary bishop for Liberia of the Methodist Episcopal Church and he returned there for three years. He died in South Orange, New Jersey.
By Sylvia M. Jacobs
Bibliography
Alexander Camphor, Missionary Story Sketches: Folklore from Africa (1909, 1981).
See also Wade Crawford Barclay, History of Methodist Missions, 4 vols. (1949-1973);
Frederick Leete, Methodist Bishops: Personal Notes and Bibliography (1948);
Walter Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa 1877-1900 (1982).
Gurney, Samuel (1860-1924)
Pioneering Medical Missionary In Zimbabwe
Samuel Gurney was a pioneer Methodist medical missionary in Zimbabwe. He was born at Long Branch, New Jersey. After receiving his education for ministry at the New York Missionary Training School and Drew Theological Seminary, he was ordained in 1891 in the New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. While serving pastorates in New York and Connecticut, he earned an M. D. at Yale University (1901). From 1903 until his death, except for two furloughs, he served as a Methodist church superintendent and medical missionary in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). As a result of his medical ministry, chiefs Mutasa and Mangwende became supporters of mission work in their areas. Initially, “Everyone was against him,” one white settler related; a government official once told him, “We have been spared two evils-cattle sickness and missionaries.” But Gurney persevered and led in establishing new centers of the church’s work at Nyakatsapa (1907), Mrewa (1909), Mtoko (1915), and Nyadiri (1923).
He was a catalyst in a partnership of government and church in health services that began in the colonial era of Southern Rhodesia and continues in Zimbabwe today. His openness in working cooperatively with all was recognized as he chaired the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference (1922-1924). He died in Salisbury.
By Norman E. Thomas
This article is reproduced from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, copyright © 1998, by Gerald H. Anderson, W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan. All rights reserved. It is taken, with permission, from the Dictionary of African Christian Biography: http://www.dacb.org/stories/zimbabwe/gurney_samuel.html
Bibliography
Henry L. James, Missions in Rhodesia under the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1898-1934 (1935).
Muzorewa, Abel Tendekayi (1925 – )
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 congregations while he studied theology. He was ordained in 1953 and was appointed a circuit preacher for five years before spending 1958 to 1963 at Methodist colleges in the United States, where he completed a master’s degree. By the 1950s he supported his people’s rising nationalist feelings and, after his return, he took up a conference post as youth director, where he could channel his ministry into political activity. He led protests against the deportation of Bishop Ralph Dodge, who opposed the increasing political repression of the Ian Smith government, which unilaterally proclaimed the independent white-ruled nation of Rhodesia in 1965. In 1968, Muzorewa was elected bishop to succeed Dodge, becoming the first African head of a major church in Rhodesia. He came into conflict with the Smith regime, which banned him from tribal trust lands, where most of the black Methodists lived. He continued to criticize the racist policies of the government and became a national symbol of resistance.
In 1971 the British struck a deal with Smith that provided for a transition to majority rule over decades in exchange for an end to sanctions against the government. Muzorewa joined with an inexperienced cleric, Reverend Canaan Banana, to form the African National Congress (ANC) to oppose the settlement. It was so successful that the proposed referendum was withdrawn; Muzorewa found himself a national leader and an international personality. The liberation movements – the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) of Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) of Joshua Nkomo – both placed themselves under the ANC umbrella even though they had some doubts when Muzorewa founded a national party. The ANC was the only legal black party once ZANU and ZAPU undertook guerrilla warfare, which it rejected. Muzorewa is a man without cunning or political guile, which was both his appeal during the 1970s and the reason for his failure. He was the acknowledged African leader, but he lacked ambition and avoided the factional politics that fueled the independence movements but which also led to ethnic violence and bloodshed in internecine battles. Muzorewa saw himself as a Moses leading his people out of bondage; ZAPU and ZANU saw him as a figure-head maintaining a legal front while they fought the real battle for liberation.
In 1975 Sithole and Nkomo were released from the restriction that had confined them to their home villages since 1964. They promptly moved to seize control of the ANC from Muzorewa. Talks with the government collapsed, Nkomo and Sithole abandoned the ANC to begin their own splinter movements, and Muzorewa temporarily left the country. After 14 months, he returned to a tumultuous welcome. Nkomo tried to outflank the bishop by joining with guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe to form the Patriotic Front (PF). After the collapse of U.S.-brokered conciliation talks in 1977, Muzorewa found himself increasingly isolated politically. The neighboring African states endorsed the PF’s civil war, and Muzorewa turned to direct negotiations. In 1978, Muzorewa and Sithole (who had lost control of ZANU to Mugabe) signed an agreement with Smith for installing a majority government within a year. All citizens over 18 had the vote, but the seats were reserved for whites and they were allocated a quarter of the cabinet positions.
From the start the transitional government was doomed to failure. Muzorewa became prime minister when his ANC carried the elections and the country’s name was changed to Zimbabwe Rhodesia. But the PF denounced the arrangement, the war continued, and no international recognition was forthcoming. When Muzorewa attempted to address the United Nations Security Council the day after Nkomo and Mugabe, he was not permitted to do so. The security situation deteriorated until government supporters were unsafe beyond the region around the capital. Large numbers of whites emigrated, leaving the economy in shambles. Finally, an international all-party arrangement led to the arrival of a British administrator along with Commonwealth troops to oversee a cease-fire. In 1980 independence was achieved, and Mugabe’s ZANU swept to power. Muzorewa was elected to parliament, but the ANC won only two other seats. Banana became president of Zimbabwe, with Mugabe as prime minister. Muzorewa remained in parliament but was detained from 1983 to 1984. In 1985, he returned to Scarritt Theological Seminary in Memphis. He divides his time between Memphis and his farm in Zimbabwe.
By Norbert C. Brockman
This article is reproduced from An African Biographical Dictionary, copyright © 1994, edited by Norbert C. Brockman, Santa Barbara, California. All rights reserved. It is taken, with permission, from the Dictionary of African Christian Biography: http://www.dacb.org/stories/zimbabwe/muzorewa_abel.html
Bibliography
Current Biography. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940-.
Lipschutz, Mark R., and R. Kent Rasmussen. Dictionary of African Historical Biography. 2nd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Dickie, John and Alan Rake. Who’s Who in Africa. London: African Development, 1973.
Wiseman, John A. Political Leaders in Black Africa. Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1991.
Rake, Alan. Who’s Who in Africa: Leaders for the 1990s. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992.
Additional reading: Muzorewa, Abel. Rise Up and Walk (1978).
Hall, Rosetta Sherwood (1865-1951)
Medical Missionary To Korea
In 1890 the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society sent Dr. Rosetta Sherwood Hall to Korea as a medical missionary. Ms. Hall became an educator as well when she began teaching a blind girl a form of Braille. She founded the Pyongyang School for the Deaf and Blind in 1909. Joining with a group of Korean doctors, Ms. Hall co-founded the Chosun Women’s Medical Training Institute in 1928. Ms. Hall served 44 years in Korea. She lost her U.S. citizenship after she married Canadian missionary Dr. William James Hall in 1892.
Please view more at United Methodist Women.org
Holbrook, Ella
Faithful Service In Hawaii: Susannah Wesley Community Center
With a $500 grant from the Woman’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Ella Holbrook set out as a missionary with Japanese and Korean women immigrant laborers on plantations in Hawaii in 1899. Ms. Holbrook went house-to-house, visiting with the women and organizing English-language and sewing classes. The society sent other women missionaries to help in this work, and the Susannah Wesley Home was started for girls who were orphans, abandoned or whose parents were unable to care for them.
Over the years, the facility changed to meet the needs of a community that still includes many immigrants, some survivors of human trafficking. Today, Susannah Wesley Community Center is a multipurpose agency offering Head Start, after‐school clubs for youth, study hall programs, English classes for adults and mental health services.
This is what happens when faithful women organize for mission!
Please view more at United Methodist Women.org
Scranton, Mary (1832-1902)
Educator Of Girls In Korea
In 1885, Mary F. Scranton became the first woman missionary sent to Korea by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (North). Ms. Scranton established Korea’s first girls school, Ewha School for Girls, shared the Gospel message with Korean women and helped them organize for Christian service. More than a century later, Korean and other Asian Christian women are still benefiting from and building on her foundational work.
Today, Ms. Scranton’s early efforts have multiplied a thousand-fold in South Korea. Ewha University, the world’s largest women’s university, and Ewha High School in South Korea are both legacies of Ms. Scranton’s work. The fruit of Ms. Scranton’s mission is affecting women from across Asia through the work of the Scranton Women’s Center for Leadership Development, a United Methodist Women partner in Seoul.
Please view more at United Methodist Women.org
Ames, Jessie (1883-1972)
Lynching Is An Indefensible Crime
In 1930 Methodist woman Jessie Daniel Ames gathered a small group of daring women together in Atlanta, Georgia, to form the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.
The protection of white women had been a common excuse for white mob lynchings of black men, and so the women were determined to use the power of their mission societies to stop this terrorism in their names. The women drafted a statement saying, “Lynching is an indefensible crime. Women dare no longer allow themselves to be the cloak behind which those bent upon personal revenge and savagery commit acts of violence and lawlessness in the name of women. We repudiate this disgraceful claim for all time.”
By 1937,109 women’s organizations representing more than 4 million women had joined in the campaign. One of the association’s most prominent endorsing groups was the Woman’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, one of United Methodist Women’s predecessors. Bertha Payne Newell, superintendent of the Woman’s Missionary Council’s Bureau of Christian Social Relations, served as secretary of the association.
Please view more at United Methodist Women.org
Catchings, Rose
Listening To The Voices Of Women
From 1968 to 1988 Rose Catchings served as the first executive for international ministries with women and children for the General Board of Global Ministries, a position created to oversee United Methodist Women’s international work after The United Methodist Church was formed in 1968.
In the World Division’s Oral History Project, Ms. Catchings talked about one of her first mission trips with a mostly male church delegation to a refugee camp near Kenya.
“Most refugees in the world are women and children, so I decided to leave the group and walk among the women for awhile. They said, ‘If groups like yours would talk with women, we’d tell you our priorities; but groups like yours always speak to men, and they don’t know our priorities.’ That shook me up. … A great deal of listening goes into this work, and it must be so.
“No woman anywhere I went talked about her life without talking about children. … Women in … the forests, the villages, had a common need to develop their own potential so their societies could become better. … They say, ‘I want better opportunities for my children. I need to know something more than what I now know.’
“[After that] I tried to take four or five women with me on each trip so that women in this country, [the United States], could hear what women in other countries were saying … so that women in this country could raise questions with women in the other countries — churchwomen to churchwomen.”
Please view more at United Methodist Women.org