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The Incredibles: Amazing Stories of Women Who Responded to God’s Call

The following article, “Women in the Pentecostal Movement,” by Joyce Lee, is reprinted with permission. It first appeared in the May 31, 1998, edition of the Pentecostal Evangel.

From the beginning of the modern Pentecostal movement, women have made vital contributions. Though the spiritual outpouring came at a time in history when, culturally and socially, women were not afforded great freedoms, the women of the Pentecostal movement took their mandate from a higher source—“Your sons and your daughters will prophecy” (Joel 2:28, NIV; italics added). This mandate, coupled with a sense of the urgency of the soon return of Christ, presented opportunities for ministry based not so much upon gender as upon the anointing of the Spirit.

Agnes Ozman, Jennie Evans Moore, Florence Crawford

It was to a young woman, Agnes Ozman, that the distinction, “the first to speak in tongues,” was given in January 1901 at Charles Parham’s Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas.

Five years later, when the Holy Spirit was poured out in Los Angeles, several women connected with the Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street went on to gain recognition with their ministries. Lucy Farrow, who was used of the Lord to pray for people to receive the infilling of the Spirit, later took the Pentecostal message to Liberia. Jennie Evans Moore ministered at the Apostolic Faith Mission both before and after her marriage to the pastor, William Seymour. Florence Crawford assisted with publishing The Apostolic Faith, the newspaper sponsored by the mission. She later founded the Apostolic Faith organization with headquarters in Portland, Oregon, one of the earliest Pentecostal denominations in the country.

Rachel Sizelove, Ivey Campbell

Rachel Sizelove, whose family lived in the small midwestern town of Springfield, Missouri, shared the message which led to establishing a Pentecostal church in that town. Her subsequent vision of a “sparkling fountain” rising up from Springfield and flowing to the ends of the earth was prophetic. The Assemblies of God would later be established, move to Springfield and be instrumental in sending the gospel around the world. Ivey Campbell is reportedly the first person to carry the Pentecostal message to her home state of Ohio. She later ministered in places in Pennsylvania which helped spread the Pentecostal message throughout the Northeast.

Carrie Judd Montgomery, Elizabeth Mix

Carrie Judd Montgomery was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1858. She became an invalid at an early age and was healed through the ministry of a holiness preacher, Elizabeth Mix. Carrie’s healing provided opportunities to share her testimony, and thus began her ministry which later broadened into preaching, teaching, writing and social outreach. She moved to Oakland, California, in 1880, where she met and married George Montgomery, a wealthy Christian businessman. After her Pentecostal baptism in 1908, she made a worldwide tour observing the Pentecostal outpouring. Upon her return she began publishing articles which reported the move of the Spirit around the world. Though she is probably best known for her publication, Triumphs of Faith, a journal on healing and holiness, she along with her husband established an orphanage, a missionary training school and the Home of Peace, a haven for missionaries on furlough and other travelers, which still exists today.

Maria Woodworth-Etter

Perhaps one of the best-known holiness preachers of the 19^th century was Maria Woodworth-Etter. Born in 1844 she began her evangelistic ministry in the 1880s. Traveling across the country with her message of salvation, holy living and faith healing, she attracted crowds as large as 25,000. After receiving her Baptism in 1912, at the age of 68, she continued traveling and spreading the Pentecostal message. In 1918, at the age of 74, she founded and pastored a church in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is today known as Lakeview Temple, a congregation of more than 1,500 members. She also wrote several books recounting the marvelous miracles and wonders which took place in her ministry.

Aimee Semple McPherson, Kathryn Kuhlman

Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944), a dynamic and innovative Pentecostal evangelist and founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and Kathryn Kuhlman (1907-1976) are two well-known women ministers whose Pentecostal influence crossed denominational lines.

Though the focus has been on a few who have enjoyed wide recognition, the vast majority of women in the Pentecostal movement were not so widely known. They served as pastors, missionaries, writers, teachers, and founders of rescue missions and faith homes. They were dedicated pioneers whose faithfulness, sacrifice and influence only eternity will reveal.

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from the December 3, 2000 issue of the Pentecostal Evangel.

Marie Stephany

Marie Stephany began her missionary service in North China in 1916. She reached out with compassion to both abandoned children and adult opium addicts. During a great famine in China in the early 1920s, parents sold their young sons and many baby girls were drowned or left to die in deserted fields. Marie started a small orphanage, paying beggars the equivalent of 10 or 20 cents to find abandoned babies and bring them to her. In her small orphanage, she cared for as many as 30 children at a time.

She also established a home to minister to men hopelessly addicted to opium. Some of them sold their homes and family members to pay for their addiction. Through her witness, many were born again and delivered by the power of the Holy Spirit. Within a few years, more than 30 of the 40 national workers in Marie Stephany’s ministry were former addicts who had been set free and discipled.

Marie Stephany worked in North China for 26 years—long enough to see many of the orphans she raised become evangelists and pastors. She pioneered churches in regions untouched by the gospel. Eventually, one church seated 1,000 worshipers.

Nettie Nichols

Like Marie Stephany, the heart of Nettie Nichols, a missionary in Ningpo, China, was deeply moved by the plight of young girls who were abandoned to die by poverty-stricken parents or sold into slavery. She reached out to these girls, and soon 40 of them lived in her home. In 1922, she purchased land and built an orphanage and chapel. In 1932, with the help of Missionary Eva Bloom and Joshua Bang, a Chinese high school dean who surrendered his life to Christ, she opened Bethel Bible School. By 1935, 175 children, widows and students were living at the Bethel Mission compound.

After 30 years of selfless ministry, Nettie Nichols died in China in 1940.

At the close of World War II, Philip Hogan, former executive director of [Assemblies of God] Foreign Missions, and his wife Virginia went to minister in Ningpo. In spite of civil war in China, they found 40 Bible school students. As the war escalated, the Hogans were forced to leave after only 18 months.

In 1986, nearly 40 years later, the Hogans visited Ningpo and were reunited with 23 Chinese believers they had known from long ago. They learned that at least 600 groups of Christian believers were in the area.

Nearly 80 years after Nettie Nichols first arrived in China, the seed of the gospel she had planted—first through the loving care of abandoned children in an orphanage and then in a Bible school—had multiplied into a rich spiritual harvest.

Anna Tomaseck

Anna Tomaseck went as a missionary to North India in 1926. After serving 10 years as a nurse in schools and hospitals, she felt called to care for unwanted and abandoned children in the town of Rupaidiha. The Nur Children’s Home in the mountains of North India was the last house in the country before the Nepal border: “I chose the name Nur,” Anna said, “because it means radiance of love from God’s heart.” The Indian children called her “Mamaji” (precious mother).

Anna learned several local languages. During her 40 years at the orphanage, she raised 420 Indian and Nepali children.

Foreigners could not enter Nepal to minister, but Nepali travelers came to visit “the last house in India” where they received the message of Christ’s love. As they took the gospel back to Nepal, it marked the beginning of the Pentecostal work, which, in recent years, has grown rapidly to hundreds of churches.

Anna Tomaseck’s compassion for suffering and abandoned children became an outreach that resulted in the planting of the church in a country where she could not personally minister. From her remote outstation on India’s border, the light of the gospel shone to the physically suffering and spiritually lost.

Florence Steidel

Florence Steidel began her missionary service in Liberia in 1935 as a missionary nurse in a girls’ school at Newaka. Late in 1942 she learned that she had active tuberculosis and entered the Missouri State Sanitorium in Mount Vernon, Missouri. On March 9, 1944, a doctor declared that her tuberculosis was completely arrested. She took a course in elementary building construction at Central Bible Institute (now Central Bible College) in Springfield, Mo., and sailed again for Liberia in November. In 1946 she was released from her duties at the girls’ school, freeing her to turn her efforts toward her dream of establishing a home for lepers.

God quickly confirmed His leading when an aged and crippled leper, Jacob Freeman, came and begged Florence to keep him at the mission station. “Jacob,” she said sadly, “I have no place to keep you.”

“It is better for me that I die, Ma,” he pleaded. “I beg you to keep me. I can’t walk back.”

Florence replied, “If you will build yourself a little bush house and stay in it, I will be glad to dress your sores.” Jacob put up a small, crude shelter. Within a few days other lepers arrived, and soon 68 people were living in small brush houses made of palm branches. This group of shelters was the beginning of what would become New Hope Town.

From the start, lepers did the work of constructing buildings for the compound. Florence Steidel directed them, using what she had learned in the elementary construction course. She oversaw every facet of the building—from laying the foundation forms to the interior finishing. When the first building was completed in 1947, 68 grateful, happy patients moved in.

But Florence never stopped building—because the sick never stopped coming. Eventually more than 100 buildings were built, including homes for patients, separate schools for leprous children and those free from the disease, a carpenter shop, storerooms, and three missionary residences. They were arranged on six well-planned streets. In 1952 the new mud-brick church was completed. At the dedication service, 614 lepers from 27 tribes were in the audience. Twenty-five committed their lives to Christ and 16 received the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Eventually more than 500 patients were treated each day at New Hope Town. Ninety percent of those who came for physical help also found a new life in Christ.

Lettie Lewis

One day at New Hope Town, missionary-nurse Lettie Lewis was examining slides through a microscope in the laboratory. As she glanced through the window, she saw a woman crawling up the pathway on her hands and knees. Except for a small loincloth, the woman was naked. Her hair was matted, and her knees and hands covered with sores. She had been traveling for about two months, crawling most of the way.

Her name was Yonmady. Lettie Lewis and Florence Steidel bathed her, washed her hair and gave her a clean dress. Tears of gratitude streamed down Yonmady’s face. She bowed humbly to the ground and said over and over, “A-wee-a” (thank you).

Day after day the missionaries cleansed and treated the horrible ulcers that exposed the bones on Yonmady’s hands and feet. And they told her about the Savior. One day, when one of the missionaries was reading God’s Word to her, Yonmady raised herself from her mat on the floor and said, “I understand now! I want this Jesus!”

Just two short weeks after Yonmady received Christ as her Savior, she died and went to be with Him. Her final days were filled with gentle care and love, but now she has an eternal home in heaven.

The following material is excerpted from “The Family Comes Together,” by Wayne Warner. It first appeared in the July 20, 1997 issue of the Pentecostal Evangel.

Dollie Anne (Drain) Sims

Perhaps the youngest person ever ordained in the Assemblies of God was commissioned at the age of 15—while the 1914 organizational meeting convened in the Opera House along bath row in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Dollie Anne Drain, a 15-year-old Paris, Arkansas, farm girl had already preached for nearly 2 years. On the last day of that historic council, M.M. Pinson and C.A. Lasater ordained her.

History shows in Dollie’s case it was no misguided rush to ordain. A few years later she married Herbert Simms, and the two ministered in Arkansas for many years. Dollie outlived her husband several years and then went on to heaven from Maranatha Manor, Springfield, Missouri, in 1991, at the age of 92.

(The following information is provided from a research paper by Reverend Daniel Crabtree, associate professor at Central Bible College.)

Dollie was born and raised in Arkansas by a mother who was a devout Free Will Baptist and a father who was not “overly religious.”[1] Although he believed in God and prayer, he had little to do with organized religion.[2] Dollie was saved at the age of 13 on the last night of a three-week revival conducted by a team of holiness preachers. The following year the holiness preachers returned with the message of the baptism in the Holy Spirit and Dollie was swept into Pentecost.[3]

Shortly after receiving the Baptism Dollie began to sense a call to enter the ministry. While praying she could see herself preaching in front of crowds of people. The Lord asked her, “Will you preach My word?” She replied, “Oh Lord, I could never preach! How could I? I’m just a little farm girl who has never traveled or been educated as a minister.” God’s answer was this promise, “My presence will go with you.”[4]

While still a teenager, Dollie attended a Bible conference at which a group of young people “felt a definite call to form an evangelistic party to go out west and preach and win souls for Christ.”[5] The conference leaders laid hands on each one and prayed that the Lord would confirm His call. When it came time to pray for Dollie, she requested prayer that the Lord would make her father willing to let her enter the ministry. Dollie recalled, “Being so young as I was, I knew my father would not give his permission on his own, for me to go so far away” (interview with Sam Witt, June 3, 1981). Upon her return home, Dollie rejoiced when her father willingly consented to her entering the ministry. While Dollie was at the Bible conference the Lord appeared to her father and told him to give up his daughter, “for I have called her to my work” (interview with Sam Witt, June 3, 1981).

In 1913 Dollie Sims, not yet 15, joined the evangelistic band as they moved from community to community holding revival services and starting churches. Over the next six years, as God supernaturally provided the means, Dollie participated in the establishment of 28[6] new churches primarily in Arkansas and Texas.[7] In 1919 she met and married Herbert Sims, a Pentecostal preacher. Together they served in ministry for the next 45 years, both as evangelists and pastors. During these years Dollie also pioneered and led the women’s ministries in Arkansas and Louisiana.[8]

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[1] Dolly Sims, interviewed by Everitt Fjordbak, 1980, tape recording, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Springfield, Missouri.

[2] News-Leader (Springfield, Missouri), August 6, 1989.

[3] Dolly Sims, interviewed by Everitt Fjordbak, 1980, tape recording, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Springfield, Missouri.

[4] Dollie Sims, “An Eye Witness─1914 Revival,” in Geneva Taylor Booher, Builders Together With God (Russelville, Arkansas: N.p., 1972), 7.

[5] Dollie Sims, interview by Sam Witt, June 3, 1981, tape recording, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Springfield, Missouri.

[6] The number of churches she assisted in starting is somewhat problematical. She claims also to have started 32 churches with her husband after they were married (see Witt interview). In other places she claims to have helped start 32 churches altogether, most of them before she was married (see Mary Ruth Chambless, Behold God’s Handmaid, p. 18-19). Any discrepancy should be attributed to the difficulty for an elderly woman precisely remembering events from years before. No doubt she was instrumental in the establishment of many wonderful congregations.

[7] Dolly Sims, interviewed by Everitt Fjordbak, 1980, tape recording, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Springfield, Missouri.

[8] Dollie Sims, interview by Sam Witt, June 3, 1981, tape recording, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Springfield, Missouri.

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