Cora, my great-grandmother, was a woman who prayed beyond her years. Although this unsung hero remains unknown even to most family members, her legacy has influenced generations. To reference James 5:16, hers was the legacy of the powerful and effective prayer of a righteous person.
Speaking at a seniors brunch at my church recently, I shared how Grandma Cora’s beautiful story had mixed with pain as it came down my family tree. After the brunch, a woman thanked me for sharing both the good and not so good of my family history. I sensed she was grateful to be assured that, amidst darkness, there is hope.
There are things you wish you’d talked more about with your grandmother before she died. Grandma Cora’s story is one of those. A preacher of the gospel, Cora Olive Gregg Lockwood was my great-grandmother. Her daughter, Edith Osgood, was my grandmother.
My Grandma Osgood, a humble woman with bedrock fortitude, stood quietly in my grandfather’s shadow. Conversations didn’t usually revolve around her or her stories. But what she did share with me led me to believe her mother was a woman who lived and prayed beyond her years.
Cora’s father, Vernon Gregg, immigrated from England to the US shortly before the Civil War. After his arrival in the new country, he married Nancy White, great-great niece of the 19th century statesman, Daniel Webster. Although we have no record of other children, Vernon and Nancy had at least Cora, born in 1861. By then the Greggs were living on a remote farm in Pennsylvania.
A sickly child, Cora suffered from heart disease. By age 18, heart specialists were giving her little more than a year to live.
One day a magazine came in the mail from Vernon’s relatives in England. An article described how a woman, who doctors had also given up to die, had been healed. The woman, having read of the miracles Jesus performed while on earth, prayed that God would answer her prayers – and he did, completely healing her.
Upon reading this article, Cora, by then 18, and her mother felt that if this woman could be healed, so could she. If she just believed. To quote my grandmother, “Mother and daughter read again about Jesus and His healing power, knelt and prayed and asked that Cora might be healed. They got up from their knees feeling that their prayers had been heard and thanked God for the answer.”
So convinced was Cora that God had healed her that she took immediate action. The Greggs lived thirty miles – an arduous hours-long journey by horse and carriage in those days – from the nearest store that carried medicines. Nevertheless, Cora, who hadn’t been able to bear the pain, instantly poured out the medicine she had. From then on, she never had heart trouble again.
Then, just days after being healed, Cora felt God calling her into evangelistic work. The Greggs were Methodists, a denomination open to women ministers, so Cora applied to the Methodist church for ministry appointment. Denominational leaders sent her to New York state as an itinerant preacher.1
Cora Gregg served as a traveling evangelist, going from church to church, preaching and praying for the sick. As Grandma wrote, many people were “blessed by her testimony and by faith were healed of their diseases.”
My grandmother recounted how, as a child, she and her siblings enjoyed the visits of her mother’s friends who had been healed in her ministry. Grandma said they “never tired of hearing them tell of the wonderful way they had been healed by the Lord.”
Healing evangelists, women as well as men, were not unknown in the 19th century, particularly in the Wesleyan-Methodist-Holiness tradition. And itinerant preachers had been part of the same tradition ever since John Wesley had ridden horseback through the English countryside in the 1700s.
At the age of 34, Cora married a widower, Frank Lockwood. He and his first wife had lost their three children during an epidemic of diphtheria. The mother then died shortly thereafter.
Frank, a believer like Cora, was a trained tenor who sang mostly sacred music, oratorios such as The Creation, Elijah, and The Messiah. Though he died decades before I was born, I heard his musical talent echoing in the refined soprano voice of my grandmother. When Frank’s government job with U.S. Customs permitted, he traveled with Cora, singing in her evangelistic meetings.
They’d been married only 10 years when Frank died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving Cora alone to raise their three small children, my grandmother the youngest at the age of 4. Cora may have continued to minister even after they started raising the family, but with Frank’s death, her public ministry came to an end.
However, Cora’s spiritual life kept growing. Early in 1906 not long after Frank’s death, about the time the Azusa Street Revival began on the other side of the continent in Los Angeles, she received what Pentecostals were calling the Baptism in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues.
Soon after, Cora joined a church that was just getting started in Newark, NJ. Bethel Pentecostal Assembly had a great impact on the Pentecostal movement in those early days, both as a base for sending out missionaries worldwide and as a training center for ministers and leaders in the movement.2
Minnie Draper, an evangelist and former colleague of A.B. Simpson of the Christian & Missionary Alliance (CMA), became a driving force in the young congregation and served as president of its executive board until her death in 1921. Draper had served on Simpson’s missions board and brought that missions vision to Bethel.
By 1911, the church had called its first fulltime pastor, the Reverend Allan A. Swift. In 1916, the congregation launched the Bethel Bible Training School, with William W. Simpson as its first dean. William, no relation to A.B., had been a pioneer missionary in China with the CMA when he received the Pentecostal experience. He came to Newark to lead the new school for a couple of years before returning to China in 1918.
One constant in Cora’s ministry, even after her husband’s death, was her prayer life. My grandmother saw her mother spend hours in prayer, interceding for her and her siblings, and for many others. Through her intercession, she prayed future generations into the kingdom.
At the age of 23, my grandmother Edith left home to serve with Allen Swift, her former pastor at Bethel, and his wife, then missionaries in southwest China. The year was 1924. She had planned to go for the 7-year term common in those days, but her mission leaders sent her home after only 3 years, due to unrest in that part of China.
I always thought the “unrest” comment intriguing, given that China had been in turmoil for decades, and would remain so for decades more. But whatever the reason, Edith returned home. And because she did, I am alive to write this.
Back in the US, Edith enrolled in the Bethel Bible Training School. William I. Evans was by then the school’s dean. Under Evans, the school merged with the more recently formed Central Bible Institute (later College) in Springfield, Missouri, the same school where my parents met a generation later.
But, one story at a time…
While at Bethel, Edith met Howard Osgood. A former Christian Church minister and graduate of Hiram College, Howard had come into the Pentecostal movement, joined the Assemblies of God, and came to Bethel to do additional ministry study in exchange for teaching music. Edith and Howard were married at Bethel Pentecostal Assembly on June 8, 1929.
In December that same year, they left to serve in China. My mother was born in Kunming in 1932 and my Uncle Brenton followed four years later. After two decades in China, Edith and Howard continued ministering elsewhere in East Asia before retiring in 1965.3
While they were living in China, Grandma Cora died. The year was 1937; she was 75. She kept up her prayer ministry until the end.
Now nearly 90 years later, the results of Cora’s prayers are still being felt. I remember my mother telling me her Grandma Cora Lockwood used to pray for me and my siblings. My mother never met her grandmother, who had died when my mother was a child of 5 growing up in China. So, Mom was passing down from her mother the story of how Great Grandma Lockwood interceded for the generations to come.
At least 25 of Cora’s descendants became ministers, 14 of them women. Several of them have been missionaries in Asia and Latin America. Others have pastored churches, ministered as campus missionaries, served in denominational leadership, or taught in Bible colleges and seminaries. While most of these ministers have affiliated with the Assemblies of God, one great-great-grandson is a parish priest with the Roman Catholic Church.
Still others, although not formal ministers, have served faithfully in local churches and on short-term missions assignments. Together all these heirs of Cora’s legacy have spread their ministry around the globe.
All that may sound like a storied family history, but I struggle with leaving it there, knowing the darkness that has at times entered our family line. I may write of that darkness another time, how it deeply affected me as a child and overwhelmed me in my 50s when my wife and I were serving in China, the darkness cutting that work short.
But for now, it is enough to understand that, in my family’s story, painful bad has mixed with all that amazing good. Though I’ve struggled with this toxic mix of a spiritual heritage, I’ve come to learn the value in sharing both.
Recently I wrote of a dozen godly women who have had profound influence in our world, including in my own life. Grandma Cora was one of those women, albeit much lesser known than the others. But in researching for that post and what I knew of Grandma Cora from my own grandmother, I was struck by how her story has impacted mine. So, I’ve taken a fresh look and now see something I didn’t see before.
I knew how she’d prayed for yet unnamed descendants to follow. As my mother told me, “Grandma Lockwood prayed for you.” I now realize that, though her intercession did not keep us from trauma or suffering, her labor of prayer carried us through whatever came our way.
But the other secret is how Cora’s ministry of prayer became the heritage she passed down through my grandmother and mother. It wasn’t enough for Cora to pray; intercession itself had to be transferred on. The secret to James 5:16’s effective prayer is to keep it moving forward. That has been the saving grace in our family.
Cora’s own grandmother, Susan Webster White, died sometime in the late 19th century. Her obituary stated that she left three adult children, including Mrs. Nancy Gregg, who it noted was the “mother of Cora Gregg, the evangelist of Staten Island, N.Y.” Cora, the evangelist of Staten Island whose life history lies largely obscured, left a legacy of faith and prayer that lives on in the lives of those who followed her, five generations and counting.
For a related post I wrote, see: Here are 12 women who greatly influenced my life. I write weekly about faith and how it intersects with our world. You can subscribe for free at Contact Us!
Photo, courtesy Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center (P8121), is of the Bethel Bible Training School (Newark, NJ), 1923, dormitory on the left, chapel and church on the right.
- My grandmother referred to her mother as a “lay Methodist evangelist.” While we have no record of her being ordained as a minister, she did have recognized ministerial status. ↩︎
- “At Home with Her Lord,” The Latter Rain Evangel, April 1921, pp. 10-11; See also Gary B. McGee, “Three Notable Woman in Pentecostal Ministry,” Assemblies of God Heritage, Spring 1986, pp 3-5, 12, 16. ↩︎
- In addition to what my grandmother shared directly with me, see two articles by Glenn W. Gohr: “Pioneer Missionaries to China still Active in Springfield,” Assemblies of God Heritage, Fall 1988, pp. 17, 20; and Howard and Edith Osgood: Pioneer Assemblies of God Missionaries to China | Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center. ↩︎
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