One hundred years ago this month, a most amazing woman, far ahead of her time, passed away. She was among the greatest female evangelists and church planters of all time, with a legacy as a pioneer of the modern Pentecostal movement. Yet over time she was nearly forgotten. Her name was Maria B. Woodworth-Etter.
Wayne Warner wrote the first complete and scholarly biography of her in 1986.1 He affirmed the view of her supporters that she “broke the male domination of the pulpit and paved the way for other women.” To put it in contemporary terms, she broke the glass ceiling in ministry.
Certainly when she was born in 1844, preaching or pastoring were not options for women. Even by the time of her death in 1924, women ministers were still rarely seen outside of Methodist, Holiness, or Pentecostal circles. Even in larger society, it was only four years before she died that women in the U.S. were granted the right to vote.
That Woodworth-Etter rose to be a preacher in a day when female ministers were not taken seriously is even more surprising given that her parents were not very religious. They did join a Disciples of Christ Church when she was 10. Three years later, she had a conversion in that church and shortly thereafter felt a call to preach.
But when her father died of alcoholism, Maria and her older sisters were forced to go to work, abandoning any hope for further formal education. The call to preach she had received as a teenager would not fade from her memory. But the Disciples taught that women belonged in the home, not behind the pulpit.
She later wrote:
“I heard the voice of Jesus calling me to go out in the highways and hedges and gather the lost sheep. Like Mary, I pondered these things in my heart, for I had no one to counsel with. The disciples did not believe women had a right to work for Jesus. Had I told them my impression they would have made sport of me. I had never heard of women working in public except as missionaries, so I could see no opening – except as I thought, if I ever married, my choice would be an earnest Christian and then we would enter upon the mission field.”
Instead, she married P.H. Woodworth, a farmer, Civil War veteran, and a man with no interest in spiritual matters. It wasn’t the best of matches.
At the age of 35, Maria made an adult commitment to the faith, an experience which finally led her into the ministry. That call to ministry came in the midst of a serious struggle that climaxed with the death of her fifth child. Five of their six children had died by 1880, with only her firstborn living to maturity and dying a month before Maria did.
When her call persisted and she found no helpful examples in her day of women responding to such calls, she looked to the Bible which was filled with them. “The more I investigated, the more I found to condemn me…. I had one talent, which was hidden away.”
God is calling women all over the nation to work in various places in the Lord’s vineyard, she proclaimed. Frequently referring to Joel’s prophecy, she said that the modern-day anointing was for men and women alike, a theme that also would become dominant in the future Pentecostal movement, expressed as it was by the Apostle Peter on the Day of Pentecost.
Finally around 1880, she began preaching. At first, in concession to her husband, she remained close to home in Ohio. She preached in revival meetings and started churches wherever she went.
Her method was to preach a series of meetings in a community, organize a church out of the converts, and place someone in charge of the new congregation. She held nine revivals, organized two churches (one starting with 70 members), organized a Sunday school of about a hundred members, preached in 22 meeting houses, and delivered 200 sermons – and that was just in the first year and a half.
Unlike her experience with the Disciples, she was warmly received by certain other denominations, including the Quakers. She joined the United Brethren Church for a brief period but left it and was granted a license to preach by the 39th Indiana Eldership of the Church of God,2 which also appointed her as an “eldership evangelist.” Regardless of her affiliation, she operated independently in her evangelistic meetings. By 1885, she was already gaining national attention.
Woodworth’s husband finally consented to her traveling farther afield, even accompanying her. He handled the business operations, took charge of erecting the tents and operating the food and book stands. But with his mind and health affected in the Civil War, he lacked social graces, and later was discredited by reports of “indiscretions.” However, Maria never spoke negatively about him and publicly accepted him until he died.
Her meetings were marked by physical demonstrations, such as trances or “falling in the Spirit”, similar to earlier frontier revival meetings. What made her ministry so appealing to the masses was how she allowed them to participate and express their emotions. She gave extensive opportunities for testimonies of healing and conversion – and reports of many of each followed her wherever she went.
In Illinois, thousands were converted in her meetings. In Ohio, she preached to a single audience of 25,000. In 1889, she ventured to Oakland, California, for a 4-month campaign where 8,000 came to hear her speak.
But the Oakland meeting was plagued by mob violence and other controversies. In St. Louis when others tried to discredit her, friends and Church of God leaders came to her defense. Despite all the opposition, she continued to have a highly successful ministry, traveling back and forth across the nation.
It was in Oakland that P.H. left her. They divorced two years later and shortly thereafter he died. A decade later she met and married Samuel Etter, hyphenating her name. A great contrast with P.H., Samuel believed strongly in Maria’s ministry and supported her until his death in 1914.
Although some Church of God leaders had defended her in St. Louis, she was attacked by others on many occasions. Finally in 1904, church elders asked her to return her credentials. The elders expressed concern over the charismatic features of her ministry, especially the healings. But her openness to the poor and focus on the cities also distanced her from what was a predominantly rural, middle-class denomination.
By then, her gifts were finding a much warmer welcome in the fledging Pentecostal movement, which had started at the turn of the century. In fact, according to Warner, her simple but powerful preaching helped prepare cities across the nation for the Pentecostal movement.
Many of the manifestations of early Pentecostalism, including speaking in tongues, were evident in her meetings well before speaking in tongues was identified as the physical evidence of Spirit baptism by Pentecostals. She herself claimed to have received the gift of tongues long before it was known in the Pentecostal movement.
Extremism in the earliest phases of Pentecostalism concerned her, but by 1912, when she was 68, Woodworth-Etter took a leading role in the movement. As Warner writes, “The Pentecostal movement ‘discovered’ Maria B. Woodworth-Etter…” That year she went to Dallas at the invitation of F. F. Bosworth. Thousands came to hear her night and day for five months.
Even then, there were times Woodworth-Etter was shut down by male leadership. At a meeting in California, a local leader reported that other preachers objected to how meetings had been turned over to her. But generally, she was much more welcomed as a woman preacher in the Pentecostal movement than outside of it.
Many of her followers joined the newly forming Assemblies of God in 1914, yet Woodworth-Etter never actually united with this or any other Pentecostal organization. She had greater interest in spiritual unity than in denominational organization.
But even in the Assemblies there were those who resisted women in leadership. A local leader in Hot Springs, Arkansas, at the time, David Lee Floyd noted that other leaders appreciated Woodworth-Etter’s ministry but hesitated to “give her too much authority.” Still, she continued to traverse the nation, enthusiastically received by the masses, while often persecuted by religious leaders and civic authorities alike.
Even though she had started countless churches since 1880, she remained to pastor none of them. That changed in 1918, when at the age of 74 she founded the Woodworth-Etter Tabernacle in Indianapolis. Warner reports that the Tabernacle was built, as with other decisions made in her ministry, in response to a vision she received. It became a center for people to be ministered to from all over the world. She continued to pastor the church until her death 6 years later. Toward the end, she seldom preached, yet still kept exhorting and praying for the sick.
The Tabernacle, now known as Lakeview Church, eventually affiliated with the Assemblies of God and became one of its leading congregations. Today Lakewood Church carries on Woodworth-Etter’s mission. As Ashley Grant wrote in 2017, Woodworth-Etter established the Tabernacle as “a national healing ministry and revival center located in the crossroads of America.”
The church has also deliberately returned to its original focus as a multiethnic congregation. Long before society was ready for such diversity, Woodworth-Etter was unfavorably noted for embracing African-Americans, Native Americans, and minority groups. Yet she committed the church to being a voice for minorities and the marginalized.
By the early 1990s, Lakewood had become a mostly white congregation. Over the next decade, the church’s leadership prioritized restoring the congregation’s original ethnic diversity. Today, the church once more looks like a place Woodworth-Etter would feel at home in. Again quoting Grant, “The Lakeview staff of millennials, women, and ethnic minorities reflects the church’s diverse makeup.”3
Woodworth-Etter’s legacy of being a trailblazer is still evident a century later.
***
I first learned of Woodworth-Etter in the early ‘80s. Wayne Warner directed the Archives, now known as the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, in Springfield, Missouri, where I did much of my doctoral research. While Wayne had not yet published his book, he shared his manuscript with me and pointed me toward the primary sources I cite in my own work.
What amazed me about Woodworth-Etter was how much influence she had on spiritual movements of her time and those following, and yet how little she was remembered. True to form, history is defined by those who record it. Wayne Warner, who made sure she was written down in history, passed away earlier this year. A part of his legacy is bringing hers to light.
As Grant Wacker eulogized at Wayne’s funeral, “Wayne understood that God was no respecter of genders, for God gave spiritual wisdom to women just as often as men.” In fact, Wayne’s other published work was on Kathryn Kuhlman, another female healing evangelist well-known in the Pentecostal-Charismatic world but, as Wacker said, unheralded outside it.4
This post is adapted from my book, Ethics in the Age of the Spirit: Race, Women, War, and the Assemblies of God, pages 141-46. Photo of Maria B. Woodworth-Etter used with permission of the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center.
This post is dedicated to Wayne Warner (1933-2024).
- Wayne E. Warner, The Woman Evangelist: The Life and Times of Charismatic Evangelist Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Studies in Evangelism, no. 8, edited by Donald W. Dayton and Kenneth E. Rowe (Scarecrow, 1986). ↩︎
- This denomination was founded by John Winebrenner, originally a minister with the German Reformed Church, a Calvinist group. When that group dismissed him for his revivalism, he was rebaptized by immersion and organized the General Eldership of the Church of God, with Arminian theology, in 1835. Winebrenner was an ardent abolitionist and pacifist. ↩︎
- Assemblies of God (USA) Official Web Site | Back to the Roots (ag.org) ↩︎
- Remembering Wayne E. Warner, Pioneer Assemblies of God Archivist | Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center (wordpress.com) ↩︎