This Week in Texas Methodist History March 7, 2021

 

Texas Methodist Women Reorganize after Creation of Methodist Church, March 6-11, 1940

 

The Methodist Church was created in 1939 by the merger of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and the Methodist Protestant Church.  The merger of the three denominations had very little theological importance since all three predecessor denominations had retained the basics of their Wesleyan heritage. Organizational matters were another matter.  The most contentious issue facing the new denomination was the status of African Americans.  Eventually that issue was resolved in favor of the Southern Church  by placing African American congregations in a segregated Central Jurisdiction.  That racist decision was not to be erased until 1968 and the creation of the United Methodist Church from the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church.

 

One of the organizational issues to be resolved concerned the status of the women’s organizations of the three predecessor denominations.  All three of those denominations had created Woman’s Foreign and Woman’s Home Missionary Societies.  They also lobbied the denominations to create the position of deaconess.  The Methodist Protestant Church even allowed the ordination of women as pastors.  

 

The distinction between the home and foreign missions was eventually ended, and by 1939 the denominations had institutions all around the world and in the United States as well.  The ministries included schools, hospitals, settlement houses, immigrant reception centers, etc.  In the Texas Conference, for example there were settlement houses in Houston and Beaumont for Mexican immigrants, (Eugenia Smith, Am Shipley, and Elma Morgan) a woman’s residential co-op in Houston  Carmen Blessing), and a deaconess (Willie Mae Porter) assigned to the East Texas Oil fields in the Longview District.  (The Japanese Mission in Orange County had just been terminated.)  There was also a deaconess working at Houston Methodist Hospital (Sarah Kee).  

 

The various missionary societies were fund raising powerhouses.  They raised funds to support these missions and to supply scholarships for both undergraduate women and graduate students at Scarritt who planned to enter the mission field. 

 

The northern and southern denominations both had offices to run the missions.  The MEC officed on Fifth Ave.  in New York City and the MECS in Nashville.  Merging those two offices would be complicated by the different cultures that had developed in the two denominations.  

 

From March 6-11, 1940 the Woman’s Missionary Council of the former MECS  met in New Orleans, and Texans were well represented. This was the last time the Southern women would meet without their Northern counterparts.   Mrs. J. W. Mills, was vice president of the organization.  She had been president of the Texas Conference Society for 21 years and had long experience serving at the denominational level, even being one of the first women elected a delegate to the General Conference of 1922.  The Council meeting in New Orleans consisted of the Mission Board officers, almost all of whom were men, the sixteen women serving on the Mission Board and the president and secretary of the 41 annual conference Societies—a gathering of about 110 voting members.    They counted about 200 foreign missionaries and about 165 deaconesses working in home missions.  By contrast the Northern Church had 525 foreign missionaries and 950 home missionaries. They reported raising about one million dollars for missions and noted that the sum exceeded the amount raised by the Board of Missions by about $100,000.

 

The keynote speakers show just how far the Council had to go in eliminating sexism from a woman’s organization.  They included Dean Lynn Harold Hough of Drew University,  Umphrey Lee of SMU,  Paul Quillian, John Mott, and A. Frank Smith---couldn’t the program organizers find women to provide the keynote speeches? 

 

Much of the work of the New Orleans meeting was explaining the new organization.  The new organization would be named Woman’s Society of Christian Service.  In an accommodation to the growing number of women in the workforce, a new organization, the Wesleyan Service Guild would be created, and its meetings would be held at night so women in the workforce could attend. 

 

 

Members of the Council were instructed to go back to their conferences and re-organize, write a new charter, elect new officers, etc.  They would also elect delegates to the first Jurisdictional Meetings of the Woman’s Society of Christian Service. 

 

The Texas Conference accomplished those goals at Cameron the following Sept. 30-Oct. 1.  They had previously met in College Station one last time earlier that year to dissolve the old MECS Woman’s Missionary Society.   New bylaws were adopted.  New officers and committee chairs were elected and five delegates to the Jurisdictional WSCS meeting to be held at Boston Ave. Methodist Church in Tulsa the following December were elected.

 

The WSCS and WSG continued until the 1968 merger which created the United Methodist Women.