Maria Woodworth-Etter
I have been in great dangers; many times not knowing when I would be shot down, either in the pulpit, or going to and from meetings…But I said I would never run, nor compromise. The Lord would always put His mighty power on me, so that He took all fear away, and made me like a giant…If in any way they had tried to shoot, or kill me, He would have struck them dead, and I sometimes told them so.¹
Maria (pronounced as if it was spelled Mariah) was born on July 22, 1844 to Samuel Lewis and Matilda Brittain Underwood. Her parents weren't Christians and therefore she had no religious education until her parents joined the Disciple church in 1854. Her first loss occurred in 1857 when her father went out to the field to work but was carried back to the house with a severe case of sunstroke. Her mother was left with eight children and no support. Her mother and all the children old enough had to work to support the family.
When Maria was thirteen she heard the story of the cross at a Disciples meeting and was converted. Soon after she was converted she heard the voice of God tell her to "go to the highways and hedges and gather the lost sheep". This was confusing to her as the Disciples did not allow women workers. She thought that perhaps if she married a Christian man they could do missions work together. Maria Woodworth-Etter did not immediately heed the Lord’s call to evangelistic ministry in her life. As a single woman in the latter part of the nineteenth century, she felt the need to position herself by first obtaining an education and then marrying a missionary. Her well thought-out plans were interrupted when her father suddenly died in a farming accident and she was left with the burden of helping support her family. She met P.H. Woodworth upon his return from the Civil War, and after a brief courtship, they married and took up farming.
They attempted to farm but it was a failure. Over the course of time, P.H. and Maria became the parents of six children. Farming life proved difficult and they struggled with the demands of making a living and raising a family. Maria was frustrated that she couldn’t answer the call to ministry due to the demands of her life on the farm as a wife and mother of a growing family. She battled illness and disappointment that her husband did not share her desire for ministry. Then overwhelming tragedy struck as the Woodworth’s lost five of their six children to illness. She had a son who died at a very young age. Maria then had another boy, Fred, who died, and she herself came close to dying. Georganna (Georgie), the second girl, was seven years old and she also became ill and lingered in terrible pain for several months, before she also died. Three weeks before Georgie died a little girl named Nellie Gertrude (Gertie) was born. However she only lived four months before she also died. Maria herself struggled with poor health and many times thought that she herself would die. There was one remaining boy and girl left to the Etters. Willie, the seven year old boy, became ill and died within a few days. All told within a few years five of the six Etter children had died leaving them in great grief and sorrow. Elizabeth Cornelia (Lizzie), the oldest girl, was the only child left to them. P.H. never recovered from this loss and Maria did her best to support him while raising their only surviving daughter. Instead of growing bitter, Maria applied the Word of God to her heart.
Due to the failure of the farm, Maria and her husband decided to start a traveling ministry. Maria preached wherever God called and moved through the Midwest where she gained a great reputation for the power of God coming into her meetings. Not long into her ministry she felt God calling her to pray for the sick. She was resistant to doing so because she feared that it would distract from the evangelistic call. Jesus assured her that if she prayed for the sick more people would be saved. She agreed and began praying for the sick. Her meetings were characterized by great power, healings, visions, and trances. In 1884 she was licensed as an evangelist by the Churches of God Southern Assembly, which had been founded by John Winebrenner. Some of her meetings had over 25,000 attendees. She traveled with a tent and set it up where God gave her opportunity.
She came to understand through her study of the Bible that God had used women as ministers, prophets, and leaders. From the prophecy of Joel she read that God would pour out his Spirit on both men and women. Still, she felt inadequate and ill-equipped to be of useful service to the Lord. She continued to study and later wrote, “The more I investigated, the more I found to condemn me”. Then Maria had a vision. Angels came into her room and took her to the West, over prairies, lakes, forests, and rivers where she saw a long, wide field of waving grain. As the view unfolded she began to preach and saw the grains begin to fall like sheaves. Then Jesus told her that, “just as the grain fell, so people would fall” as she preached.6 Finally, Maria yielded to the increasingly clear call and asked the Lord to anoint her for ministry.
And the Lord did. Shortly after she began ministering to small groups in her community, churches began inviting her to speak to their congregations. The result was always a deep conviction among the hearers as they fell to the floor weeping. Soon she was invited westward and began traveling extensively. It wasn’t long before she had held nine revivals, preached two hundred sermons, and started two churches with Sunday school memberships of over one hundred people. God honored Maria’s dedication and faithfulness restoring her heart and the years she had lost. But it was not until she preached at a church in western Ohio that the meaning of her vision about the sheaves of wheat became clear. Here the people fell into what seemed like “trances”—an altered state which would come to profoundly mark her ministry and confound the wise of her day. “Fifteen came to the altar screaming for mercy. Men and women fell and lay like dead,” Maria recounted. “After laying on the floor for some time, they sprang to their feet shouting praises to God. The ministers and elder saints wept and praised the Lord for His ‘Pentecost Power’”7—and from that meeting on, her ministry would be marked by this particular manifestation with hundreds miraculously healed, and hundreds more coming to Christ.. At every meeting she held, there was a demonstration of the power of the Spirit. One reporter wrote, “Vehicles of all sorts began pouring into the city at an early hour—nothing short of a circus or a political rally ever before brought in so large a crowd.”8 Maria couldn’t answer all the invitations she received to minister, but the ones she did accept created a national stir that has never been silenced. The writings of then young F.F. Bosworth described the spectacular meetings that took place in Dallas, Texas, from July through December. As a result, Dallas became a hub of the Pentecostal revival.
The entire time she felt that God was calling her to preach to the lost. Finally a way was opened for her to speak at a Friend's meeting. When she got up to speak she was given a vision of the pit of hell and people not knowing their danger. She cried out for people to follow God and choose to be saved. Although she felt called to continue she did not know how to do that. She thought she would study but she had a vision where Jesus told her souls were perishing and she could not wait to get ready. Day and night she felt the need to call sinners to repentance. She finally started in her local area and began to see many conversions. The power of God would fall and sinners would run to the front in repentance. Eventually she held nine revival meetings and started two churches locally.
Within a short time after Maria Woodworth-Etter responded to God’s call to “go out in the highways and hedges and gather in the lost sheep,”² and people were thronging to hear her speak with signs and wonders following. By 1885, without a public address system, crowds of over twenty-five thousand pressed in to hear her minister while hundreds fell to the ground under the power of God.³ Woodworth-Etter not only shook up denominational religion, she rocked the secular world with life-altering displays of God’s power.
Those who came to investigate, condemn, or harass her seemed most at risk of “falling out” in what was described as a trance-like state. Maria preached that these strong manifestations of the Spirit were “nothing new; they were just something the Church had lost.” 4 She was unwavering in her determination to break the strongholds that held people, communities, and whole cities in bondage. It seemed the more opposition she faced, the more she dug in her heels. Maria produced invincible strength through tenacious prayer that enabled her to take authority and minister with grace and power. She was known as a revivalist who could break towns open.
1890-1900 were tough years for Maria. The dramatic occurrences in her meetings and life made her ministry highly controversial. She had resistance from both the religious and secular community. She was arrested in Framingham, Massachusetts for claiming to heal people, but was released when many came forward with their testimonies. In St Louis, Missouri she had some of her most dramatic meetings in 1890 and 1891, but local psychiatrists filed charges of insanity against her for claiming that she saw visions of God. In one of Etter's meetings in 1890, a man named Ericson prophesied that San Francisco and Oakland would be devastated by an earthquake and tidal wave on April 14th. This created quite a stir and the group was given extensive (negative) media coverage. April 14th came and went without the promised destruction and Ericson was institutionalized for his prophesy and the Etter group left town. (It is interesting to note that when a major earthquake did occur in San Francisco on April 18, 1906 Etter and many of her supporters felt that they had been vindicated about the 1890 prophesy.) In 1891 Maria divorced her husband for infidelity. He was bitter and threatened to write a critical book about her ministry if she did not pay alimony. He died within a year of the divorce. Maria continued her ministry with friends and associates. Even her own denomination struggled with what was happening in her meetings and she came under considerable pressure to stop. In 1900 she finally bowed to the pressure and gave up her Evangelist's license inthe Southern Eldership of the Church of God. She was on her own.
Along with Maria’s ministry success came great pressures and severe persecution. It was during a controversial crusade in Oakland, California—where she had met with unusually challenging opposition—she decided to leave her unfaithful husband after his infidelity had been exposed. After twenty-six stormy years of marriage, they were divorced in January of 1891. In less than a year, P.H. remarried and publicly slandered Maria’s character. He died not long after on June 21, 1892, of Typhoid Fever. God, however, continued to honor Maria. As she persistently sowed, labored, and reaped a momentous harvest for the Lord, God sent her a true friend and partner in Samuel Etter. Maria traveled extensively and met Samuel Etter in 1902 in Arkansas. Again her sorrow was turned to joy as the two were married in 1902 and worked together for next several years. Samuel became a vital part of Maria’s ministry in every capacity and the two co-labored for Christ until his death twelve years later. It is clear that Maria knew about the Azusa Street meetings and later talked about her approval of the power of God shown there. In 1912 she and Samuel ministered at a five month long meeting in Dallas, Texas for F. F. Bosworth. This meeting was widely reported in Pentecostal circles and her ministry blossomed from that point on. In Pentecostal circles many of the unusual things she'd experienced caused her to be considered a forerunner in experiences with the Holy Spirit. She was well known by John G. Lake who called her "Mother Etter" in his sermons. She continued to travel and minister, but Samuel became ill and eventually died in August of 1914. The strain of her husband's illness and then loss, coupled with a grueling three meeting a day ministry schedule caused Maria to become ill herself with pneumonia in November 1914. At 67 she was feeling herself close to death but God gave her a vision of Himself as the conqueror of death and disease. He showed her she wasn't done yet. By the end of January 1915 she was back on the road ministering again.
Maria never wavered in her dedication to the healing and evangelistic ministry she was so powerfully called to. She seemed invincible in her ability to carry on in the face of tragedy and opposition. Her fame for miraculous healings and revival services grew, as did her critics. But God silenced them all. She has been called the grandmother of the Pentecostal movement. None has done more than Maria Woodworth-Etter to shed light on the convicting power of the Holy Spirit, the role of women in ministry, and the power of miracle crusades to revive a nation. In addition, she brought insight on how to effectively administrate massive miracle crusades, build sustainable ministry centers and manage opposition in the public arena. Her commitment and dedication personally influenced such great heroes of the faith as Smith Wigglesworth, Aimee Semple McPherson, John Alexander Dowie, John G. Lake, E.W. Kenyon, F.F. Bosworth, and Kathryn Kuhlman. Her legacy is evidenced by the ongoing ministry work of healing evangelists around the world. Though, for the last six years of her life, she confined herself to ministering from the Tabernacle she had erected in Indianapolis, ID, her healing anointing remained as powerful as ever. She continued to speak with power from the Word of God until her very last days. As she became weaker, she was carried in a chair to the pulpit, and finally ministered a touch of healing or a word of hope from her bed.
Finally in 1918 God called her to start a church in Indianapolis. She used it as a conference center, and often traveled from there to minister and preach in the mid-west. Her health declined, and she died on September 16, 1924, at the age of eighty (80), Maria B. Woodworth-Etter fell into a deep sleep and went home to be with the Lord. Her passing was mourned by all whose lives she touched and was felt by the entire nation. She ministered God’s healing power with the last ounce of her strength, proclaiming God’s love with the last of her breath. She was honored as a woman of God. She was buried in a grave in Indianapolis next to her daughter and son-in-law. Her inscription reads "Thou showest unto thousands lovingkindness." At least one granddaughter and her husband, Beulah O. and Earl W. Clark, who were also ministers in Pentecostal circles, survived her.
The Church And You Talks about The People And The History Of The Church.
God's General: Maria Woodworth- Etter
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