God’s Battle Axe – Maria Woodworth Etter

The Lord Jesus Christ has shown repeatedly that anyone can preach His message of salvation. However, there are those who twist Scriptures to disqualify some people based on their gender. Up till now, many Christian denominations discourage women from engaging in active ministry, especially preaching. The Lord’s command to His early disciples and apostles was “Go ye into the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. One of the people who heard this clarion call and took action was Maria Woodworth Etter.

She was born on July 22, 1844 to Samuel Lewis and Matilda Underwood. Her parents were not Christians and therefore she had no religious education until they joined the Disciple Church in 1854. She lost her father in 1857 to stroke, thus her mother was left to take care of eight children alone. Consequently, her mother and all the children old enough had to work to support the family.

At age thirteen, Maria heard the story of the cross, and surrendered her life to Christ. She said she later heard a voice telling her “to go to the highways and hedges, and gather the lost sheep”. This was confusing to her, as the Disciple Church did not allow women to preach the good news of Christ. She thought that perhaps if she married a Christian man they could do missions work together.

         A few years later, she married Philo Horace Woodworth. They attempted to farm but was a failure. She had a son who died at a very young age. Maria then had another boy, Fred, who also died, and she herself came close to dying. She lost two daughters as well, named Georganna and Nellie; aged seven years and four months respectively. By this time, she had only one boy and a girl left. The boy, Willie later died when he was seven years old, while the oldest girl, Lizzie was the only child left for the family.

        The entire time Maria was grieving the loss of her children, she felt that the Lord 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 the danger. She cried out for the people to follow God and choose to be saved. Although she felt called to continue preaching, she did not know how to fulfil this calling. She thought she would study to get herself ready 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.

Due to the failure of the farm, Maria and her husband decided to start a traveling ministry. She preached wherever God called and moved through the Midwest where she gained a great reputation for ministering under the power of God. Not long into her ministry, she felt God calling her to pray for the sick. She was resistant to doing so because she feared it would distract from the evangelistic call. Jesus then 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 characterised 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 one John Winebrenner. Some of her meetings had over 25,000 attendees. She travelled with a tent, and set it up wherever God gave her opportunity.

       Years 1890-1900 were tough 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. For instance, 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 1891 and 1892, but local psychiatrists filed charges of insanity against her for claiming that she saw visions of God. In one of her meetings in 1890, a man named Ericson prophesised that San Francisco and Oakland would be devastated by an earthquake and tidal wave on April 14^th. This created quite a stir and the group was given an extensive negative media coverage. April 14^th came and went without the promised destruction. Therefore, Ericson was institutionalised in a psychiatric hospital ward for this prophesy and the Etter group left the town.  It is interesting to note that a major earthquake did occur in San Francisco on April 16, 1906. Maria and many of her supporters felt that they had been vindicated about the 1890 prophesy.

By the late 1880s, she and her husband were separated. Her husband was drinking, sleeping with other women who came to the meetings, and sometimes actively tried to stop her meetings. In 1891, Maria divorced him for infidelity. In reaction, he threatened to write a critical book about her ministry except she agreed to pay him alimony. He remarried quickly and then died within a year of the divorce of typhoid fever. 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 license.

 Thereafter, she travelled extensively in her personal capacity, during which she met Samuel Etter in 1902 in Arkansas. They married and worked together for several years. It is clear that Maria knew about the Azusa Street meetings, as she 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, another healing evangelist. This meeting was widely reported in Pentecostal newsletters and her ministry blossomed from that point on. Pentecostals considered that many of the unusual things she had experienced made Maria a forerunner in the works of the Holy Spirit.

 She was well known by John G. Lake, another popular healing evangelist,  who called her “Mother Etter” in his sermons. Maria continued to travel and minister, but Samuel fell sick and died in August of 1914. The strain of her husband’s illness and loss, coupled with a gruelling three meeting a day ministry schedule caused her 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 that she was not done yet. By the end of January 1915, she was back on the road ministering again.

Finally, in 1918, she said God called her to start a church in Indianapolis. Maria used the building she put up for the church as a conference centre, and often travelled from there to minister in the Mid-West. Her health later declined, and she died on September 16, 1924.

If a woman that was plagued by poverty, lost five of her children and was born in an era when preaching was the sole preserve of men could serve the Lord with all she had, what excuse can any of us in this generation give for ignoring the Great Commission? People like Maria have proven to us that anyone can win souls for Christ. We need to be more conscious of who we are in the Lord and walk circumspectly in the light of this truth. All believers are God’s battle-axe and we must take the battle to the gates of the enemy in the power of the Holy Spirit.

 ****Culled from Biography of Maria Woodworth Etter, https://healingandrevival.com.