Maria Woodworth Etter

Maria Woodworth-Etter (1844—1924)

Country of Origin

United States

Countries/Regions of Ministry

United States

Traditions

Pentecostal

Ministries

healing revivalist
pastor

Maria Underwood was eleven years old when her father collapsed in a field on their Ohio farm with a fatal sunstroke. She and her older siblings dropped out of school to work and aid their grieving mother. About a year prior, her mother and hard-drinking father had begun attending a local Disciples of Christ congregation. There, young Maria heard the gospel. At age thirteen, she was born-again, baptized in a creek, and felt she heard the voice of God saying, “Go to the highways and hedges, and gather the lost sheep.” The Disciples of Christ did not accept women in the pulpit at that time, and women in United States could not vote. A contemporary, Catherine Booth, the “Mother of the Salvation Army,” did not preach her first sermon (across the ocean) until 1860, so Maria knew of no models to emulate.

As an older teen, she married a Christian man along whose side she could work--Philo Horace Woodworth, a nearby farmer. Six children came along rapidly—and with them, one heartache after another, as five succumbed to death by the age of seven. Maria later wrote about their dying moments in agonizing detail. Only the oldest, a daughter, lived to adulthood.

At thirty-five years old, she dared to speak publicly in a meeting of the Society of Friends (Quakers), who welcomed women in ministry. When she got up to speak, she was given a vision of the pit of hell with people falling into it. She cried out for her audience to be saved from such horror. The response was immediate. Soon thereafter, she received another vision in the night. Her description was as follows:

The dear Savior stood by me … and asked what I was doing on earth. I felt condemned and said, “Lord, I am going to work in thy vineyard.”

The Lord said, “When?”

And I answered, “When I get prepared for the work.”

Then the Lord said to me, “Don’t you know that while you are getting ready, souls are perishing? Go now, and I will be with you.”

I told him that I could not talk to the people; I did not know what to say, and they would not listen to me.

Jesus said: “You can tell the people what the Lord has done for your soul; tell of the glory of God and the love of Jesus; tell sinners to repent and prepare for death and the Judgment, and I will be with you.”

Still I made one excuse after another, and Jesus would answer, “Go, and I will be with you.”

From that point forward, in the 1880s, she held public meetings. People swarmed to hear her and responded to her salvation calls. Regarding one 1883 meeting in Fairview, Ohio, she wrote:

I felt impressed that God was going to restore love and harmony in the church…. [Those] present came to the altar, made a full consecration, and prayed for a baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire. That night it came. Fifteen came to the altar screaming for mercy. Men and women fell and lay like dead. I felt it was the work of God, but did not know how to explain it or what to say. I was a little frightened….The ministers and old saints wept and praised the Lord…. They said it was the Pentecost power, that the Lord was visiting them in great mercy and power….

Around this time, Maria felt God calling her to pray for the sick. At first she resisted this, fearing it would distract from evangelism. The Lord assured her that if she prayed for the sick, more people would come and be saved. She obeyed.

As her meetings became more dramatic, her husband became more skeptical, wishing Maria would remain a quiet farmer’s wife. He gradually grew hostile, began drinking heavily as well as seducing several women who came to his wife’s meetings. There was also evidence of some mental imbalance, perhaps a reaction to the deaths of his five children. By the late 1880s, Philo and Maria separated and were divorced in 1891. He quickly remarried but died of typhoid fever within a year of the divorce; Maria conducted his funeral.

Afterwards, she crossed the country from Chicago to Atlanta to San Francisco to Kansas City. Accounts of healing cures began to pile up: chorea (involuntary jerking of the shoulders, hips, and face), spinal meningitis, cancer, deafness, misshapen limbs and shoulders that had never healed correctly following an accident. In 1889, she purchased a tent that could seat 8,000, and set it up in Oakland, California.

More than once, her tent became too small for the crowds. Her largest audience was said to be a camp meeting five miles outside Alexandria, Indiana, with an estimated crowd of 25,000. They had to listen carefully, since no sound amplification was available. From a high platform in a grove, she testified: “I talked nearly two hours. The people all stood. The solemnity of death rested upon the multitude. Some had their bodies healed, and thousands were brought to Christ.”

In Saint Louis, in 1890, local psychiatrists filed charges of insanity against her for claiming that she saw visions of God. One night, a gang surrounded her tent. No longer timid, she wrote:

They had pistols and clubs, and were ready to kill us, and tear down the tent. It looked as if we would all be killed. Several ministers tried to talk, but were stoned down, or their voice drowned out. It looked like surrender or death.

It was an awful sight to see a little band of Christians, sitting nearly frozen to their seats with fear, surrounded by a mob of wild, fierce men and women, many of them half-drunk, their eyes and faces red and inflamed….I said to my co-workers, “We will never give up, and if they take us out of the tent before we are ready to go, they will take us out dead.” I told them to lead in prayer one after the other, and the God of Elijah would answer….

A feeling of the awful Presence of God began to fall on the people…. Then I arose, and … raised my hand in the name of the Lord and commanded them to listen. I said the Lord had sent me there to do them good, and that I would not leave until the Lord told me to, when our work was done. I told them the Lord would strike dead the first one that tried to harm us or to strike us with a dagger.

The power of God fell, and the fear of God came upon all the multitude. The sweat came on their faces, and they stood like as though in a trance; the men began to take their pipes out of their mouths, and their hats off…. They felt they stood naked and guilty before God…. Tears ran down many faces, through the dirt, leaving streaks….They all passed out quietly. After that, the hoodlum element always respected me.

While traveling, in 1902 she married a man she met in Arkansas, Samuel Etter, who supported her ministry. She added his last name to her own, forming a hyphenated surname—an unusual move in those times.

When the Holy Spirit fell at Azusa Street in 1906, she watched the awakening from a distance, not sure at first whether its teaching was valid. But soon she came to embrace the Pentecostal message demonstrated there, first speaking in tongues herself in 1912 at age 68. That same year, she preached three meetings a day for nearly five months in Dallas. She spoke at the 1913 “Worldwide Camp Meeting” near Pasadena, California, where according to one published report, “Many were healed as Sister Etter raised her hands toward heaven while she was leaving the tent.”

Samuel Etter died the following year. Maria was present in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the 1914 organizing of the Assemblies of God—although she noticed that some of the men in charge seemed hesitant about giving authority. Nevertheless, Assemblies historian Carl Brumback later honored her by writing, “She looked just like your grandmother, but … exercised tremendous spiritual authority over sin, disease, and demons.”

"Mother Etter" was, in a sense, a John-the-Baptist type forerunner of the coming Pentecostal and Charismatic awakenings—bold, unconventional, controversial at times, but undeniably anointed by God to bring salvation, healing, and divine power to the world.

Dean Merrill