by Susan Wilds McArver

For nearly 20 years, Lutheran women of the United Synod of the South had struggled, worked, written letters, and prayed in their efforts to organize Women’s Home and Foreign Missionary Societies (WHFMS) — the ancestors of our own Women of the ELCA circles.

Nothing had happened. They discovered that their desire to establish such groups met with both misunderstanding and stiff opposition. The male church leaders were patronizing at best, actively discouraging at worst.

At the turn of the twentieth century, many men considered the formation of church women’s societies a new, radical, and even dangerous idea. Whispers persisted that these groups actually served as a cover to promote "woman’s rights propaganda." When such organizations did manage to form, the congregation’s pastor usually attended the meetings and led the program. After all, worried one alarmed pastor, if women were left to their own devices, "Who knows what they will pray for?"

Finally, the women decided to take matters into their own hands. In November, three officers of the fledgling South Carolina WHFMS, Kate Smeltzer Eargle, Nannie Carper Kreps, and Bessie Brown Scherer, undertook a month–long organizing campaign, visiting 25 rural Lutheran churches in 34 days. Traveling between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and leaving behind both their children and their bemused and slightly concerned husbands, they could report with exhilaration at the end of their travels that they had formed a new society in almost every church they visited. Within seven years, woman’s missionary societies existed in all but two churches of the South Carolina synod.

Early success and challenge
Home and foreign mission societies arose across almost all American Protestant churches in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including many of the different ethnic Lutheran churches from the East Coast to the West. They existed for two purposes: to educate women about the work of global and home missions and to raise money to support those causes.

And they did raise money. In a time before the church officially frowned upon such grassroots efforts, these women conducted all sorts of fundraisers for the cause. One ambitious society sold turkey dinners at the state fair every year. That was when the turkey had to be chased down, plucked, dressed, and hauled to the fair by wagon along with the firewood to roast it over and the china and silver to serve it on.

Others held oyster roasts, bake and bazaar sales, lemonade socials, and auctions for hand-sewn goods. One sewer wrote of her work in the missionary society: "I like to think that God held this mission together, through dark days, by means of the threads in the women’s hands."

By 1918, the combined efforts of women’s missionary societies in the South provided a third of the missions budget for the United Synod. Their efforts supported not only the foreign mission work in Japan, but also the home mission work in all the southern synods. The women’s pride and joy was the founding of at least three congregations officially named Woman’s Memorial Lutheran Church in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

Consecrate your pens
But, out of necessity, women’s missionary societies raised far more than money. A practical problem soon arose for these new missionary societies. In southern rural churches in the early twentieth century, women simply did not speak in public or lead meetings, even women-only meetings. Newly created missionary societies were in danger of disbanding simply because no one knew how to lead a program.

As a solution, the women of the United Synod formed a Literature Committee and assembled packets of mission information about particular themes for use as monthly program material throughout the southeast. The committee reasoned that women would be more comfortable leading a group if they knew what to say. At first, the Literature Committee relied upon missionary tracts and pamphlets from other denominations, but Lutheran women began asking for their own literature. "Why are so many of our Lutheran women letting their brains lie dormant in this cause?" they asked. "Are you willing to consecrate all but your pens to the Lord’s service?"

Material written by and for Lutheran women began to pour in to the Literature Committee, which then compiled, printed, and distributed it. The members of the committee furnished their own packing materials and worked in the living room of one of the synodical officers.

By 1911, the committee presented an organized 12–month study on the subject of "Power," a program they noted was sound in doctrine, devotional in nature, and practical in usage. All a woman had to do with the material was "render, digest and apply," the committee advertised.

With the pre-packaged program, even the most timid woman could be a leader. The program material not only made it easier for reserved women to lead activities and speak in public, it also allowed southern women to step into new roles of "acceptable" leadership responsibility. For most women in the South of this and succeeding generations, church leadership roles were the only public leadership roles they could hold.

The power of the printed word
Standardized programming proved so popular that other Lutheran women in the United States and Canada began to adopt it, and the Literature Committee found its work expanding rapidly. The southern women soon invited their northern sisters to join in publishing women’s programs cooperatively, in a move that anticipated by several years the eventual merger of the northern and southern Lutheran churches. In the first year, the women filled 250 orders for program materials. In 1916, they filled 15,000. By 1919, they were publishing nearly 750,000 pieces of literature annually.

To their delight, these women found their published works being translated into Swedish, German, and Norwegian for ethnic Lutherans living in the United States. For foreign mission purposes, it was translated into Japanese.

Their success, they reported, "has given to our literature a circulation so far beyond the greatest expectation of our committee that we can scarcely realize the extent of its influence." Forced out of the living room packing center in 1913 because of the magnitude of their task, the women gratefully accepted an offer to move their headquarters into the Lutheran Publication Building in downtown Columbia, South Carolina. Armed with an Underwood typewriter and a determination to serve their Lord, they faithfully churned out their work for the next five years. It was a heady — and sometimes overwhelming — experience for a committee that started as three women with a jar of paste, a rubber stamp, and an ink pad.

The literature packets did more than provide leadership training. Missionary programs proved educational for isolated, rural southern Lutheran women, giving them insight into and knowledge about the larger work of their denomination. For the first time, women began to see that the church was more than the building where they worshiped. It stretched from the dirt roads and mountains of the South to the Great Plains in the Midwest, and even to the far–off Orient.

These women are our ancestors in faith. Without their determination to organize into societies — often in the face of opposition from those they loved best — the church would not have been planted overseas or in the cities and towns that sprang up across the country in the early twentieth century. We owe a great debt of thanks to our grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the women whose stories we may never fully know.