Reading different theological perspectives. Historical readings express their authors' perspectives, including Arminian and Reformed or Calvinist traditions. Inclusion does not make an author's position settled CTS doctrine. Read with Scripture and the assigned material. A supported answer from another evangelical perspective should be assessed on its reasoning, not penalized simply for differing from the author. If an automated score rejects such an answer, ask CTS for review.

Master’s Assigned Readings (all five)

M.Div. and Th.M. students read all five assigned selections and take their separate exam after activation. The test page states the current rule; valid earlier completions remain valid.

Optional Honors (choose three)

Honors is optional on every track. Certificate and Associate students may read three honors selections without a required-reading exam. Honors does not replace either master’s exam.

The Master's textbook test: read Maria Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost (1912): Selections, then take its test: twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once. Correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. It is separate from the reading test on the five digests below: passing one does not pass the other. On the M.Div. and Th.M. tracks both tests are being introduced; each test's page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take them, and a pass is kept in your record.

The Master's reading test: separate from the honors invitation below. Honors asks you to read any three of these digests; the Master's test covers all five. It has twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, four from each reading, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once; correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. You may try again after a short wait. The test is being introduced: its page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take it, and a pass is kept in your record.

Honors option: Complete any three of the five readings below. These readings supplement the course and do not replace its units or examinations.

On this site: Each of the five readings is a Chapala Theological Seminary digest, written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French here on the site — every one opens directly from this page, with nothing to download. Each card names the work its digest is made from.

Selected: 0 of 3

Reading 1 · Her Call to Preach

A Worm to Thresh a Mountain

A CTS digest of Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912), chapters I–III, about pp. 23–39

Woodworth-Etter tells of her poor Ohio childhood, her conversion at thirteen at a Disciples baptism, years of illness and the deaths of five children, and a call to preach that no church around her would accept. Among the Quakers she received an anointing of power, argued from Scripture for women preaching, and held her first revival meetings.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

A Worm to Thresh a Mountain: Maria Woodworth-Etter’s Call to Preach

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the opening chapters of her autobiography: an Ohio childhood, a long struggle with a call no church would recognize, an anointing for service, and her first meetings

A CTS digest of chapters I–III of Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912), about pp. 23–39. Her own text is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Acts of the Holy Ghost, ch. I–III
Primary source
1844–c. 1880
Maria Woodworth-Etter

A word before you read. Maria Beulah Woodworth-Etter (1844–1924) was one of the best-known American evangelists of her day, and she became a bridge between the nineteenth-century Holiness revivals and the Pentecostal movement of the twentieth century. These chapters are her own account of how she was called. Read them as testimony: a woman remembering, more than thirty years later, what God did in her life. CTS presents her visions and experiences as she reported them, not as events we can check.

1.An Ohio Childhood Marked by Loss

Maria Underwood was born on 22 July 1844 in New Lisbon, Columbiana County, Ohio, the fourth daughter of Samuel and Matilda Underwood. Her parents were not churchgoers when she was small. They joined the Disciples Church only a year before her father died of sunstroke in July 1855, when she was eleven. The widow was left with eight children and almost nothing to live on. Maria and her older sisters went out to work for other families by the week. She longed for school and cried herself to sleep over it. She kept books in the kitchen and learned verses by heart while she worked. The woman who would later preach to crowds of thousands had very little formal education.

2.Conversion in the Creek

At eight years old she already felt “strong desires to know of God.” Two sisters were converted at a Methodist meeting, but the adults there seemed to think children did not need salvation. At thirteen she went forward at a Disciples meeting, walking the long aisle from the back of the crowd. The Disciples of Christ belonged to the Stone–Campbell “Restoration” movement. They taught that a person should believe, repent and be baptized by immersion, and they were suspicious of emotional conversions. Woodworth-Etter says plainly that “they did not believe in a change of heart.” Yet the next day, as she was led down to the creek, she asked the Lord to save her fully, and while going into the water “a light came over me.” The onlookers thought she had fainted. From then on she was at church four times on Sunday and several times in the week. Her first great spiritual moment came inside a tradition that did not expect it, a pattern that runs through her life.

3.A Call With No Open Door

Soon after her conversion, she writes, she heard Jesus calling her “to go out in the highways and hedges and gather in the lost sheep.” She had no one to talk to about it. “The Disciples did not believe that women had any right to work for Jesus,” she says, and she had never heard of women working in public except as missionaries. So she made a private plan: if she ever married, she would marry an earnest Christian and the two of them would go into mission work together. She married P. H. Woodworth, and they settled in the country, but the plan failed. Her health broke down, their work on the land went badly, and she was often too far from a church to attend. Then came years of grief. Of their six children, five died young. She tells of each death, above all that of seven-year-old Georgie, who died of scrofula after eight months of suffering. Only Lizzie, the eldest, grew up. Woodworth-Etter interprets these losses as God calling her to set her heart on heaven. Many modern readers will find that interpretation hard. A pastor should handle it gently: she is describing how she made sense of unbearable sorrow, not giving a rule about how God deals with every grieving mother.

4.Sorrow, Visions and a Bargain With God

During long illnesses, when everyone expected her to die, she had what she calls “glorious visions.” Once she saw the Saviour on the cross beside her and touched his wounded body. Another time she seemed to be carried to the “Beautiful City,” where she saw her children shining in glory. At last, she says, “the time had come to promise or die.” She promised God that if he restored her health and prepared her, she would do the work. She began to recover at once. The family moved to a Friends (Quaker) settlement, and the Friends took her to their meetings. Here the struggle sharpened. Quakers allowed women to speak in worship, so the door was finally open, but she was “bound as with chains in a man-fearing spirit.” When she stood to testify she trembled “like a leaf” and begged God to send someone else. A vision of sinners falling into the pit, with herself on a narrow plank calling them upward, kept pressing on her. Her husband, her daughter and her relatives opposed her. Ministers she had never met told her God was calling her. Her reply was, “If I were a man I would love to work for Jesus.”

5.“A Worm to Thresh a Mountain”: The Anointing

This is the theological centre of the reading. Woodworth-Etter wants the reader to understand that she already had “a good experience, a pure heart,” and was full of the love of God, but she was “not qualified for God’s work.” She took her image from Isaiah 41:15: “God would have to take a worm to thresh a mountain.” So she asked for the power God gave the “Galilean fishermen,” coming “like a child asking for bread.” Then, she writes, the power of the Holy Spirit came down like a cloud brighter than the sun. She saw “liquid fire” with angels in it. “I was baptized with the Holy Ghost, and fire, and power which has never left me.” Here we can see clearly how she belongs to the Holiness movement. Holiness preachers of the period, building on John Wesley and on Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874), taught a second work of grace after conversion, often called entire sanctification or a “clean heart.” Many of them also spoke of a “baptism of the Holy Ghost” as power for service. Woodworth-Etter separates the two: first a pure heart, then an anointing for work. After the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles began in 1906, Holiness-Pentecostal churches such as the Church of God in Christ and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) taught a similar order: salvation, sanctification, and then the baptism in the Holy Spirit, now with speaking in tongues as its sign. Her 1912 account does not mention tongues at this point. It shows instead the older Holiness pattern from which Pentecostal teaching grew.

6.“Go Now”: Her Scriptural Case and First Meetings

Even after the anointing she held back. She planned a course of study first, but could not concentrate. Then, she says, Jesus stood by her in a vision and asked what she was doing. She said she would work when she was prepared. The answer came: “Don’t you know that while you are getting ready souls are perishing? Go now, and I will be with you.” When she protested that she did not know the Bible well enough, she saw a great open Bible on the wall and felt she understood it. Woodworth-Etter did not reject study. Her point is that a call to preach must not wait for a perfect preparation that never comes. Chapter III then sets out her biblical case for women preaching, written as a set of “pointed inquiries”: Miriam, Deborah and Huldah; Anna and Phoebe; Paul’s women co-workers; Joel’s promise that “your sons and daughters shall prophesy,” fulfilled at Pentecost (Acts 2). She asks, “Is there not as much to sustain the position that women are called to preach as there is that men are called?” Her first meeting was in a village among her husband’s relatives. She rose with Isaiah 38:1 in mind, “Set thy house in order,” and the fear left her: the words came faster than she could speak them. About twenty professed conversion. She went on preaching at weekends while keeping house. “I did not write my sermons or have sketches of sermons,” she says; she took a text and trusted God. Her boldest early venture was a place called “The Devil’s Den,” known for unbelief. She had “to do all the talking, all the praying, and all the singing.” After two weeks, she reports, seventy-five people had turned to Christ. She organized a Sunday school of 150, with a former drunkard as superintendent.

7.What a Pentecostal Pastor Takes from It Today

First, she joins call, character and power. She did not treat the anointing as a substitute for a pure heart, nor a pure heart as enough without power. Second, her story is a warning against delay. Many gifted believers wait for a perfect moment, and her vision’s question still speaks to them. Third, she shows what pastors now call follow-up: prayer meetings, a Sunday school and responsible local leaders were set up before she left. Fourth, her habit of preaching without notes needs balance. In later Pentecostal practice, dependence on the Spirit has sometimes been set against preparation, yet her own preaching was full of Scripture. Today’s preacher can pray and prepare, and do both in the Spirit. Finally, her case for women preaching raises a question on which churches differ. Some traditions, often called complementarian, read passages such as 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34 as reserving the pastoral office or authoritative preaching to qualified men, while welcoming women’s testimony, teaching and mission work. Egalitarian traditions read Joel 2, Acts 2 and Galatians 3:28 as opening every ministry to women and men alike. Others stress team ministry, in which husbands and wives or mixed teams serve together under shared oversight. Pentecostal denominations themselves have answered differently. CTS asks students to understand her arguments and the other views fairly, and to follow the teaching of their own church.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Woodworth-Etter was told that while she was “getting ready, souls are perishing.” Is there something God has asked of you that you keep postponing until you feel prepared? She distinguished a “pure heart” from power for service. How would you explain the difference, or the connection, to a new believer? How have suffering and loss shaped your own ministry, and how can you speak about God’s purposes in grief without wounding those who mourn? Finally, how does your church understand the ministry of women, and can you state the main alternative views fairly?

Select

Reading 2 · Running a Campaign

Three Meetings a Day

A CTS digest of Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912), chapter XXII, about pp. 132–139

In the summer of 1886 Woodworth-Etter held invited campaigns at Anderson and Farmland, Indiana: three services a day, church members called forward first, a team of workers that lost heart, people falling under the power, a prayer she linked to the Charleston earthquake, 194 baptized in the White River, and a new church organized before she left.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Three Meetings a Day: How Woodworth-Etter Ran a Campaign

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the summer of 1886 in Anderson and Farmland, Indiana: invitations, tents and groves, a team that faltered, a mass baptism in the White River, and a church organized before she moved on

A CTS digest of chapter XXII of Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912), about pp. 132–139. Her own text is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Acts of the Holy Ghost, ch. XXII
Primary source
1886
Indiana campaigns

A word before you read. By 1886 Woodworth-Etter was no longer a timid farm wife testifying among the Quakers. She was a travelling evangelist whose meetings filled tents, groves and opera houses across Indiana, and whose name was in the newspapers. This chapter shows the practical side of that ministry: how a campaign began, how it was staffed, how long it ran, and what was left behind. As always, the numbers and wonders are her own reports.

1.The Setting: Indiana in the 1880s

In the early 1880s Woodworth-Etter moved her base from Ohio to Indiana. In 1884 she joined the Churches of God, a body that went back to the German Reformed preacher John Winebrenner (1797–1860). Its regional conference was called an “Eldership,” a word that appears often in her book. That church gave her a home and recognition as a minister, and several of the congregations she founded joined it. Her fame grew quickly. During a revival at Hartford City in 1885 she often fell into long trances on the platform, and reporters began to call her the “trance evangelist.” Some writers praised the moral change in the towns she visited. Others said she mesmerized or hypnotized her hearers, and doctors debated whether the prostrations were a nervous disorder. Woodworth-Etter wrote for readers who had heard both kinds of report. Her own aim in this chapter is to show the order and fruit of the work.

2.Invited, Not Imposed

The Anderson campaign began, she says, after “sinners and Christian people” had asked her for two years to come. She arrived in July and pitched her tent at the Fair Grounds. The first night it could not hold the crowd. Most of those present, she says, were “non-professors, or, dead professors, which is worse.” A “professor” in her day meant someone who professed faith: a church member. So she began in an unusual way. “I did not ask sinners to come, but insisted on professors coming to the front.” She called church members forward first, to repent and pray, but the unconverted rushed to the front as well, and in minutes there were “several bright conversions.” She held three services a day for three weeks, through rain and storms. The local pastors at first “stood and looked on,” but ministers and elders from other places came, took part, and publicly endorsed the work. Ladies from the town churches invited her into their homes and begged her to stay.

3.A Team That Faltered

She could not stay, because she had promised to go to Farmland, a village in Randolph County. Here we see that she worked with a team. She had been announced at Farmland for the previous Sunday, so she sent “several other good workers” ahead to begin. Two thousand people, she says, met the train expecting her, and they were disappointed. Then the plan fell apart. In the Anderson station she met one of the women she had sent. The woman was discouraged; she had seen the people of Farmland in a vision lying in their coffins and believed they could never be raised spiritually. A second worker slipped away without a word. The third was a man, the one she depended on most. He found her lying exhausted in her tent, said nothing could be done, and refused to stay. “He stepped in the hack and was gone.” (A hack was a hired carriage.) She broke down weeping. It was time for the afternoon service, and hundreds were walking toward the tent. “In the strength of God I arose; was helped to the pulpit.” She stood trembling and began to sing. The power came; she prayed, preached and called for seekers, and the altar was crowded for ten days. Notice two things. First, the honesty: she does not hide the failure of her own team. Second, her comment that the man was “a worse coward than the woman.” Like most people of her time she assumed men should be braver than women, yet her story shows a woman holding the line when a man ran.

4.Inside the Grove Meeting

She returned to Anderson for three more weeks in a grove the local believers had secured. Again there were three services a day, and sometimes one ran into the next. She reports twenty to fifty conversions daily, with people from many states going home to tell what they had seen. Her description of the meetings is vivid. The power of the Holy Spirit “came as a cyclone,” and the crowd swayed like grain in the wind. People were “stricken down in every direction” and carried to the platform, which would not hold them. Strong men reeled as if drunk. At other times the power came “in melting power, wave after wave,” and the whole audience wept in silence. Most stood through the entire service. She mentions physicians, lawyers and unbelievers converted, and she tells of healings: a woman given up by several doctors, whose unbelieving physician came, examined her, spoke publicly and was converted with his wife; a merchant dying of consumption who came to the meeting the next morning well. Pentecostal readers will recognize these scenes. What later Pentecostal and charismatic churches call “falling under the power” or being “slain in the Spirit” was a central feature of her meetings two decades before Azusa Street, and it had roots in the camp meetings of early American Methodism.

5.Praying for an Earthquake

The most striking event in the chapter needs careful reading. Woodworth-Etter was burdened for “bright men and women” who were “almost persuaded” but would not yield. She felt impressed to say that it was “the last call,” and she asked everyone who believed in prayer to kneel, lift hands and ask God to shake the earth, “to send an earthquake, if necessary.” About five hundred knelt. Then, she says, the ground shook and the tremor was felt across the city. She identifies it with the great Charleston, South Carolina, earthquake. That earthquake struck on the night of 31 August 1886. It was one of the strongest ever recorded in the eastern United States, it killed about sixty people, and it was felt over a vast area that included Indiana. The dates fit her account of the summer. But the meaning she gives it is her own: “The prayer of faith will be answered, if the Lord has to bring heaven down.” A careful pastor will notice the problem. An earthquake that brought death and ruin to Charleston is here read as an answer to a prayer meeting hundreds of miles away. Pentecostal Christians believe God can use events in nature, but most teachers today would be slow to link a particular disaster to a particular prayer, and slower still to make it a tool of evangelism.

6.Baptism, a New Church and the Court-House Steps

A campaign was not finished, in her practice, until converts were baptized and gathered into a church. On the day she appointed, the converts went down to the White River, where a pier of planks ran out into the water. A minister waded out to the end, while she walked back and forth on the planks leading each candidate. She counts one hundred and ninety-four baptized, many of them past sixty, some above eighty, and most came out of the water shouting. Then she organized a church in the grove with 295 names enrolled. Woodworth-Etter, like the Churches of God she then served, practised believer’s baptism by immersion, and she treated it as the public step that followed conversion. The campaign closed, at the request of local businessmen, with a meeting on the court-house steps. She was worn out and “very weak and nervous,” with “ministers, lawyers, doctors and reporters” all around her. “It took grace and courage for me to stand on those high steps,” she says, yet her voice carried for blocks. Meanwhile the pastors of Farmland had sent a committee to ask her back, saying their churches had been revived. She returned for a camp meeting in which “nearly all the ministers of the village” worked beside her. A United Brethren minister organized a church, and members of the Society of Friends helped. She reports that only a handful of the converts were under eighteen and about half were over forty.

7.What a Pentecostal Pastor Takes from It Today

This chapter is a small manual of revival practice. She went where she was invited and kept her appointments. She called church members to repentance before calling unbelievers. She worked with a team and with local pastors of several denominations. She gave long, concentrated time to one place: three weeks, three services a day. And she did not leave without baptizing converts and organizing a church. Those habits passed into Pentecostal evangelism: the tent campaign, the altar call, the call to “tarry” in prayer, and the effort to plant churches from revival meetings. The chapter also carries warnings. She pushed herself to collapse, and her team broke down under pressure; a modern pastor should build a team that is trained, prayed for and cared for, and should guard his or her own health. Her claims about numbers came without any system of recording, and they should be read as a joyful report, not statistics. And her reading of the earthquake reminds us to speak humbly about how God works in nature. Her strongest lesson is perhaps the simplest: when her helpers ran, she sang, and she kept preaching.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Woodworth-Etter called “professors” to the front before calling sinners. What would it look like to begin a revival with repentance among church members in your congregation? Her team failed her at Farmland. How do you prepare, support and correct the people who serve with you? How do you plan follow-up, so that converts are baptized and joined to a church? And how should a Pentecostal preacher speak about earthquakes, storms and other disasters without making claims Scripture does not make?

Select

Reading 3 · Worship, Prayer and Testimony

The Poor Despised Mourners’ Bench

A CTS digest of Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912), chapter VII, about pp. 58–64

At Monroeville and Massillon Chapel, Indiana, in the winter of 1883–1884, Woodworth-Etter brings back the mourners’ bench, prays three nights for God to show his power, and sees people fall into long trances. Rumours of mesmerism follow. She teaches that a vision is a trance, preaches free grace, and lets restored drinkers and new converts testify.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

The Poor Despised Mourners’ Bench: Worship, Prayer and Testimony in Her Revivals

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — two winter meetings in Allen County, Indiana, in 1883–1884: an altar brought back into a cold church, prayer for God to show his power, people falling in trances, rumours of mesmerism, and the testimonies of new converts

A CTS digest of chapter VII of Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912), about pp. 58–64. Her own text is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Acts of the Holy Ghost, ch. VII
Primary source
1883–1884
Monroeville and Massillon

A word before you read. This chapter takes us inside two small revival meetings early in Woodworth-Etter’s travelling ministry. It shows what worship looked like in her meetings: a crowded altar, long seasons of prayer, singing, people lying “under the power,” and converts standing to tell what God had done. It also shows why her meetings stirred fear and gossip. Read it as her testimony. The trances and the judgment she describes are her account and interpretation, not facts CTS can verify.

1.Bringing Back the Altar

In November 1883 she began meetings in the Methodist Episcopal church at Monroeville, Allen County, Indiana, at the invitation of the pastor. The church, she says, was “dead.” There had been no real revival in the town for years, and nearly everyone expected failure. They had not used a mourners’ bench for nine or ten years. After the second day she asked the sexton to move the musical instrument back and bring up to the front “the poor despised mourners’ bench.” He laughed. People said it would be a good joke on her, for no one would use it. That night she preached, “shouted victory,” and called for seekers, and they came forward for three weeks, day and night. Some history helps here. The mourners’ bench, also called the anxious bench, was a front pew where people under conviction knelt to pray and be prayed for. It came out of Methodist camp meetings and was made famous by the evangelist Charles Finney in the 1830s. Critics thought it manipulated emotions. Its defenders saw it as a place to make a public decision. The Pentecostal altar call, and the practice of praying with seekers at the front, grows directly from this tradition.

2.Praying for God to Show His Power

The church had become so formal, she writes, that some of the best people in town were almost sceptics. She felt it would take a great display of God’s power to convince them that “experimental religion” was real. In her day that phrase meant religion known by experience: a real meeting with God, not only correct belief. Claiming the promise that God would grant what was asked for his glory, she prayed for three nights that God would “display his power in his own way.” On the third day an elderly woman fell to the floor and became cold and rigid, “as if dead,” with only her pulse to show life. They laid her on the pulpit sofa, where she remained all day. That evening two more women fell; the next day six others. One young woman stood for about two hours with her eyes open and a smile on her face. As they were carried home, some people ran from the church in fear. “I had never seen the like,” she says. “Oh, how my faith was strengthened!” She adds that she herself fell under this power several times during the meeting, while singing or talking, and once seemed to see her children who had died. Notice how she handled it: she told the audience to come quietly and look, and believers stayed all night, singing and praying beside those who lay still.

3.Judgment, Rumours and the Charge of Mesmerism

One night she warned that someone was refusing God “for the last time.” An old man left cursing the Methodist church. On his way out of town, a train ran over him and killed him. She calls it “swift judgment.” The town was shaken. “Some said I prayed for God to kill him,” she writes, and people refused to have her pray for them. “Others said I mesmerized the people.” Mesmerism, named after the Austrian doctor Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), was a popular nineteenth-century theory that a person could control another’s mind and body by a kind of invisible force; today we would speak of hypnosis. Many critics of her trances used this explanation, and newspapers repeated it for years. Her critics were not simply enemies of God. Many were ordinary people frightened by what they saw, or educated men trying to explain it by the science of their day. Woodworth-Etter answered calmly. No one need stay away; she would pray for them at home. The meeting went on, and she reports about two hundred conversions and about one hundred people joining the Methodist church. Then she did something very practical: she appointed cottage prayer-meetings from house to house, sometimes five or six a week. A modern pastor will want to say more carefully than she did that a tragic death is not a proof of God’s judgment on one person. But her refusal to fight the rumours, and her care to keep people praying together in homes, are worth learning.

4.A Theology of Visions and Trances

In the middle of the chapter she pauses to teach. God has always warned and guided his people “by visions and dreams,” she says, and he promised to do so especially “in these last days,” which began at Pentecost. She quotes Joel 2:28 as Peter used it in Acts 2:17. Then she makes a bold equation: “A vision is a trance.” Paul fell into a trance while praying (Acts 22:17), and Peter saw his vision of the sheet in a trance (Acts 10:10). If believers prayed more “the right kind of prayers” and kept looking until the blessing came, they would know more of God’s power. Her image is memorable: “Do not ask for a loaf and be satisfied with the crumbs!” Children of a king should not live on crumbs when the table is full. She then turns sharply against “preachers who preach the Letter but deny the Power,” using 2 Timothy 3:5 and 2 Corinthians 3:6. This theme, that the churches had kept the form of godliness but lost the power, became one of the main arguments of the Pentecostal movement after 1906. Pentecostals have also learned, often painfully, the need for discernment. Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 12–14, that everything be done “decently and in order” and that prophecy be weighed, are the frame in which most Pentecostal churches today receive visions and other manifestations.

5.The Weight of the Appeal

Woodworth-Etter’s worship was never only about experience; it was evangelistic. She tells of a young man who sat through the Monroeville meeting but put off his decision. A few weeks later he fell ill and, she reports, died without hope, refusing prayer because he believed it was too late. The story is meant to make the reader feel the urgency she felt. She writes of “the responsibility of standing between the living and the dead as a mouthpiece for God,” knowing that the same message would bring life to some and judgment to others. Yet she also preaches grace clearly. A sinner must come as a humble penitent, trusting Christ alone. “Salvation is not of works.” If you pay a penny for anything, it is no longer a gift. “I am glad salvation is free.” The new believer receives “the witness of the Spirit” and goes on to baptism and good works. This is classic evangelical and Wesleyan preaching: free grace, assurance by the Spirit, and holy living as the fruit.

6.Massillon Chapel: Fire, Families and Testimony

Her next meeting, from 27 December 1883, was at Massillon Chapel in the same county, where two small congregations, Lutheran and Methodist, worshipped. Everything looked discouraging, but some ministers and converts from earlier meetings came to help. “The second night the holy fire broke out.” It spread from person to person and then for miles around, “like fire in dry stubble.” Whole families came to the altar together: one night a father, mother and three sons. Here testimony was central. Brother T., once a respected Methodist class leader, had fallen away for twenty years into heavy drinking. When he was restored he stood and told the congregation how miserable he had been and how the Shepherd had followed him, and the house was filled with weeping and shouts of joy. She adds that he would be willing for her to tell his story “for the encouragement of others” who struggle with drink. Brother V. said his heart was as hard as stone, but knelt, prayed, and in a few minutes was on his feet “speaking as if it were with another tongue,” urging sinners to come. In 1883 that phrase almost certainly means sudden power and freedom in speech, not speaking in tongues in the later Pentecostal sense. A third man, Brother S., came forward through the packed house singing the gospel song “Hold the Fort.” She counts about seventy converts, forty restored backsliders and seventy new church members, in the coldest weather of the winter.

7.What a Pentecostal Pastor Takes from It Today

First, prayer prepared the way. She prayed for three nights before anything unusual happened, and the meeting was carried by believers who stayed and prayed. Second, the altar was not decoration. It was a place for decision, prayer and ministry, and someone had to bring it back. Third, testimony is worship. In her meetings ordinary people told what God had done, and their stories reached others more than sermons could. Pentecostal services that still include a time of testimony keep that gift. Fourth, manifestations need pastoral care. She did not stage them, explain them away or exploit them; she watched over the people involved. Today’s pastor should welcome the Spirit’s work, teach its biblical frame, and avoid both fear and spectacle. Fifth, follow-up happened in homes. Her cottage prayer-meetings look much like the cell groups of modern Pentecostal churches in Latin America and Asia. Finally, she shows that revival can be shared across church lines: the meetings were held in Methodist and Lutheran congregations, and converts joined local churches rather than following her.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Is there a “despised mourners’ bench” in your church’s life, some neglected practice of prayer or decision that needs to be brought back? How long do you pray before you preach, and who prays with you? When people fall, weep or shout in your services, how do you care for them and help the congregation understand what is happening? How can you give space for testimony without losing order? And how would you respond, with grace and truth, if your community accused your church of manipulating people?

Select

Reading 4 · Healing and Discernment

A Good Counterfeiter

A CTS digest of Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912), chapters XXXIV–XXXV, about pp. 187–203

In Oakland (1889–1890) and St. Louis (1890) Woodworth-Etter preaches in an eight-thousand-seat tent, warns that the devil counterfeits God’s works, faces down a mob in Kerry Patch, and reports many healings and early speaking in tongues. CTS reads these as historical claims, adds the Oakland prophecy controversy her book omits, and asks how pastors should pray for the sick.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

A Good Counterfeiter: Healing Claims and Discernment in Oakland and St. Louis

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the great tent campaigns of 1889–1890: an eight-thousand-seat tent in Oakland, a warning about the devil’s imitations, a mob in the Kerry Patch district of St. Louis, and a long series of reported healings

A CTS digest of chapters XXXIV–XXXV of Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912), about pp. 187–203. Her own text is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Acts of the Holy Ghost, ch. XXXIV–XXXV
Primary source
1889–1890
Divine healing

A word before you read. Divine healing became the most famous, and the most disputed, part of Woodworth-Etter’s ministry. In these chapters she reports blind eyes opened, cripples walking and the dying restored. Pentecostal Christians believe that Jesus still heals in answer to prayer, and CTS respects that conviction. But the accounts here are testimonies and claims, written years later, without medical records. CTS presents them as historical claims, not as verified medical findings, and asks students to read them with both faith and care.

1.West to Oakland: A Tent in the Rain

In the fall of 1889, she writes, she felt the Lord calling her to California, though she knew no one there. She opened meetings in Oakland on 28 October 1889, in the worst rain the town could remember. The meeting was not advertised, and twenty-three people came the first night. She told them that hundreds would be saved and that the tent would soon be too small. Some laughed. Her account of the next weeks is full of small provisions: Christians who put stoves and a floor into the wet tent, a red-hot stove found mysteriously set up in her living tent, gifts of groceries and money. Pastors from several churches helped, and the meetings were advertised “in different ways.” Soon the friends of the work bought a new tent costing $1,325 and holding eight thousand people, which she calls the largest gospel tent in America. A Methodist Episcopal pastor from San Francisco preached the dedication sermon. Many sailors and ship captains came. One captain, his wife and twelve of the crew were converted, and workers bought hundreds of her books and scattered them on the ships, so that, she says, the message went to many parts of the world.

2.“The Devil Is a Good Counterfeiter”

She describes the meetings in her usual way. The Holy Spirit would fall during the preaching; well-dressed men sat with hands lifted, “held under the mighty power of God,” and people fell “all over the tent, like trees in a storm.” One elderly world traveller came to scoff and was struck to the floor for two hours, then rose converted. Then she pauses for discernment. The devil, having failed to stop the work, tried to imitate it. “The devil is a good counterfeiter.” Her example is Moses before Pharaoh: the magicians of Egypt also turned their rods into serpents, and no one could see the difference, until Aaron’s rod swallowed theirs (Exodus 7:10–12). God permits counterfeits “for a while,” she says, but in the end the true work will swallow up the false. Two lessons are worth noting. First, she admits that real and false manifestations can look the same. Second, her test is not appearance but outcome over time. That is close to Jesus’ own rule, “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16), and to Paul’s instruction to “prove all things” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

3.What the 1912 Account Leaves Out

A fair reader should know that the Oakland campaign was also the scene of a public controversy that this chapter does not mention. In early 1890 California newspapers reported that people connected with her meetings were predicting that an earthquake and tidal wave would destroy Oakland and San Francisco in April of that year. The papers said some believers left the area. When the date passed quietly, the press mocked her, and she left for St. Louis that April. Accounts differ about how far she herself made or endorsed the prediction, and the newspaper record should be checked during collation. Later in her book (chapter LVIII) she claims that San Francisco was warned and links the warning to the great earthquake of 1906. The episode shows why her critics were not simply hostile to God. Newspapers that printed sensational stories also reported a real failed prediction, and Scripture itself gives a test for prophecy that does not come to pass (Deuteronomy 18:22). Pentecostal churches today generally teach that prophetic words must be weighed by the church and that predictions of dates and disasters call for special caution.

4.St. Louis: Courage in Kerry Patch

Called to St. Louis in April 1890, she held meetings in a hall for two months. To save money for the campaign, she and her helpers rented rooms on a third floor and did their own cooking. In June she raised the great California tent in “Kerry Patch,” an Irish district notorious for violence; it was the only ground large enough. Christians begged her not to go there. On the first night the tent was packed with men standing on the seats with pipes and cigars, women in dirty aprons, fire-crackers, pistols and clubs. Ministers who tried to speak were stoned or shouted down. She told her co-workers that if the mob took them out of the tent “before we are ready to go, they will take us out dead.” Two women prayed aloud; then she stood, raised her hand and commanded the crowd to listen. A deep fear of God fell, she says. Men took off their hats, some fell, and the crowd left quietly. Stone-throwing went on for weeks until citizens pressed the police to act and the chief promised protection. Over the summer the neighbourhood changed: men shaved and came with their families, and women came in clean clothes. She told the opponents that if the meetings only cleaned up some of their citizens, that alone was worth supporting.

5.The Healing Accounts

The meetings ran day and night for five months. Here the chapter becomes a catalogue of healings. The lame threw away crutches, the deaf and dumb clapped their hands, children who had never walked ran about. Helpless people received “a shock from Heaven’s battery.” She tells of a Methodist woman crippled for fourteen years, bedridden for four, with a long list of diseases, who was carried in by three men; she gave herself to God, Woodworth-Etter laid hands on her and prayed for the unclean spirits to be driven out, and the woman leaped through the tent. She tells of a boy whose terror after being seized by dog-catchers had left him with violent “mad spells” for two years, which people took for hydrophobia; during one fit he bit a hole in her tent canvas. She frankly admits, “I was so scared,” and told the mother not to bring him back. But the mother returned, and “the Lord gave me faith to pray for him.” She reports that he was healed and for years afterward brought her flowers. Some physicians, she says, counted six hundred healed. In this campaign she also reports people baptized in the Spirit and receiving gifts: a little girl, healed of helplessness and dumbness, who spoke in an unknown tongue, and a man called to the nations who was given, she believed, the gift of their languages. Fifty-three converts were baptized in the Mississippi River, and a mission of over four hundred members was formed.

6.Reading the Claims Carefully

How should a student handle these stories? Three cautions help. First, the diagnoses are lay descriptions. “Hydrophobia,” “dropsy” and “catarrh” were broad nineteenth-century terms, and there are no medical records. Second, the numbers were not counted by any system. Third, the 1912 text was written after the Azusa Street revival, by a woman who had by then joined the Pentecostal movement, and its vocabulary of “gifts” and “other tongues” may partly reflect that later setting. Her report of tongues in 1890 is still historically interesting, because it shows that some Holiness meetings knew such experiences before 1906. The man given “their languages” reflects a belief common in the first Pentecostal years, sometimes called xenolalia: that tongues were known human languages given for missionary preaching. Most Pentecostal teachers later moved away from that idea. None of this means nothing happened. Many people in her meetings were convinced they had been healed, some said they stayed well for years, and Pentecostals believe God answers the prayer of faith (James 5:14–16). It means we hold her reports as testimony, honour what God may have done, and avoid claiming more than the evidence allows.

7.What a Pentecostal Pastor Takes from It Today

Woodworth-Etter joined healing to the gospel: people were saved and healed “at the same time,” and healing was a sign pointing to Christ, not an end in itself. A pastor today can follow her courage and compassion, praying boldly for the sick and for the most frightening cases, as she did with the boy. But a wise pastor also builds habits she lacked. Encourage people to keep seeing their doctors and to let medical improvement be confirmed. Do not announce healings before they are tested. Never pressure the sick, or blame those who are not healed for weak faith. Keep honest records of testimonies and follow up with people months later. Treat critics and journalists with respect, and admit mistakes, especially around prophecy. And practise discernment as she taught it: look for lasting fruit, measure everything by Scripture, and let the church weigh what is claimed in the Spirit’s name.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Woodworth-Etter warned that “the devil is a good counterfeiter.” What tests would you use to tell a true work of the Spirit from an imitation? How do you pray for the sick in a way that expresses real faith, yet protects people from pressure and disappointment? What would you do if a prophecy given in your church failed to come true? And when you hear testimonies of healing, how do you honour God and the person while still telling the truth about what is known?

Select

Reading 5 · A Sermon on Women’s Ministry

Your Daughters Shall Prophesy

A CTS digest of Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, “Sermon: Woman’s Privilege in the Gospel,” Acts of the Holy Ghost (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912), chapter LXXI, about pp. 478–486

In her sermon “Woman’s Privilege in the Gospel,” Woodworth-Etter argues from Pentecost and Joel’s promise, from Phebe and Paul’s co-workers, from Deborah and from the women sent to announce the resurrection, and answers the command to keep silent. CTS sets out her case beside complementarian, egalitarian and team-ministry readings without taking a side.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Woodworth-Etter’s Sermon on Woman’s Privilege in the Gospel

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — one of her printed sermons: Pentecost and Joel’s promise, the women around Paul, the hard sayings about silence, Deborah and the resurrection women, and a call to every believer to work

A CTS digest of chapter LXXI, “Sermon: Woman’s Privilege in the Gospel,” in Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912), about pp. 478–486. Her own text is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Acts of the Holy Ghost, ch. LXXI
Primary source
Printed 1912
Women in ministry

A word before you read. Woodworth-Etter preached for more than forty years, and she was often asked by what right a woman did so. This sermon is her fullest public answer. CTS presents it as a historical sermon and describes what she believed and practised. Christians who love the Bible have reached different conclusions on women’s ministry, and this digest sets out those views without taking a side. Students should understand her arguments, the main alternatives, and the teaching of their own church.

1.The Sermon and Its World

The sermon is printed among the more than twenty sermons that fill the last part of her 1912 book. It is undated and may have been preached many times. By 1912 she was a leading figure in the young Pentecostal movement; that year she held a long campaign in Dallas, and the next year she was a featured preacher at the Worldwide Camp Meeting at Arroyo Seco, near Los Angeles. But her argument is older than Pentecostalism. In 1859 the Methodist Holiness teacher Phoebe Palmer published The Promise of the Father, and Catherine Booth of the Salvation Army published Female Ministry; both defended women’s preaching from Joel 2 and Acts 2. Women were prominent in Holiness revivals and then at Azusa Street and in early Pentecostal missions. Woodworth-Etter stands in that line. Her sermon is not a scholarly treatise; it is a preacher’s case, built from many texts and aimed at moving women to act.

2.Pentecost: Sons and Daughters

She begins where Pentecostal preaching usually begins, with Acts 2:1–4: the wind, the tongues of fire, and all of them filled with the Holy Spirit. Then she paints the scene. The crowd saw “men and women, with their faces shining with the glory of God, all preaching at once.” Just as today, she says, when God’s power is shown, people cried out “too much excitement” and called the believers drunk. Peter answered from Joel 2:28–29: “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,” and on “my servants and on my handmaidens” God would pour out his Spirit (Acts 2:17–18). For her this settles the main question. The Spirit was poured out on women as well as men, and they spoke. She adds 1 Corinthians 11:5, where Paul gives instructions for a woman who “prayeth or prophesieth,” and says “Paul speaks as if it were very common for women to preach and prophesy.” She also mentions Philip’s four daughters who prophesied (Acts 21:9). Note that she treats prophesying and preaching as closely related, following Paul’s definition in 1 Corinthians 14:3: speaking to people “to edification, and exhortation, and comfort.”

3.Phebe, Priscilla and Paul’s Co-workers

Next she argues that “Paul worked with the women in the gospel more than any of the apostles.” She names Priscilla and Phebe (Phoebe), and imagines Phebe and Paul “holding revivals together” before Phebe travelled to Rome. Paul’s words in Romans 16:1 call her a “servant of the church which is at Cenchrea,” and Woodworth-Etter adds that this “signifies a minister of the church.” The Greek word is diakonos, which can mean servant, minister or deacon, and translations differ. She also notes that Paul asked the Roman church to assist Phebe in whatever “business” she had, called her a helper of many, and praised other women who “laboured with me in the gospel” (Philippians 4:3). Her conclusion is that Phebe had real authority in the churches and had been fruitful in winning souls. Interpreters agree that women were active co-workers in Paul’s mission; they differ on whether texts like these describe an office of leadership or a valued ministry of service under the leadership of elders.

4.The Hard Sayings

She does not avoid 1 Corinthians 14:34, “Let your women keep silence in the churches.” Her answers are brief and pointed. Paul adds “as also saith the law,” and she replies, “We are not under law but under grace.” Paul says women should ask their husbands at home, and she asks, “What will those do who have no husbands?” Some women, she adds, would die in ignorance if they depended on their husbands for knowledge. Above all, she reads the passage as Paul’s response to “contentions in the churches,” noting that the same letter speaks of divisions (1 Corinthians 11:18). In other words, Paul was forbidding disorder and quarrelling in worship, not the Spirit-given speech of women. Students should know how others read these texts. Many complementarian interpreters see in 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 1 Timothy 2:11–14 a lasting order, often grounded in creation, that reserves the authoritative teaching office or eldership to qualified men, while they affirm that women may pray, prophesy and serve in many ways. Many egalitarian interpreters, like her, read these passages as addressed to local problems and see Galatians 3:28 and Pentecost as opening every ministry to both. Readers on both sides have questioned her “law and grace” answer, since Paul himself appeals to the law there. Notice too that her sermon does not discuss 1 Timothy 2:12 directly.

5.Deborah, the Resurrection Women and the Woman at the Well

The sermon is strongest when it tells stories. She lists Miriam (Micah 6:4), Huldah the prophetess (2 Kings 22) and Esther, and she retells Judges 4 with energy: Israel had sinned and suffered for twenty years, and “Barak dared not meet the enemy unless Deborah led the van.” She pictures Deborah riding beside the commander, “shouting victory,” and the enemy king fleeing, only to be killed by a woman. She then quotes Galatians 3:28: in Christ there is neither male nor female. Her most important example is Easter morning. The disciples had fled, but the women stayed by the cross, watched the burial and came early to the tomb. Angels and then the risen Lord himself sent them to tell the brothers. Jesus, she says, entrusted these women “to preach the first resurrection sermon.” Finally she turns to the Samaritan woman of John 4, who left her water jar and ran through the town saying, “Come, see a man.” The whole city came out. “This was the result of one sermon by a weak woman.”

6.The Appeal: Every Believer at Work

The last part of the sermon is an appeal. She speaks directly to her “dear sister in Christ”: “It is high time for women to let their lights shine,” to bring out talents “hidden away rusting” (compare her own confession in chapter III that she had hidden her one talent). But she widens the call to everyone. The church is made of “men, women and children.” It is a building, and if we cannot be a pillar or cornerstone, “let us be a spike or a nail or a brick.” “God’s church is a workshop; no idlers allowed here.” She borrows the memory of the American Civil War, when the government called for hundreds of thousands of volunteers, and asks who will enlist in Christ’s army for the reward of eternal life. She reminds her hearers that “they that turn many to righteousness” shall shine as the stars (Daniel 12:3), and the sermon ends with poems, by other writers, about a “starless crown,” a crown with no jewels because its wearer won no one to Christ. The theme is urgent evangelism. In her view, the question of women’s ministry was finally a question of harvest: the fields are white, and the workers are few.

7.What a Pentecostal Pastor Takes from It Today

Woodworth-Etter did more than argue. She preached, organized churches, baptized converts and travelled with co-workers, and after her second marriage, in 1902, her husband Samuel Etter assisted her in the meetings. Pentecostal churches since then have answered the question in different ways. Some, such as the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel founded by Aimee Semple McPherson, ordain women to every office. Others, including several large denominations, license or ordain women as ministers and evangelists but have reserved certain offices, such as bishop or senior leadership, for men. Still others emphasize team ministry, in which husband-and-wife teams or mixed leadership groups serve together under shared oversight. CTS does not take a position here. A pastor can learn from the sermon in any case: the Spirit is poured out on all believers; women’s witness has been vital since the resurrection morning; disorder and quarrelling dishonour worship; and every member of the church, whatever their role, is called to work in the harvest.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. How does your own church read Joel 2, Acts 2, 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, and can you state fairly the strongest case for a view different from yours? Woodworth-Etter called the women at the tomb the first preachers of the resurrection. What does their faithfulness teach every disciple, man or woman? In your congregation, are there talents “hidden away rusting”? And how can you help every member find a place to work, as “a spike or a nail or a brick,” in God’s building?

Select

Record your reading

When you have read your three chosen readings in full, enter your name and affirm it below. This record is kept on your honor, in this browser; it shows on your certificate as with honors.

Your name

On my honor, I have read in full the three readings I selected above.

✓ Recorded — this class counts toward your With Honors progress. Reading With Honors ↗

Honors Reading — recorded

affirmed on to have read, in full:

Chapala Theological Seminary · Pentecostal Worship, Preaching, and Ministry · present or print this page as your honors reading record.

Further Study: Three Public-Domain Works

These three works are for further study, for the student who wants to go on reading. They are not part of the honors reading above: that stays as it is — the five CTS digests, any three read in full and recorded on your honor. All three are in the public domain; each link opens the work online, and most can also be found in the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg. Most are in English: the Chrome browser can translate a page (right-click, “Translate to…”; on a phone, the browser menu).

The Whole Book · 1912 Scan

1. Acts of the Holy Ghost

Maria Woodworth-Etter · Dallas: John F. Worley Printing Co., 1912; Internet Archive scan

Read the chapters and sermons the textbook leaves out, in the scan of the 1912 edition from which its selections were taken. Read its accounts of healings and visions as testimony: they are what the author and her witnesses reported.

Open reading ↗

The Plain Text · 1912

2. Acts of the Holy Ghost

Maria Woodworth-Etter · 1912; text read by machine from the scan

Search the whole book as plain text. The text was read by machine and has many errors, even in names; check a passage against the page images before you quote it.

Open reading ↗

The 1912 Edition · Archive Record

3. Acts of the Holy Ghost

Maria Woodworth-Etter · 1912; Internet Archive record

Look at the archive’s record of the scan, with its date and publisher, before you cite the work.

Open reading ↗

Honor attestation: By selecting three readings above, you affirm that you have read those three digests in full. The digests are CTS-authored summaries that may include brief excerpts or adaptations of public-domain works.