Henrietta Mears has been called the “mother of Sunday school.” Her revolutionary teaching methods (adding lively pictures and implementing grade levels) changed the landscape of Christian education in her day, and her imprimatur remains on today’s models for curriculum. But I like to think of her more as the “grandmother” of modern evangelicalism. Her vision for the Christian life inspired a generation of young leaders who, in turn, inspired my generation.
She has the perfect pedigree to be the grandmother of evangelicalism: she accepted Christ consciously, dutifully, and single-mindedly at the age of seven (and never wavered); she sacrificed the (non-Christian) love of her life for the gospel; she had an unquenchable passion for Sunday school; and she wore goofy hats.
But as grandmothers go, she also would have been one who sometimes asserted an opinion where it may not have been solicited; she would have been a source of discomfort to those Christians who could not get to church on time; and she would have raised an eyebrow among those who could not abide her blue dress with butterfly sleeves, red earrings (and bracelet and pin and necklace), bright lipstick, polished nails, and rings on every finger. (“Why not look your best when you go to church on Sunday?”) An apostle to the Jesus freaks she was not.
Still, for the historical moment of her rising, big hats with pinwheels and long-legged birds on them served her well. She used to say: “I wear my hats for my college boys, and they love them.”
She also used to say: “There is no magic in small plans. When I consider my ministry, I think of the world. Anything less than that would not be worthy of Christ nor of his will for my life.” So while inspiring her “college boys” with her hats, she also imparted to them the vision of conquering the world for Christ. And her “boys” included the likes of Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright and former U.S. Senate chaplain, the late Richard Halverson.
Billy Graham’s preaching ministry itself was galvanized at Henrietta Mears’s summer Bible conference center, Forest Home. It was there that Graham came to terms with the authority of Scripture in 1948. Bill Bright was emboldened in 1947 by Mears’s challenge to him and the other members of her “Fellowship of the Burning Heart” to pledge themselves to “absolute consecration” to Jesus Christ and his gospel.
So that makes Henrietta Mears a kind of spiritual grandmother to me. Billy Graham’s preaching galvanized my new-found faith in the summer of 1972. My faith was emboldened the same summer at a youth evangelism event, Explo ’72, sponsored by Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ. Mears may well be the spiritual grandmother of us all.
Seven-Year-Old Disciple
Henrietta Cornelia Mears was born into the high society of Fargo, North Dakota, in 1890. She was the last of the seven children of Margaret (then 42) and Ashley Mears, who owned several banks in the Dakotas. From the start, she was a precocious child who protested when her mother would “dumb down” Bible readings to make them more understandable. On her first day of kindergarten she returned nonplused, saying that kindergarten was to amuse little children and that she had been “amused enough”; she wanted to be “educated.”
At the age of seven, after the family had resettled in Minneapolis, she convinced her mother that she sincerely felt the weight of her sin and wanted to surrender her life to Christ. Her mother protested, saying, “I’m afraid everyone will think that at seven you are too young to understand what it means.”
The young Henrietta replied, “Why mother, you know how sinful I am!”
Four days later, the following Easter Sunday, she stood with her cousin before the congregation at the First Baptist Church and answered all the questions put to her about Christian doctrine with “clarity and frankness.” (Before she could read she determined that her favorite book of the Bible was Paul’s Letter to the Romans.)
At the age of 12 she was stricken with crippling muscular rheumatism so that “her family feared for her life.” Her parents asked Mr. Ingersoll, a friend and church member, to pray for Henrietta, and when he arrived he asked her if she believed the Lord could heal her. She answered, “He created us. I see no reason why he cannot heal us.”
Ingersoll’s prayers for healing, however, remained unanswered. In fact, her rheumatism became worse. Two years later, in acute pain, she asked her mother if Mr. Ingersoll might come back and pray for her again.
This time when he prayed, as Barbara Powers reports in The Henrietta Mears Story, “Henrietta was filled with confidence that her body had been completely healed.”
A few years later, when she was a senior in high school, Mears and a friend attended a series of meetings at church, and they both “heard the call” to commit their lives to full-time Christian service. When the invitation was given, they went forward with absolute resolve to “go wherever the Lord wanted them to go” and to “do whatever work he wanted them to do.” The friend soon felt called to missionary service in Japan. But Mears heard no such call, and that vexed her: “Is something wrong with me?” she asked herself.
She remained in the States and went on to attend the University of Minnesota, graduating among the top of her class in 1913. She took a teaching position in chemistry at a nearby high school, which planted the love of students in her heart. It was not long before she was teaching the Bible to the school’s football team (they approached her about teaching them).
She fell in love at this stage of her life. When the young man proposed marriage, he assured her that, despite his not being a Christian, he “admired her religious convictions.” She longed for companionship, children, family life, and was not averse to the life that marrying a banker, like her father, would promise. She agonized and prayed: “Lord, you have made me the way I am. I love a home, I love security, I love children, and I love him.” She left it in the Lord’s hands, saying, “You have promised to fulfill all my needs. I trust in you alone.”
In the end, she severed the relationship, saying later, “I’ve never missed companionship.” Her friend and protรฉvรฉ Cornelius says that “it would have been hard for her to find a mate who could live with her” since Mears was so spiritually focused. Besides, adds Cornelius, “she loved the apostle Paul the most.” When Mears’s many students expressed their desire to follow her example in remaining single, she rebuked them: “Nonsense! The Lord intends for you to marry; that is the way he has made us. It just so happens that in my case that wasn’t his will.”
After teaching in public high schools for 14 years, Mears took a year’s sabbatical to travel and assess her goals for the future. During this time she and her sister Margaret traveled to Europe and then wintered in California, attending the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood. The senior pastor, Stewart P. MacLennan, knew Henrietta from having visited her in Minnesota, and he had invited her to speak on several occasions. Before the sisters returned home, he asked Mears to come on staff as the director of Christian education at the church. In 1928, at the age of 38, she joined the staff of “Hollywood Pres.”
A Dream Come True
Mears used to say “dream big,” and she backed up her dreams with one of her favorite Scripture passages: “Every single place that the sole of your foot will tread upon will be yours” (Joshua 1:3)-to which she would add, “We need more Bibles today bound in shoe leather!”
No obstacle was greater than the size of her dreams-which always centered on her work with the youth. When Henrietta Mears became director of Christian education, the Sunday school of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood consisted of 450 people. But within a mere two-and-a-half years, it grew to exceed 4,000. When she was dissatisfied with the “unattractive” (no pictures) and “deficient” (no continuity between lessons) Sunday-school curriculum the church was using, she tossed it and wrote her own (her lessons were soon in such great demand that in 1933 she, along with Cyrus Nelson, founded Gospel Light Publications for the purpose of distributing them nationwide); when she wanted the youth of her Sunday-school program at the church to have a place to enjoy “happy memories and high points of decision,” that dream was translated into the Forest Home Conference Center, which she founded in 1939; when national distribution of Sunday-school material through Gospel Light was not enough, she went international, launching Gospel Light International. (“Ninety percent of failure is because of lack of organization,” she said.)
By 1957, as a result of Henrietta Mears’s years of ministry with Hollywood Pres, the church had erected a large Christian education plant, developed a successful Sunday-school curriculum, and evangelized and discipled tens of thousands of young people.
Mears was driven by her conviction that she was training the next generation of world leaders. And almost incidentally, in the course of so doing, she raised the concept of Sunday school to new levels. “It is my business as a Sunday-school teacher,” she said at a convention held at Moody Church, Chicago, in 1950, “to instill a divine discontent for the ordinary. Only the best possible is good enough for God. Can you say, ‘God, I have done all that I can’?”
“She believed in methods,” says Eva Cornelius, who worked with Gospel Light and traveled with Mears. “She introduced the idea that the youth should be taught at grade levels and that teachers should be well prepared and follow up with their students.” Those Sunday-school teachers who give up and quit, Mears would say, were those who only planned a week at a time and waited until Saturday night to do their preparations. “You must be an architect. It takes time. Plan it for six months or a year-better five years.”
To those who complained that they were not succeeding, Mears rejoined: “You don’t have results because you don’t take the time or make the effort to do anything about your teaching or to learn more about your students.”
“Don’t ever say ‘I’m just a Sunday-school teacher,’ ” she used to say. “You are a teacher in Christ’s college. Be proud that you teach!”
She never faulted youth who didn’t attend church. She insisted that it was incumbent upon the church to draw the kids in. “These kids don’t have time to waste. There are so many things they can do to have a good time,” she said. “Everything we offer youth must be excellent. Their association with the gospel must be of the very finest in every way.” The church, she said, must “enlist and train” leadership within its own members. “Something was wrong,” she said, if churches weren’t doing this.
But she didn’t cut any slack for the students either. During a “share time” at a Wednesday evening Bible study, she “took command” when she thought the discussion had gotten off track: “That has been the most ridiculous testimony time I think I have ever heard! All we have been talking about is silly little things that don’t amount to a hill of beans,” she said. “There hasn’t been one word about winning the nations for Christ.”
“She had little patience for people who trivialized the gospel,” says Bill Greig, CEO of Gospel Light and the son of Mears’s cousin. “She wasn’t afraid to speak as she felt led of the Lord to speak. She demanded excellence from people.”
Though Mears frequently taught and spoke from pulpits all over the country, she never assumed that a woman should preach-hence the emphasis on training “her boys.” “She thought that if you got the men there,” says Cornelius, “the women could come too.” Bill Bright adds: “She felt that both men and women could be taught under men, but that some men would have trouble being taught under a woman. Yet she herself appealed to men. So she contradicted her own principle.”
But she had a vision for what anybody, male or female, could be in Christ. Vonette Bright, who (with her husband, Bill) lived with Mears for ten years running her home and counted her among her closest companions, said that when Henrietta Mears taught from the Bible she always took the lesson to the point of personal application: “She endeavored to make a person come to the point of commitment. She would ask, ‘What are you going to do with this information?’ “
Eva Cornelius recalls, “She would look at somebody and have a dream about what he or she could become, and then encourage and pray for them. I used to tell her, ‘Henrietta, stop looking at me! I have too much to do already!’ “
The late Bible scholar Wilbur M. Smith said that Henrietta Mears’s accomplishments at Hollywood Presbyterian amounted to “the most significant work among our nation’s youth done by a woman in the twentieth century.” Greig adds that he is still hearing Mears’s messages from the pulpits of her disciples today.
Henrietta Mears’s example stood up to her proclamation: There is no magic in small plans.
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