At Lunch With Mattye Bowman: Pioneer clergywoman
By Lynn Hutton
One's first impression of the Rev. Mattye Bowman is a woman of quiet strength and dignity. What is not apparent until one gets better acquainted – say, over a four-hour lunch at R.J's Courtyard Restaurant in Maryville – is the merriment and mischief in her eyes.
Ninety-five years ago, Mattye Kirby Bowman was born the third of 12 children to a Kentucky tenant farmer. She was baptized as a young girl, but her "true conversion," when she really became a Christian, happened at age 25. "And I wanted to tell everybody about it."
Two weeks later, she began a four-year stint teaching Sunday school at a rescue mission, but that desire to "tell everybody about it" deepened into a call to evangelistic ministry. Her first revival lasted 17 days, with 69 converts.
She came to Knoxville in 1942 to continue her revival preaching. The presiding elder (called a district superintendent today) heard her preach and asked her to serve a little Holston Conference church whose pastor had resigned. "I never thought of being a pastor," Bowman says. "The Methodists weren't licensing women in those days."
She agreed to take Bright Hope Church for nine months, a struggling congregation meeting in an abandoned school, averaging 20 people in Sunday school. Bishop Paul Kern granted her the privilege to preach without a license, and for 14 years she was the only woman preaching in Holston Conference.
When she left Bright Hope six years later, she had led the building of the brick church that still stands. By that time, Sunday school attendance had grown to more than 100.
Today she is the oldest member of Fairview United Methodist Church in Maryville, where for six years she has volunteered for Glasses for the Masses, a mission program that distributes eyeglasses to the poor in countries from Paraguay to Russia. She lives at Asbury Place in Maryville.
As to the challenges she faced as a woman in ministry, she laughs, "I never went to a church that wanted me."
One group got up a petition when they learned a woman was coming to be their pastor. One church pillar told her, "There hasn't been that much excitement in this town since the war broke out." On the other hand, no church asked her to leave, and one congregation even offered her $500 to stay.
In the 1950s, Bowman was ordained a probationary deacon, and then, by three-fourths majority vote of the conference, she was granted ordination as elder. She retired in 1973 because of her first husband's failing health, then was appointed to another church, commuting 20 miles round trip for three years.
At 75, she met Harry Bowman, a retired United Methodist minister who would become her second husband. He died in 1993.
After dining on a lunch of catfish, Bowman declared in her low-pitched, authoritative voice, "I'm glad I was a pioneer of the clergywomen's part of the United Methodist Church. I'm happy I've spent my life in the Lord's service. I'm real well satisfied with what I turned out to be."
The Rev. Hutton is director of music and education at Central United Methodist Church in Knoxville.
top
|
|
