CROSS CURRENTS
by Lynn Hutton

Mattye Bowman: A Woman of God

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 is the merriment and mischief in her sky blue eyes.

Ninety-nine years ago next month, Mattye Nation Kirby Bowman was born the third of 12 children to Samuel Nation, a Kentucky tenant farmer, and his wife. Looking back now, she says, “The Lord has always had His hand on me.” She was baptized as a young girl, but “My true conversion – when I really became a Christian – happened when I was 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” gradually deepened into a call to evangelistic ministry. Her first revival lasted 17 days, with 69 converts.

She came to Knoxville in 1942, “at the Lord’s leading,” to continue her revival preaching. Her first revival in Tennessee garnered several converts and five invitations to conduct revivals. The Presiding Elder (called a District Superintendent today) heard her preach and asked her to take a little church whose pastor had resigned. “I never thought of being a pastor; the Methodists weren’t licensing women in those days.”

She agreed to take Bright Hope Methodist Church for nine months, a struggling congregation meeting in an abandoned schoolhouse in Halls and 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 built a brick building that still stands in Halls (and whose cornerstone bears her name) and averaged more than 100 in Sunday school. The congregation had paid all but $5,000 of their indebtedness and had money saved for the furnishings. The Presiding Elder marveled at her success in raising money and teased her about “minting money in the church basement.”

Today she lives in assisted living at Asbury Place in Maryville, is the oldest member of Fairview Church in that town, where for 10 years she volunteered in Glasses for the Masses, a mission program that distributes eyeglasses to the poor in countries from Paraguay to Russia. She was passionate about her partnership in this mission: “Be sure to put that in the article you’re writing.”

Nowadays, she is not able to attend church but still has a mission project. She handcrafts cards, which Asbury Place sells to its residents. The years have taken their toll, but she has never had a stroke, a heart attack or blood pressure problems. Since cataract surgery, her eyesight is 20/20. Her doctors tell her she could live another 10 years.

When asked if she and her husband of 55 years had children, she replied, “The Lord had other plans for me. I may have been a barren woman, but I never pastored a barren church. I never had a year without professions of faith and never failed to pay our apportionments.”

And even though she never had children of her own, she had several sons in the faith. Seven young men left her churches to pursue the ordained ministry. She calls them “my preacher-boys.”

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, and 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 either, and one congregation even offered her $500 to stay, in a day when “that was some money,” she says, twinkling.

In the 1950s, she 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 husband’s failing health, then took another church and commuted 120 miles round trip for three years.

At age 75, while doing a skit entitled “Me and Pa,” she met Harry Bowman, a retired United Methodist minister who would become her second husband. Until the last three years, she still did Minnie Pearl imitations and impromptu comedy routines, wrote poetry and made quilts.

The Rev. Bowman declares 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.”