The Peniel Missionary Society was an interdenominational holiness missionary organisation that was started in Los Angeles, California in 1895 by Theodore Pollock Ferguson (1853–1920) and Manie Payne Ferguson (1850–1932) as an outgrowth of their Peniel Mission. It was merged with the World Gospel Mission in 1957.
History of the Peniel Missionary Society In addition to the expansion of the Peniel Mission in the United States of America, and its overseas territories: Alaska and Hawaii, eventually Peniel Missions were established overseas in Africa, Bolivia (1911); China (1909); Egypt, Guatemala, India, Mexico, and the Philippines. A separate organisation, The Peniel Missionary Society, under the control of Manie and Theodore Ferguson, was formed in 1895. The objective of the organisation was: "Mission work, as God shall lead, and as means shall be provided." (Dennis). The Mission operated on the faith mission model, with workers unsalaried, and guaranteed no financial support. Despite this, by 1911, the Peniel Missionary Society was operating in the following fields: India, North Africa (Egypt), Mexico, Central America (Guatemala), South America (Argentine Republic, and Bolivia), West Indies (Puerto Rico), Alaska, and Hawaii. (Dennis)
Egypt (1895-1957) In August 1894, Miss Ella Shaw, who had helped establish the Peniel Mission at 308 Grant Avenue in San Francisco, California on 11 November 1893, and while a mission worker at the San Diego, California Peniel Mission, advised Mrs Ferguson that she and Miss Anna (Annie) Vansant were burdened to start a Peniel Mission in Port Said, Egypt. They testified: "We must go to the most wicked port in the world." (Traschel Africa 107)
On 20 October 1895, the first anniversary of the opening of the Peniel Hall in Los Angeles, Shaw and Vansant departed for Egypt, arriving there on 24 November 1895, to commence the first foreign branch of the Peniel Mission. (Love Slave, 232–233) Initially, they held religious services on British gunboats and coal ships waiting to go through the Suez Canal. "Prayer and persistence, aided by the Holy Spirit, brought bright converts." (Traschel, Africa, 107) Shaw left Egypt in early 1897 due to ill health. She later started the Peniel Mission in New York city, and eventually (as Mrs Melody) became the secretary-treasurer of the Peniel Missionary Society.
Among the activities of the Peniel missionaries in Egypt was teaching at the American School in Port Said. Vansant, seeing that there was no Protestant church nor any school for girls in Port Said, opened a small school later that year in her apartment, and even took in three children to live with her. In the evenings she taught an English Bible class for young men. Five months after the departure of Shaw, Mary Lyons and Miss M. Watson, arrived in Port Said. Vansant, who soon contracted tuberculosis and departed for the U.S., but died before reaching New York. In 1901, Lyons established the Bethel Orphanage Faith Mission in Port Said, with Vansant's mother, Mrs Marian A. Vansant, of Los Angeles, serving as the American Secretary of that mission. It was established to "bring the Mohammedans to a saving knowledge of Christ, and to save the children from a life of vice and sin, training them, with God's help, to be missionaries and Bible-women among their own people, and giving them a thorough Arabic and English education."(Dennis)
In 1897, Mrs Mary Richardson arrived in Port Said and began the construction of "a beautiful and commodious school building" near the beach on Kitchener Road (now Sharia 23 July) for the Peniel American School. (Traschel, 108–109). Later Miss Sarah Longhurst, an American pensioner, arrived as a missionary at age 58. She mastered Arabic and translated hymns for an Arabic hymn book. She was assisted by Mrs Jennie Ussher (who served 1921–1943), a former secretary for General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. After their deaths, both were buried in Port Said.
About 1930 increased enrolments due to the school having "the highest scholastic reputation in the city" (Traschel 109) resulted in King Fuad I of Egypt underwriting the expense of a new wing (named The King's Wing) of six additional classrooms. In 1931, Charlotte Warren and Edna Schendel arrived to teach at the Peniel school. After a year, Schendel returned to the U.S. because of lung troubles and died a few years later. Warren opened the first kindergarten in all of lower Egypt, with 150 children enrolled. Ill health compelled her to return to the U.S. at the end of one term of service. (Traschel, 109–110)
In 1935, Edward J. Higgins (November 26, 1864 – December 14, 1947), the recently retired third General of The Salvation Army (1929–1934), held revival meetings in the courtyard behind the Peniel School. As a result, there was formed the Salvation Army Sailors' Home, and the Salvation Army work in Alexandria, Egypt.
Before Longhurst died, Miss Christine Spurlin (later Christine Spurlin Schneider), an alumna of Bethany-Peniel Nazarene College (now Southern Nazarene University), an American school teacher, arrived in 1939 to begin her missionary service. She started weekly women's meetings. Converts attended the mission church (which was the first Protestant church in the city), which was located next to the Peniel School. Three smaller preaching points were established in Port Said, and another church was located in nearby Port Fouad, which was pastored by Pastor Massoud, who was educated by the Peniel Mission. At its peak in 1946, there were 600 female students at the Peniel American School. (Traschel 115) In 1949 Miss Ethyl Young began her missionary service at Peniel. Through the encouragement of Spurlin and Young, Rev. Samuel Doctorian (1930-2016), became a Peniel missionary to Lebanon.Samuel Doctorian, My Life Story (Marion, Indiana: National Holiness Missionary Society, 1956):22:
New government schools and changed legislation reduced the enrolment of the school dramatically and created severe financial stress by 1956. During the Suez Crisis of November 1956, the school was closed until 5 January 1957. By then, there were only 240 girls enrolled. (Traschel 120–121) In 1957, responsibility for the Egyptian mission was assumed by the National Holiness Missionary Society, currently known as the World Gospel Mission. By 1965, Miss Laura Spurlin had leadership of the Mission in Port Said.(Directory of U.A.R. Personages 1965)
India (1896) In June 1896 funds were donated to start the Peniel Mission in India. On 20 October 1896, the second anniversary of the opening of Peniel Hall, Mrs Anna M. Leach (who had helped pioneer the Mission at Grant Avenue in San Francisco in November 1893 and the one in Juneau, Alaska in June 1895) and Miss Rhodabaugh were commissioned to be the pioneer missionaries to India. They arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai)in December 1896. Leach died on 23 April 1899, the first Peniel missionary to die on a foreign mission field. By 1902 Peniel missionaries were running an orphanage for 20 girls at Jalgaon borrowing facilities from the Christian and Missionary Alliance. (CMA Report 1902, 133)
In 1909 Mrs Caroline P. Wallace and Miss Carrie A. Tennant of the Peniel Mission went to India to work with the Hindu Marriage Reform League (organised December 1909), an organization that opposed the practice of child bridesBushong, Burnis H. R.U.N. Reaching the Unreached Now: A Brief History of the World Gospel Mission (Marion, Indiana: World Gospel Mission, 1995): 83. and sought to raise the legal marriage age from 12 to 16."Notes of Foreign Affairs". New York Times (27 January 1909)See James Bissett, India and Its Faiths: A Traveler's Record (Kessinger Publishing, 1998):175.
Eventually the Dharangaon Mission Station was established in Dharangaon, East Khandesh, India for 30 years before being given to the Scandinavian Alliance Mission (now The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM)). This included a Girls' School and Orphanage. "This big work proved to be too much for them. The Home Superintendent of the Peniel Mission, Mrs. Ferguson of Los Angeles, requested that the SAM take over."(Grauer 182)
Mexico By 1900 there was a Peniel Mission located in Progreso, Yucatán in Mexico.(Knight, n.52)
Philippines By 1902 there were two Peniel missionaries in Zamboanga (province) on the island of Mindanao in the recently acquired American territory of the Philippine Islands. There was also a Peniel Mission in Davao also on Mindanao. A chapel was constructed and medical ministry provided.
China (1909) In 1909 Rev. Albert Kato Reiton (born 7 February 1882 in Baldwin, Wisconsin) and his first wife, Edna Greer Reiton (married 15 November 1909; died January 1912), established the South China Peniel Holiness Mission (later incorporated in 1951 as the China Peniel Missionary Society 中華便以利會) in Hong Kong in December 1909. Initially they moved to Macau to learn Cantonese. They then assisted in an orphanage in Shiu Hing (now Zhaoqing) on the shores of the Xijiang River (West River), but Edna's deteriorating health forced them to plan to return to the US for medical treatment. En route home, Edna died in January 1912 in Kobe, Japan of small pox.
Reiton married Rose Etta Femmer (died 25 July 1957 in Hong Kong) in Portland, Oregon on 20 January 1913 and they returned to Hong Kong on 4 March 1913. They served at the orphanage in Shiu Hing, before moving to Shatau (now Sha Tau Kok) to work as evangelists. On 22 November 1914 they opened the Yaumati Peniel Mission on Shanghai Street in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Soon this hall was too small to accommodate the crowds and the Mission was relocated to a former ginger factory. In 1928 the Reitons opened their first Bible Training School with Miss Alta Myers as head of the school. Initially twelve men and women enrolled. In 1930 another church was opened on Cheung Chau island 12 kilometres southwest of Hong Kong.
The Mission had ministries in Koonchung in Guangdong province, as well as in Kowloon, Shamshuipo, and Yaumati in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.
Among those baptised by Reiton was famous Chinese evangelist John Sung (29 September 1901 – 18 August 1944):John Sung, the "Billy Graham of China", was asked to baptize at Peniel Mission Church in Hong Kong. "But I have never been baptized by immersion myself." Therefore, on his request, missionary Rev. Reiton baptized him first, and he in turn baptized 21 women and 12 men! (Encyclopedia of 15,000 Illustrations)
From 1939, the Reiton's daughter, Helen Elizabeth Reiton (born 12 June 1916 in Hong Kong; died 14 December 2005) and her husband, Robert (Bob) Bruce Hammond (born 1 March 1914 in Hong Kong; died 2 September 2002), whom she married on 16 June 1939 in Pasadena, California, returned to Hong Kong in November 1939 to assist the Reitons as missionaries. After the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in 1942, the Peniel missionaries hid for 46 days, before being interned at the Stanley Internment Camp on Hong Kong island for six months before being repatriated back to the USA on 29 June 1942 - initially aboard the Asama Maru to Lourenço Marques, Portuguese East Africa (now Maputo, Mozambique). On 22 July 1942 they were transferred to the Swedish ship, "MS Gripsholm (1925)" for the final leg to New York.(Hammond)
After completing his education at the Pasadena College of the Church of the Nazarene in 1945, Bob Hammond started a missionary radio programme in June 1945 on KGER, a Christian radio station in Long Beach, California to raise funds for the ministry in China and throughout Asia. As many as 50,000 people listened on a regular basis. This programme continued for 46 years.
V.O.C.A. and other Asian Nations (1946) After World War 2, the missionaries returned. They organised themselves as the Voice of China (later Voice of China and Asia - V.O.C.A.) Missionary Society, an interdenominational missionary agency based in Pasadena, California.