White, Mrs. Mollie Alma. Looking Back from Beulah; On the overruling and forming hand of God in the poverty and struggles of childhood, the hardships of later years, the battles, victories and joys of The Sanctified Life, the discovery of the path that led to it. The apostasy of the modern church, with scriptural subjects and comments, pentecostal work. Bound Brook, NJ: Pentecostal Union (Pillar of Fire), 1910.
Black pebble cloth with gilt decoration, 5 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches, portrait of the author with additional illustrations, 343 pp. plus adverts, small bump to top page corner tips. Good. Hardcover. [5177]
Alma Bridwell White (1862-1946), b. Kinniconick, KY; d. Zarapheth, NJ. In 1882 Alma Bridwell was a school teacher in the Montana Territory, where she met Kent White, a Methodist seminarian. They married, and Alma became active in leading the singing and occasionally speaking during church meetings in Colorado, where her husband pastored several small churches. In March 1893 a spiritual experience of “entire sanctification” energized Alma and she began to organize a series of revival meetings in which “she attempted to recover the fervor and piety of primitive Methodism. Her zealous emotionalism, together with her outspoken criticism of the decorous accommodations of the Methodist hierarchy, brought down the wrath of conservative churchmen on White and her husband, who was transferred to a still less desirable pastorate. She eventually persuaded him to resign altogether. For a time the couple traveled and evangelized together in Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, and in December 1901 White founded the Methodist Pentecostal Union Church in Denver, Colorado. She was ordained an elder in the new sect in March 1902, the same year she published Looking Back from Beulah, about the course of her life leading to the founding of her church.
A short time later she founded the Pentecostal Union Herald, which in 1904 was renamed the Pillar of Fire. In 1907 the headquarters of the church was moved to Zarephath, New Jersey, where a tract of land had been donated by a follower, and the sect grew rapidly. From 1904 to 1905 White made the first of 29 evangelizing missions to Great Britain. Evangelists and missionaries of the sect adopted military uniforms similar to those of the Salvation Army. In 1917 the church changed its name to the Pillar of Fire, reflecting White’s firm opposition to the rise of more primitive and undisciplined forms of pentecostalism. In 1918 she was consecrated senior bishop of the Pillar of Fire, becoming the first woman bishop of any Christian church.” – see Women in American History, by Encyclopedia Britannica.