Marie Stephany

Marie Stephany was born in 1878 to a Catholic family in the remote mountains of the Austrian-Hungarian border (Dalton 3). As the seventh of twelve children, she had a very difficult childhood, receiving little formal education. At the age of 12, she joined some of her family who had emigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, though she soon after struck out on her own in search of employment as a housekeeper. Living on her own with little help from her family, she experienced many miraculous healings and provisions as she moved back and forth across the United States, culminating in an encounter with Jesus while cleaning an employer’s home that drove her to worship him as Lord. 

As a young adult in America, Stephany’s faith journey led her through a series of relationships, including a brief engagement to an actor that she broke off when he refused to change his life and become a Christian (Dragon 45). In 1904, following a hospitalization and miraculous healing, she adopted an unwanted two-month-old child she named “Gloria.” This act of grace caused people to question her morals, with many suspecting her of having the child out of marriage. During Stephany’s second furlough in 1936, Gloria, now married with a son, informed her that after 14 years of searching she had found her birth mother, finally clearing Stephany of the charges of promiscuity (Dragon ch. 6).

Confident in her savior, but unsure of the religious landscape, Stephany explored a variety of religious traditions in her effort better to understand who this God was who was speaking to her with increasing frequency: Roman Catholicism, Christian Science, theosophy, and an independent Baptist church all failed to fully honor the God she knew. Finally, in Los Angeles in 1906, everything came together: Marie Stephany was filled with the Holy Spirit, hearing at the same time a clear call from God to go as a missionary to China (Dalton 3–4).

Unfortunately, Stephany lacked both the education and finances to obey God’s call to China. In 1914 she enrolled at the Beulah Heights Bible School in North Bergen, New Jersey to train for ministry. Through God’s miraculous provision and guidance, Stephany graduated in May 1916, rapidly raised the $1000 US needed for her outfit, and on Thanksgiving Day of that same year stepped off the ocean liner at the North China port of Tianjin. 

Now 37 years of age, Marie Stephany began her two years of language study in Taiyuan, Shanxi. While on a mountain retreat during her second year, her heart was deeply stirred as she looked down towards the many towns stretched out across the plain below. “Oh Lord,” she prayed, “send someone to take Christ to those villages.”

Following completion of language studies in 1918, Stephany recalled that mountain top prayer and settled in the village of “Huei Ren” or Huairen [怀人] on the plain to the south of Taiyuan (Dragon 64). The home she rented was in disrepair, but once again God miraculously supplied the funds she needed through a surprise visit from a missionary who travelled 25 miles to hand her the precise amount she needed, explaining, “the Lord told me to give it to you” (Power 15). During one of Stephany’s evening meetings a young boy named Peter was baptized. In later years he became one of her key local evangelists (Dragon 69). Stephany also applied from Huairen to the US Assemblies of God [神召会] headquarters to be accepted as an ordained member of the denomination, receiving her credentials on May 17, 1919.

With three locals ready to preach to the budding fellowship in Huairen, Stephany followed the prompting of the Holy Spirit to expand her ministry. In 1920, she moved to the village of “Ta Ch’ang” or Dachang, near the county seat of Taiyuan County [太原县大常镇], where she spent the rest of her years in China (“qian nian shangye”).

Following the 1920–21 North China famine, Stephany—perhaps encouraged by her earlier experience rearing Gloria—began paying beggars small sums of cash to bring her abandoned babies. As Stephany later explained, 

The Province of Shansi is considered one of the most prosperous in China, but because of the lack of rain, much of the ground is so poor, that the people have not been able to raise their grain, but they still have had to pay heavy taxes to carry on the war and this has caused much suffering. On account of this fact the baby boys are sold, up until the time they are old enough to recognize their parents; no one wants them after that time. Baby girls on the other hand, are either drowned at birth or thrown into the field to become the prey of dogs or wolves (“How the Gospel Reached” 10).

From this point on the mission station often had orphans under their care, eventually ministering to 45 girls and 12 boys (Stewart 21). Stephany became known locally by the name “Mother Peace,” with many of the orphans she brought up later serving as evangelists and pastors. 

Opium production and consumption were prevalent throughout southern Shanxi in the 1920s and 1930s. Stephany’s written accounts of her life and ministry in Shanxi are filled with stories of families, homes, and physical bodies wrecked by opium addiction. Yet they also include many miraculous deliverances of husbands and wives who were seized by the Gospel and then turned away from their addiction towards serving God and their neighbors through the church. Stephany, writing in the 1930s, claimed “Among the several hundred professed Christians in our work, the majority were dope fiends before they found Christ. Also, at least thirty of my forty workers had been dope addicts” (Dragon 104). 

Stephany left China for her first furlough on July 3 1923, leaving Mr. and Mrs. Balthasar August Theodor Bard of the AGM to “maintain her station while she is in America.” She returned in December 1926, accompanied by new recruits Alice Stewart and Henrietta Tieleman to join in her ministry on the plains south of Taiyuan (“How the Gospel Reached” 10). Unfortunately, they were soon ordered by the American Consul to leave Shanxi Province due to anti-Christian violence. From April through September 1927, the Dachang team lived in Tianjin and briefly Beidaihe, waiting for permission to return to their station. Stephany remembers this as a sweet time of ecumenical fellowship, with missionaries from many societies gathering daily for 6:00 am prayer meetings to seek an end to the violence. During these few months she also enjoyed nightly worship services led by prominent missionaries such as Jonathan Goforth, Frederick Howard Taylor and his wife Geraldine Guinness Taylor (Dragon 95–96).

Shortly after returning to Dachang, Stephany was struck down with a terrible fever, most likely typhus contracted from nursing a local Bible woman. Stephany was bedridden with arms “like hot pokers” for six weeks, as Alice Stewart nursed her burning body. Robbed of physical strength, Stephany was unable to hear and could tolerate no light. The Christian community prayed desperately for her life to be spared. When a Chinese doctor was summoned from the mission hospital in Taigu, Stephany suddenly found the strength to reject his ministrations, declaring: “I haven’t had a doctor for thirty years, but have trusted the Lord.” Eventually the fever broke and Stephany began to recover, though her hair fell out and she needed dark glasses even indoors to protect her eyes. This continued until her birthday on December 12, when during a service of thanksgiving for her deliverance, “the Holy Spirit came down quickening Sister Stephany’s body so that the hair stopped falling out and her eyes were healed too” (Stewart 47-50).

A small Bible school was opened in 1928 to train up local evangelists. Initially, “Brother” Bard was involved in running the school, but he and his wife soon moved to Beijing where in 1936 he established the North China Bible Institute (sometimes called the Truth Bible Institute) (Berley 101; Stewart 38–40). Stephany, Stewart, and Tieleman sustained the Dachang school, training up a generation of Chinese evangelists for Shanxi and beyond. In that first class was “a very stupid looking man” who “looked like a murderer.” Despite his difficulties studying, this former soldier went on to become one of the first native evangelists to Mongolia (Dragon 100–101). He quickly embraced the nomadic lifestyle of the local people, soliciting funds from Stephany for a cart, ox and tent so he could participate in Mongolian life (Dragon 109).

By 1934 the three single women of the Assemblies of God Mission in Dachang were overseeing 15 or 16 outstations, including a station in Mongolia. Recent fighting in Shanxi had forced them to close their station in the nearby capital city of Taiyuan, “but the work has gone on in the villages, and many have come to our place for refuge” (Power 9). With their team of 35 local evangelists, Bible women, and colporteurs, the ministry surrounding the Dachang mission had grown enough to support the construction of a new chapel with room for 800-1000 worshippers (Power 12). They also had two big tents from World War 1 which they set up outside different villages for revival meetings. In the spring and fall, Stephany dispatched Stewart and Tieleman to conduct the two-month long revivals in their old World War I army tent, after they invited the new converts to start their own fellowship. If the locals agreed to provide a meeting site and pay for its upkeep, Stephany would supply and fund a local pastor. This method eventually grew the mission to 20 stations, five of which were also opium refuges (Stewart 25, 38).

As fighting expanded across Shanxi, rumors reached the missionaries and their flock of violence and torture at the hands of Communists. On one occasion in 1936 when attack seemed imminent, Stephany and the Dachang Christians gathered in the church to pray, claiming the promise of Psalm 91:7 that “a thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.” According to Stephany’s biographer, “twelve believers were filled with the Holy Spirit, and a great wave of peace enveloped the congregation.” None of the believers attached to the station came to any harm (Dalton 5). 

Stephany left soon after on her second furlough, leaving Stewart and Tieleman to maintain the mission, including the orphanage and Bible school. When the Japanese occupied the Taiyuan area in October of 1937, the missionaries were allowed to continue living and working in Dachang. Stephany returned in 1939, having had little news of her sisters and brothers in Shanxi. She rejoiced to see the newly completed thousand-seat chapel, and to meet the 24 students enrolled in their local four-month Bible school, even as another 12 local believers were in Beijing attending Bard’s more rigorous North China Bible Institute (Dalton 5).

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Stephany, Stewart, and Tieleman were labeled prisoners of war and, while they were not interned, their property was occupied and the orphans allowed to remain only through miraculous intervention (Stewart 86–89). Conditions deteriorated until the summer of 1942 when the Japanese repatriated the three American missionaries in a prisoner exchange (Stewart 102–6). At the age of 63, Stephany handed over the Dachang mission and all its outstations to her colleagues and the many local sisters and brothers she had served with during her 26 years in China. She passed away peacefully at the Bethany Retirement Home in Lakeland, Florida on November 28, 1962 (Dalton 18). 

1. ^This is a guess for the village near Yuci that Stephany mentions: there is at present no known Chinese language record of where Stephany served.
2. ^Dachang Village still exists today, located in Taiyuan’s Qingxu County, Jiyi Township [太原市清徐县集义乡] about 40 kilometers south of Taiyuan and 25 kilometers east of the Qingxu county seat—not far from Yuci [榆次] and Taigu [太谷]. The village was visited recently by workers with today’s Assemblies of God World Missions. They were received by a small gathering of local believers who still preserve the memory of Stephany and her colleagues. The thousand-seat church, alas, no longer stands.