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By Tracy McNeal

On April 29, we celebrate the 99^th birthday of Eunice Mathews. This article was originally written by Tracy McNeal for the Board of Global Ministries April 30, 2004.

It’s not every day that The United Methodist Church gets the opportunity to honor one of its leading lights before her years of history-making have passed into memory.

Yet, on April 29, 2004, the Church paid tribute to Mrs. Eunice Jones Mathews “a living legend in The United Methodist Church’s distinguished history of mission” with a special reception at General Conference 2004 as she celebrated her 90^th birthday.

During a brief suspension in legislative proceedings, an energetic Eunice Mathews was warmly introduced to the General Conference by R. Randy Day, the then general secretary of the General Board of Global Ministries, before taking to the podium herself, where she was welcomed by a standing ovation.

Between intermittent applause and appreciative shouts, Eunice expressed gratitude for the conference’s recognition and the special reception that followed. “will certainly remember it for the rest of my days,” she said.

After emphasizing her respect for her parents, “whose combined missionary service totaled 108 years,” and her pride at “having served with [her] husband in five different episcopal areas,” she made a statement that displayed the very freedom of spirit inspiring her lifework and myriad achievements.

“I do not have to be identified as the daughter of E. Stanley Jones, nor do I have to be identified as the wife of my husband [Bishop James K. Mathews] but I do have permission to be myself, and this is in the freedom of Jesus Christ.”

A cursory glance at the trajectory of Eunice Mathews’ life reveals a design of sorts, patterned by United Methodism’s remarkable record of missionary service. She was born on April 29, 1914, to Methodism’s premier missionary couple of the twentieth century, Dr. E. Stanley Jones and Mabel Lossing Jones.

Growing up in Lucknow, India, Eunice Mathews witnessed her parents plant the seeds of God’s word and nurture them into sizable, self-sustaining Methodist communities. Among these was a boys’ primary school in northern India launched by Eunice’s mother, a pioneering woman whose efforts flouted her generation’s strict gender restrictions and paved the way for women instructors to teach male students in the region. In addition to providing her daughter’s home-tutelage, which included English lessons to supplement Eunice’s native Hindustani,

Mrs. Jones also served on the governing board of Asia’s first Christian institution of higher learning for women, presently named Isabella Thoburn College after its founder, another groundbreaking Methodist and woman missionary.

Soon after attending Wellesley Girls' School in Naini Tal, India, and later matriculating from American University in Washington D.C., Eunice began her own extensive career in humanitarian work and missionary service. She joined and assisted her father, whose lectures and writings took him around the world, and revolutionized missionary thinking by encouraging individuals to receive Christ within the framework of their unique indigenous contexts. It was while accompanying her father on a lecture circuit in India that Eunice made the acquaintance of James K. Mathews, to whom she was wed on June 1, 1940.

Sixty-three years of marriage later, Eunice Mathews and her husband, a retired bishop and former associate general secretary at the Board of Missions of The Methodist Church, have proclaimed the Gospel of Jesus Christ on six continents, faithfully ordering their lives by the scriptural mandate, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Bishop Mathews died in September 2010.)

Her understanding and efficient professional support of her husband’s clerical responsibilities has fashioned their marriage as a coequal partnership; as Bishop Mathews writes in his autobiography A Global Odyssey, “these very memoirs should be entitled We Did It Together.:

And together they have tirelessly advocated for peace and goodwill, moving among personages such as President George A. and Mrs. Barbara Bush; President Bill and Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton; Pope Paul VI; Mahatma Gandhi; Indira Gandhi; and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Indeed, Dr. King once told Eunice of his deep appreciation for her father, “who was a personal friend and biographer of Mahatma Gandhi” because, she said, it was reading Dr. Stanley’s biography that prompted him to adopt his doctrine of non-violence in the Civil Rights Movement.

Eunice Mathews counts among her distinctions an independently researched and written book entitled Drug Abuse: Summons to Community Action, a second book co-written with her father entitled The Divine Yes, and a professorship established in her and her husband’s name at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. Nevertheless, her three children: Anne, Jan, and Stan together with her six grandchildren are undoubtedly her greatest joys.

Mrs. Mathews’ lifelong call to mission beckons her still, and she continues to answer it with enthusiasm. In fact, in 2001, only three years shy of her 90^th birthday, she and her husband traveled back to Naini Tal, India, to commemorate the 70^th anniversary of Sat Tal Christian Ashram, a renowned religious retreat founded by her father.

As a woman and United Methodist, as a scholar and spouse, as a missionary and mother, Eunice Mathews occupies a special place in The United Methodist Church one where historical legacy and future direction intersect and inform one another.