Maria Woodworth-Etter

Maria Woodworth-Etter married a farmer, bore six children, and buried five of them. She began preaching in 1880, at thirty-five, with no training and no invitation anyone had asked for, and by the mid-1880s she was pitching a tent that seated eight thousand. Her meetings were famous and infamous for the same reason: people fell where they stood and lay for hours in what she called trances, and the press turned it into a spectacle. She was hauled into court in Indiana on the claim that she was practicing hypnotism and driving people insane; the case collapsed. In 1912 she preached in Dallas for F. F. Bosworth and became one of the bridges between the older holiness healing ministries and the new Pentecostal movement. She built a tabernacle in Indianapolis at seventy-four and was preaching in it until months before her death.