The Pioneering Lady Preacher

(on right) Rev. Lilly Carr Plaugher (1900-1993)

(photo courtesy of Becky Carr Booth)

Among the memorable people we have been talking about over the past couple of years is a lady who I remember fondly from my childhood.  Back in the day, my mother would often take my late great-grandmother over to the little Pentecostal Church in the Rosendorf section of my hometown of Hendricks, WV, and the reason was deeply personal to my great-grandmother, which I will talk about shortly.  In those days, a lively little lady pastor who was also distantly related to me led that congregation, and Rev. Lilly Carr Plaugher was truly a pioneer of her time.  To give some background though, I want to first off give a little history of the church itself, then a brief snippet of the Pentecostal denomination it is part of, and then we want to talk about Sis. Plaugher.

Tucker County has always been an area in which many people had a deep and very zealous Christian faith, and this was expressed in many of the churches established in the area.  In the early 1900's, my great-grandfather, Rev. Charles Judson Strahin, was a circuit-riding minister who held credentials with both the Dunkards and the United Brethren denominations, and he was responsible for cultivating a large number of churches in the upper Potomac Highlands region of West Virginia, including one that was started in 1919 in an old school in Hendricks, specifically Rosendorf.  According to Homer Floyd Fansler's History of Tucker County (Parsons, WV:  McClain Printing, 1962) this congregation was established as what was then called a "union church" on May 25, 1919 (Fansler, 366).  Now, let me explain what a "Union Church" was back then.  Due to financial limitations and the fact that many churches of various denominations were small in the average West Virginia town, it was common for congregations of various denominations to share a facility.  The way this normally worked was that one group would have its services on a given Sunday, while the others would have theirs on other Sundays during the month.  The devoutly religious mountain folks though did not want to just attend one service a month, so what would happen was that many of them would attend all the services in that particular church building, and some would even have multiple memberships.  And, it was also not uncommon then for ministers to serve congregations of different denominations, and some even held multiple credentials (as did my great-grandfather).  It promoted a sort of grassroots ecumenism that even today still is evident in the mindset and spiritual convictions of many back home.  Also, the various faith traditions often found shared convictions with each other - this was particularly true of the Dunkards, United Brethren, Methodists, and early Holiness denominations that emerged in that area - thus making even more common ground.  So, the result was a "Union Church," which served the needs of a diverse group of congregants from many backgrounds.  This arrangement can still even be found in some remote towns back home even today - even in the South, it is sometimes common to find Methodists and Baptists sharing church buildings in the same way.  

The Rosendorf Church in Hendricks, WV, as it appears today

In the late 1800's and early 1900's, this "Union Church" system, as well as the more conservative Wesleyan/pietist-based religion of many Appalachian Christians, made the region a fertile ground for the spread of two renewal movements - the first, in the late 1800's, was the Holiness movement, which found a ready audience among the more conservative-minded Methodists and United Brethren people of the Potomac Highlands.  Then, in 1906, the Azuza Street meetings in Los Angeles brought to prominence a variation of the Holiness tradition called Pentecostalism, and that too found a ready and eager following in the mountains.  Many early members of the "Union Churches" as well experienced powerful revivals in which Pentecostal spirituality renewed congregations, thus necessitating proper changes to these churches.  One of those impacted by this phenomenon was the Rosendorf Church in Hendricks.  Cleta Long, whose supplemental Tucker County history published in 1996 included a more detailed account of the origins of the Rosendorf Church than did Fansler's, notes that in the early days the budding Pentecostal congregation was one of those groups who shared in the "Union Church" fellowship, but the emotional manifestations and lively worship of the Pentecostal congregation was not without its controversy for the time, and on occasions disputes did happen, which was unfortunate for all parties involved.  In some cases, according to Long, the meetings were forced to be held outside the church facility in Emmett Cross's granary nearby in those early days (Cleta Long, History of Tucker County, p. 162).  In time though, Sis. Plaugher became the pastor of the church (sources I have say that occurred in 1939), and also in due course of time and events, the Pentecostals eventually were able to gain possession of the building (which happened I believe prior to Sis. Plaugher's leadership), which they kept to this very day - my estimation as to when that happened was the late 1920's or early 1930's.  By this time, many of the other congregations who were part of the original "Union Church" experiment were long gone, and my great-grandfather, Charles Judson Strahin, had passed away by 1933.  So, in a sense, the Pentecostals deserve merit for keeping the spiritual legacy of this old church alive.

When Sis. Plaugher took over the pastoral leadership of the young Pentecostal congregation, the need for a covering arose, and soon the little church became part of a denomination called the Pentecostal Church of God.  The origins of the Pentecostal Church of God go back to 1919, when a group of Assemblies of God members withdrew from the parent body in protest of what it felt was an imposed rigidity of codified statements of faith - the A/G adopted its Statement of Fundamental Truths back in 1916, not long after its founding, and they have been the governing convictions of the A/G to this day.  The Pentecostal Church of God faction didn't disagree with the beliefs contained in the statement, but rather the rigidity of codification.  The new group formed under the leadership of former A/G Executive presbyter John C. Sinclair as the Pentecostal Assemblies of the USA, but adopted its present name in 1922 after some organizational growing pains happened. The group was initially headquartered in Chicago, but after a series of subsequent moves it settled in Joplin, MO, where its headquarters remained up until 2011, when a series of devastating tornadoes forced a move (W.E. Warner, "Pentecostal Church of God," in Burgess, McGee, and Alexander, Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements {Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988}p. 701).  Its current offices are housed in Bedford TX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentecostal_Church_of_God).  It is still a pretty large denomination, and in my native Tucker County, they managed to start 2 congregations within a few miles of each other - one was the Rosendorf Church, and the other was in nearby Hambleton, which was for many years pastored by Sis. Plaugher's younger brother Floyd.  In 1988, Floyd also took over the pastorate of the Rosendorf Church until his passing in 2008.  His great-grandson, Adam Snyder (whose mother, Becky, has been such a tremendous help with all this information) is the current pastor of the church, which although small in number is still a very vibrant and active congregation.  

Sis. Plaugher herself was a lifelong resident of Tucker County, having been born there in 1900 to the late Oliver Homer and Louisa Carr.  Somewhere back in the family tree, she is also distantly related to me, as Oliver Homer Carr was himself the great-grandson of Solomon Carr (1805-1866) and Susannah Lambert (1809-1900) - their daughter, Angeline Carr (b. 1857), was my 3rd great-grandmother.   So, Sis. Plaugher was family.  She is credited by Cleta Long as being the first lady minister in Tucker County, although there were two other contemporaries who could be worthy contenders of that title - one is Wilma Waybright, who for decades carried on the ministerial duties at the Sugarlands Dunkard Church (Wilma Waybright is the daughter of Rev. Stanley Waybright, who pastored Whitedale Church in Terra Alta - his son LaVerne was a classmate of mine in high school and a good buddy, but we were also 5th cousins too), and the other was Rev. Iris Skipper, who pastored the Glad Tidings Assembly of God congregation on Location north of Saint George.   Whatever the case, Sis. Plaugher still had an amazing legacy of her own, and that rich heritage is still carried on today with her own family, as they continue to lead that little church in Rosendorf.  I remember going up there a lot with Mom when I was a kid, and the lively services - one thing in particular was a member of the congregation, Junior Knotts, who used to play a guitar-and-harmonica contraption as part of the worship.  The place frankly scared me as a young boy, as the Pentecostals tended to be lively and the end-times talk that characterized many of the sermons then could be a bit disconcerting for a 7-year-old (it wasn't what they said that was wrong though, but rather my mixed-up mother going off on tangents with it later).  And, although our family had some strong ties to that little church, in reality Granny was more at home attending the Free Methodist church in town, where she went faithfully for many years.  But, for the most part overall, many of the people who attended Sis. Plaugher's little church in Rosendorf were good folks, very devout, and the memory I had of them was that they were a people who really lived out their convictions.  A lot of that is due to the capable leadership of their pastor, as Sis. Plaugher led them well.

As an Anglo-Catholic today, for the most part I would personally be opposed to women clergy, but not to women preachers - God has raised up some tremendous women over the decades to proclaim his Word, and whether they should be pastors or not is something that would be more of a theological issue, but the Bible and the tradition of the Church doesn't seem to have an issue with women preaching the Word - actually, even in our Church we have a strong tradition of the ministry of the deaconess, and that has its precedence in various passages of Scripture, particularly Joel 2:28.  I believe that Sis. Plaugher personally was one of those great lady preachers, and the only regrettable thing is that she didn't have more of her great legacy preserved, as many younger Pentecostals could use that today.  Her grand-nephew Adam is also doing a fine job of providing spiritual leadership to that little congregation, and in a sense, he is the living legacy of that great heritage.  Any rate, I wanted to share Sis. Plaugher's story here today, and hopefully it will inspire others who read about it.