30 Facts About Olive Winchester

Olive May Winchester was an American ordained minister and a pioneer biblical scholar and theologian in the Church of the Nazarene, who was in 1912 the first woman ordained by any trinitarian Christian denomination in the United Kingdom, the first woman admitted into and graduated from the Bachelor of Divinity course at the University of Glasgow, and the first woman to complete a Doctor of Theology degree from the divinity school of Drew University.

On October 2,1892, Charles Olive Winchester was killed after an explosion in his hotel after he was spraying a room for bedbugs, and is interred at the Yankton City Cemetery.

In 1895 Olive Winchester became a Christian and later became an early member of the Association of Pentecostal Churches of America, a holiness denomination established in 1895, which subsequently merged with the Church of the Nazarene established by Phineas Bresee to form the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene in 1907.

In 1898 Olive Winchester enrolled in Radcliffe Ladies College, which was then a division of Harvard University.

Olive Winchester travelled frequently on behalf of the college, raising money and holding services in small communities that lacked regular church services.

Olive Winchester reported that she had been entirely sanctified in 1902.

Olive Winchester taught at PCI until 1909 before moving to Glasgow to study at the divinity school of the University of Glasgow.

In 1909 Olive Winchester broke a gender barrier as the first woman matriculated into the Bachelor of Divinity course at the University of Glasgow.

From 1909 Olive Winchester taught in that denomination's Parkead Holiness Bible School.

Olive Winchester arrived in Glasgow on September 10,1910, on the SS Cassandra after embarking in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

On May 11,1912, Sharpe proposed in the Sixth Annual Assembly of the Pentecostal Church of Scotland that Olive Winchester be ordained, and the all-male General Assembly agreed unanimously.

On May 11,1912, Winchester was ordained in a special service led by Rev George J Kunz at 4.00pm Parkhead, Glasgow, Scotland by the Pentecostal Church of Scotland, thus becoming the first woman ever ordained by any Christian denomination in Scotland.

Olive Winchester resided in this home with George and Jane Sharpe and their family, and three of the students.

In 1913 Olive Winchester urged the creation of the missionary society of the Pentecostal Church of Scotland, and was elected its first president.

For several years Olive Winchester wrote to the leaders of the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene in Kansas City, Missouri, urging them to send representatives to Scotland to expedite a merger of the two denominations.

In June 1914, Olive Winchester returned to the Pentecostal Collegiate Institute in North Scituate, Rhode Island.

Olive Winchester was appointed vice-principal and head of the Theology department.

Olive Winchester's thesis was "Messianic Quotations of the Psalms in the New Testament".

In 1918 Winchester became the professor of biblical literature and theology professor at Northwest Nazarene College in Nampa, Idaho, at the invitation of its president Dr H Orton Wiley.

Olive Winchester served as the founding pastor of the Marsing, Idaho Church of the Nazarene from 24 March 1918 until 19 May 1918, until a permanent pastor was appointed.

Olive Winchester spurred further interest in that emerging discipline by contributing frequent articles on religious education to church papers and curriculum resource manuals.

President Wiley, who appreciated good talent and Olive Winchester, made her vice president of the College in 1922, and the following year she was appointed academic dean as well, holding both positions simultaneously until her resignation in 1935.

In 1925 Olive Winchester was the first woman to complete a Th.

Religious education and sociology were two additional fields of study that Olive Winchester specialized in, and both were largely learned through personal study and rigorous self-discipline.

In June 1932 Olive Winchester attended the Eighth General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene in Wichita, Kansas, as a delegate from the Idaho-Oregon District.

Olive Winchester was appointed head of the graduate department by Wiley.

Olive Winchester died on February 15,1947, at the age of 67.

Olive Winchester's books included studies of Moses, the prophets, and the life of Jesus.

Steele defended the doctrine of entire sanctification by a study of the Greek aorist, and Olive Winchester appropriated his agenda and attempted to develop it further, though this approach has since fallen out of favor with many Wesleyan-holiness biblical scholars.

In 1931, Olive Winchester wrote a series on science and religion in The Young People's Journal, a Nazarene publication for high school youth, where she had a regular column.