Alma Bridwell White was the founder and a bishop of the Pillar of Fire Church.
Background
Alma Bridwell White was born on June 16, 1862 on a farm on Kinniconick Creek, in Lewis County, Ky. , the fifth daughter and seventh of eleven children of William Moncure Bridwell, a tanner and small farmer from Virginia, and Mary Ann (Harrison) Bridwell, a native of Kentucky. According to her autobiography, Alma (christened Mollie Alma) passed a blighted, toilsome childhood. Her melancholiac mother was harsh and exacting. "Deeply convicted of sin" at the age of nine, Alma White was later to recall the absence of religious guidance as the most painful burden of her early life. Though both parents were religious in children to church. In 1878, however, Alma un-a gloomy way, neither read the Bible or took the derwent a conversion experience in a revival conducted by W. B. Godbey, the learned holiness evangelist.
Education
She decided to become a teacher and began in a log schoolhouse, between her studies at the nearby Vanceburg Seminary and at the Millersburg (Ky. ) Female College. In September 1887, having become engaged to White, she enrolled in an elocution school in Denver while he studied at the University of Denver.
Career
During 1882-1883 she taught at Bannack, Mont. , where she had relatives. She then taught at various schools in the West, with a further year of study in Millersburg. A large part of her earnings went to relieve her never prosperous family. Though she verged on homeliness and was plagued by nervous and other diseases, Alma White had unusual speaking talents and a dignified appearance. At length, however, Kent White began to put a damper on his wife's enthusiasm, for she was alienating many of his friends and colleagues by her criticisms of their tepid piety and un-Methodist practices. The Whites had interminable matrimonial and theological wrangles, but Alma continued to aid in the church work and widened her contacts in the Colorado Holiness Association. Her commitment to lead in the spread of holiness was strengthened in March 1893, when she experienced the "second blessing" of entire sanctification. Her health improved, and she openly assumed the role of a female preacher, to rescue, as she claimed, the doctrines of John Wesley, repudiated by the Methodists in their rush toward middle-class decorum and modernity. Her opponents retaliated by having White demoted to a particularly wretched circuit, but his wife became even more outspoken in exposing "the cloven hoof of the devil" both in orthodox Methodism and within the holiness movement. In 1895 White withdrew from regular ministerial duties to join his wife's endeavors. The Whites now entered on a peripatetic life of open-air revivals and camp meetings, sustained solely by freewill offerings. Working from a base in Denver, they seeded several small churches and city missions in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. In December 1901 Alma White and fifty followers organized the Pentecostal Union Church, and she was ordained an elder in March 1902. That same year she published her autobiographical Looking Back from Beulah, explaining her course and defending the right of women to preach. Her organization was soon publishing the Pentecostal Union Herald (after 1904, the Pillar of Fire). Like other holiness sects, this church taught the imminence of Christ's return, exercised stringent discipline in dress and conduct, banned tobacco and alcohol, and practiced divine healing. Several doctrinal peculiarities distinguished the church, but the chief point of separation from other holiness groups was its insistence on maintaining a strict Wesleyan standard. The Pillar of Fire, as it was known after 1917, tended to regard other holiness churches--including the largest, the Church of the Nazarene--as "derelict" or "counterfeit" professors of holiness. It was a church for plain people, characterized by a rapturous liberty of worship that one British reporter called "no more than old-time Methodism". Converts (among them Alma's father and several of her siblings) "shouted for joy" to the music of street organ, piano, or snare drum, while skipping and bounding in the "holy dance. " But even as she encouraged this release of holy emotions, Alma White bitterly attacked a new development within the holiness movement, that of pentecostalism. Although glossolalia and associated phenomena had recurred in the historic church, she assailed the pentecostalists for practicing a "latter day sorcery. " Pentecostalism thrived in spite of such opposition. The winter of 1904-1905 saw White's first revival in England (she made nearly thirty transatlantic evangelistic tours in all). As fresh accessions came in this country, she had a "leading" to move the church's headquarters from Denver to Zarephath, N. J. , which was accomplished in 1906-1908. In Zarephath, White adopted military uniforms for the evangelists and missionaries, along the lines of the Salvation Army. Over the next three decades her church launched extensive publishing and educational enterprises, including two radio stations. In these her sons, both Columbia University graduates, played a large role. She was at last consecrated bishop in 1918. Though her sons were ordained to the Pillar of Fire ministry, Kent White broke with his family and left the church after the move to Zarephath, going over to the pentecostalists. White's six-volume The Story of My Life (1919 - 1934) recounts her side of the break and reveals her sense of mission to the world, as shown through biblical prophecy and typology and the guidance of her visions and dreams. Of her other numerous books, the most interesting are Hymns and Poems (1931), with its emphases on the blood sacrifice of Christ and the joyous assurance of the sanctified; and The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy (1925), in which she abandoned the holiness movement's traditional hostility to secret societies to endorse the Klan's populistic and no-popery aims, as a patriotism based in Scripture. Alma White died of heart disease at Zarephath, just five months before the death of her son Ray, and was buried in Fairmont Cemetery, Denver. Her church of more than 4, 000 members had established Alma White College and other preparatory and Bible schools in Denver, Zarephath, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles. Among the congregations was a branch in London, which issued a British Pillar of Fire. The church continued its missions to the impoverished and unschooled. Alma White's career, like that of the jaunty Aimee Semple McPherson, was one of ministry to a class of people shunned by or disaffected from the mainstream churches.
