Earlier this month, we focused on Indigenous and popular leadership in Latin America where holiness churches of Peru and Mexico grew through the agency of local believers.
Part two of this article focuses on women whose leadership was equally decisive, including missionaries, educators, evangelists, pastoral workers and institutional leaders whose ministries shaped the church’s identity and expansion.
The Wesleyan Church’s early history in Latin America cannot be understood without attention to women’s leadership. In the holiness movement’s first decades in the region, women served as missionaries, teachers, nurses, musicians, evangelists, pastoral visitors, trainers of workers and founders of congregations. Their ministries helped shape the church’s worship, education, leadership formation and expansion in ways that deserve distinct attention.
This importance of local leadership does not diminish the contributions of the women who participated in the Latin American holiness movement. Numerous women missionaries and evangelists placed their gifts and resources at the service of the work in Latin America. Some served as teachers; others as nurses, self-taught musicians or itinerant preachers. They included both missionaries from North America and Indigenous laywomen, many of whose stories remain difficult to recover in a brief period.
One of the most important female points of reference was Nettie Winans de Soltero, wife of the Reverend Francisco Soltero and sister of Roger Winans, pioneer of the Church of the Nazarene in Peru. From 1920 until her death in 1957, she carried out a fundamental ministry in the training of workers, teaching and pastoral visitation within the work of the Pilgrim Church in Mexico. She also participated actively in worship, devoted herself to musical instruction and, during the first decades of operation of the Pilgrims’ Bible Institute, served as its director. Her work illustrates how women’s leadership joined education, worship, pastoral care and institutional formation in the early holiness churches. The Winans were undoubtedly one of the most influential families in the history of the holiness churches in Latin America, and their work therefore deserves a broader and more careful historical study.
Women’s participation in Wesleyan ministry during those first decades was not limited to foreign missionaries. Latin American women also exercised decisive leadership, including María Velásquez López, who during the 1920s was a prominent church member and contributed to the consolidation of the work and to the formation of its identity in Peru.
Esperanza Paredes also stood out. Together with Leandro Rivera, she gave continuity and fresh momentum to the work in Bambamarca during the second half of the 1940s, showing how local women helped sustain congregational life during periods of transition.
Even more notable was the legacy of Hermelinda Leonor Camacho, an Indigenous Christian leader of Quechua origin and a decisive figure in the expansion of the Holiness Church in the Peruvian Andes between 1937 and 1957. Through itinerant preaching, pastoral ministry and her participation in the opening and consolidation of various congregations, Camacho helped root the holiness movement in the highland region of La Libertad, particularly the corridor formed by Quiruvilca, Cachicadán, Huamachuco, Santiago de Chuco, and Mollepata.
The women named here were part of a wider pattern of local and Indigenous participation that shaped the holiness movement’s regional identity. Their ministries also show how evangelism, education, pastoral care and community leadership often overlapped in the early work.
The first communities of the Holiness Church and the Pilgrim Holiness Church arose in territories with a notable Indigenous presence, particularly in the towns of the Jequetepeque Valley in northern Peru and among the communities of the Huasteca Potosina in Mexico. This context matters because women’s leadership developed within communities where local trust, family networks and Indigenous participation were essential to communicating the gospel and consolidating the work.
The participation of local leaders was indispensable for the expansion of the holiness gospel. As itinerant preachers, evangelists, and founders of congregations, they were not mere assistants to the missionaries, but protagonists in the establishment and growth of the work. Women’s leadership belonged within the same pattern of collaboration and initiative, extending from public evangelism to family and community networks. In at least one case, this collaboration also reached family life when the foreign missionary Isabel Baker married the Indigenous leader Melchor Vásquez in 1915.
Consequently, the roots of today’s Wesleyan Church in these Latin American regions were deeply Indigenous and grassroots. Its first congregations were made up largely of families of humble means connected to agricultural labor and other trades. This social composition also characterized much of its leadership and helps explain why women’s ministries in evangelism, pastoral care, music, education and congregational formation left such a lasting mark on the denomination.
The ministry of women played a decisive role in the birth and consolidation of the holiness churches in Latin America. This participation was not exclusive to the Holiness Church or to the Pilgrim Holiness Church, but also characterized the beginnings of other denominations, such as the Church of the Nazarene, the Church of God of Cleveland and various Pentecostal churches established in the region during the first decades of the 20th century.
Although this brief article has highlighted only a few of the women who exercised spiritual, ministerial and institutional influence, their stories point to a broader reality: women were not peripheral to the beginnings of the holiness churches in Latin America. They taught, preached, visited, trained, organized, led worship, founded congregations and sustained communities through seasons of growth and transition. To tell the history of The Wesleyan Church in Latin America faithfully, then, is to recognize these women not simply as helpers of the mission, but as protagonists in the rooting and expansion of the gospel across the region. Their legacy calls for continued recovery, remembrance and gratitude.
Rev. Edinson Camacho is pastor of Iglesia Nueva Generación in Duncan, South Carolina, and REDIL director (Red de Iglesias Latinas) in the upstate of South Carolina.
*Based on the book “La historia de La Iglesia Wesleyana en América Latina: 120 años expandiendo la misión” published by Wesleyan Publishing House, Fishers, IN.
Resources:
Crisanto, S. Emiliano. “Peregrinos hasta que Cristo venga: Historia de la Iglesia Evangélica de los Peregrinos: 1903-2004.” (Ediciones Puma, 2011).
