Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Anna Mow.
Dr. Anna Mow was a Church of the Brethren missionary to India for seventeen years and later taught at Bethany Biblical Seminary in Chicago. She was one of the first women ordained in the Church of the Brethren and wrote about ten books.
She spoke at the Camps Farthest Out from 1950 into the late 1970s. Her message was grace received, and the peace that came to her in India in 1933 and never left.
Anna Beahm was born in Daleville, Virginia, on July 31, 1893. Her father, I. N. H. Beahm, was a Brethren preacher and an English teacher. “He was a preacher that went around preaching and asking for nothing.”
The family was poor. “I was raised poor.” When Anna was a girl, a doctor said her mother was dying. The family had her anointed, and she recovered. “I saw my mother healed in anointing.” Anna was baptized at eleven. At eighteen she committed her life to foreign mission service.
Anna went to school in Chicago with very little money. “And when I left home to go to school, I had $40 left after I paid my fare to Chicago. After seven years, I had $50, two degrees, and a husband.” She graduated from Manchester College in 1918 and earned a divinity degree at Bethany.
She married Baxter Mow on March 30, 1921. Before she married, she had asked her mother how she would know the right man. Her mother gave her a mother’s answer: “When you don’t ask me.” Baxter was a Greek scholar, and Anna spent the rest of her life checking things in the Bible with him.
In October 1923, Anna and Baxter sailed for India. They stayed seventeen years, working in Gujarat among Hindus and Muslims. Anna learned Gujarati and Hindustani. Baxter directed a Bible school and village work. Their three children were born in India and went to school in the hills at Landour.
For the first seven years, Anna had no great crisis of faith. Then she began to know the people around her well enough to see something she had not seen before. “I got my first doubts in India, not in college, not in seminary, but after I’d been a missionary for seven years, when I knew the language well enough to learn to know the people, and I found out that the people of India were much more religious than I was.”
At E. Stanley Jones‘s ashram at Sat Tal, Jones announced one Sunday morning that Sister Anna would speak that night. He had not asked her first. She learned to start where she was. At the Balsar station, she invited some of the young men who had been raised in the mission orphanage to tea. Twenty-six showed up in their best clothes, each carrying a Bible. The gathering became a weekly Bible hour. “Too many times we’re afraid to start little.”
The deeper crisis came after her third child was born. Anna was unwell for a couple of years, and at home she was losing her temper. Then, in 1933, three things happened in one week.
Her eight-year-old daughter rebuked her. Baxter asked what the churches in America would think if they could see her as she really was at home. And a Canadian missionary said something in a Bible class that went straight to the heart of the matter: “We are before God the size we are in our families.” Anna called it the end of Anna Mow.
That December, on her way home from Landour, she stopped with missionary friends at Ratlam. They anointed her. Something changed. “And a peace came into my heart which has never left. From that December day in 1933 to this day no matter what happens.” She went home different. “And to make a long story short, when I went home, my husband found a new wife, my children found a new mother.”
Another woman on the mountainside gave Anna a thought that stayed with her for the rest of her life. “The most comforting, encouraging thing that ever happened to me was this thought: that when I see I have failed in anything, it is evidence that I’m walking in the light.” Anna never forgot it. “For 44 years, I haven’t kicked myself.” That was the peace she carried into everything that followed.
Anna and Baxter returned from India in 1940, and for eighteen years she taught at Bethany Biblical Seminary in Chicago. She taught the life of Christ, missions, Christian education, and spiritual life. Their home across from the seminary was open to visitors from India and Afghanistan, who called her Sister Anna. Nehru’s nieces even spent a Christmas with the family.
In 1943 she met Rosalind Rinker at one of E. Stanley Jones’s ashrams. Anna recognized something in Rinker and encouraged her to step out and use her gifts. “She’s a great woman with great common sense and great gifts of discernment.”
Anna also became one of the first women ordained in the Church of the Brethren. She never experienced the resistance that many women in ministry faced. “In all my life, as a missionary, as a teacher, in a theological seminary, and out in the churches, even some of the plainest churches, I have never been discriminated against as a woman.”
Anna was active in Chicago CFO, and in 1950 she spoke at its retreat. What she loved about CFO was what it did not demand of people. There was no need to prove that you were more spiritual than anyone else. “I tell you that I believe honestly, that the greatest contribution that the camp farthest out has made to the kingdom of heaven, is that you are not spiritual snob.”
She continued speaking at camps for decades, including Michigan in 1965, Ohio in 1970 with Roland Brown, and West Virginia and Kanuga in 1977. Roland Brown had known her since before 1940. He knew what was underneath her teaching. “But her heart and soul is in helping people to go all the way with Jesus.”
About 1958 Anna and Baxter retired to Roanoke, Virginia. Retirement did not mean becoming quiet. She continued speaking at retreats, ashrams, and men’s breakfasts and kept writing. Among her books were Say Yes to Life and Your Child from Birth to Rebirth.
At eighty-two she said she had freedoms she had never had before. Once she won a magazine sweepstakes: thirty days in Europe with her daughter Lois. She called it the first vacation of her life. But the thing she remembered most was the envelope. It had to be opened. She kept the envelope for years because it became a picture of grace. What good was a gift if you never took it?
That was how Anna taught grace. “I say to you, help yourself to the grace of God.” Grace was not something to admire from a distance. It was something to receive. She taught the work of the Holy Spirit just as plainly. “The Holy Spirit is not a substitute for an absent Lord, but the agent of his living presence.”
She and Baxter also spent time working through difficult passages together. In Ephesians 5, she pointed out that verse 22 has no verb of its own in the Greek. Its verb comes from verse 21: “be subject to one another.” The larger command reaches back to verse 18: “be filled with the Spirit.” For Anna, that changed the meaning of authority. Headship was not domination. It was service. “The world power is power over other people. Kingdom power is always for the benefit of other people.”
She liked her theology plain. “I’m fundamental. I don’t want to be ist.” And she had learned not to confuse spiritual excitement with maturity. “And with years, I found out that it is a much more mature thing to walk and not grow weary than it is to fly.” Her final rule was just as characteristic: “We must be in earnest, but not too serious.”
Anna Mow died on July 7, 1985, at ninety-one. She had gone to India as a young missionary and discovered that the people she was serving knew something about God that she had not yet learned. She came home having discovered grace for herself. From then on, she spent the rest of her life telling other people to take it. Help yourself to the grace of God.
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.