March 14, 2025

A Podcast Uncovers the Lost Stories of Women in Adventist History

Resource shares the experiences of mostly unsung heroines of Adventism’s early days.

by

Heather Moor

In 1940 the Review and Herald Publishing Association published a book with a dark-blue cover that you have probably never seen, written by an author you likely do not know. On the front are three words—They Also Served—and the name: Covington.

This book, written and researched by Ava Covington Wall roughly 80 years after the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, was the first book detailing the many women who contributed to the church’s founding and growth, who have “pioneered with the pioneers, stood by their side, some even going before them.”[1] Yet their stories are still not widely known.

Out of print for more than 80 years, this now-elusive book offers just a glimpse of the many women involved in the early Adventist denomination. Many more stories remain largely lost to time as generation after generation fades, their memories—and history—lost with them.

That’s why Heidi Olson Campbell, historian, created a podcast exploring the untold stories of women in Adventist history. Borrowing its namesake from Ava Covington’s important work, each of the 12 episodes of They Also Served: Stories of Adventist Womendetails the story of one or more incredible women whose impact on the Seventh-day Adventist Church and beyond was “incalculably diffusive,” to quote Middlemarch, by George Eliot[2]. Through interviews with historians and professors and her own historical research, Campbell brings these stories to life, giving a fuller picture of how American Christianity and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, as we know it, were shaped by their contributions.

These women were poets, educators, doctors, abolitionists, missionaries, writers, preachers, social reformers, and Bible instructors—women such as Charlotte Blake, among the first Black female doctors in the United States; Alma McKibbin, who defied a tragic diagnosis to become one of Adventism’s most influential Bible instructors, regardless of gender; Sojourner Truth, the famous abolitionist and activist, who was also a Millerite with close ties with Adventism; and Lucy Post, Georgia Burrus Burgess, and Anna Knight, among the first single women from the United States to serve as missionaries abroad.

About the Host

They Also Served is hosted by Heidi Olson Campbell, a historian and author who is interested in the impact of religion and politics on perceptions of gender roles in early modern Europe.

Campbell teaches in Maryland and recently defended her dissertation on Paul’s cross sermons—a site of governmental and popular religious debate during the long English Reformation. It examines how exemplars for women changed in religious rhetoric in this series of sermons during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.