Alice Luce

Alice Eveline Luce was born in 1873 in England. She was raised in an Anglican home, and she became a missionary early in life. She served with the Church Missionary Society in India, where she worked among women and girls at the beginning of the twentieth century. She learned to speak the language of the people and she gave herself to the care of the poor. She was educated and capable and had a strong gift for teaching.

While she was home on furlough, around 1909, she came across the Pentecostal movement, which was spreading around the world, and she received the baptism of the Spirit. She decided to leave the Anglican mission and joined the Pentecostal churches. She moved to the United States and made her home in California. She became part of the Assemblies of God and gave herself to the work of training missionaries and ministers.

She turned her attention to the Spanish-speaking people of the American Southwest and Mexico. She saw that the Pentecostal movement was spreading quickly among Mexican believers and that there were few trained leaders. She helped to start Bible schools to train Hispanic workers, including a school in San Diego. She taught the Bible and she made sure that students learned to read the Scriptures well. She was also a writer and wrote about the principles of missions, urging that missionary work should aim to build churches that govern and support themselves. This view was ahead of her time, and it later became a standard idea in missionary work.

She is remembered as one of the early voices who spoke for the self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating church. She stressed that the native church should be led by its own people, and she warned against missionaries who held on to control. These ideas shaped the missionary strategy of the Assemblies of God and are still taught.

The record of her life is limited, and what is told here is only what can be said with confidence. She lived humbly, never married and gave her working life to the training of others. She died in 1955. Her influence was felt in the leaders she helped to prepare and in the principles she championed.

Her life shows that influence does not depend on a large platform. A teacher who trains others, who gives away her authority and who lives simply can shape the course of a movement for generations.