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They Also Served: A Podcast Uncovers the Lost Stories of Women in Adventist History

March 12, 2025 | Los Angeles, Calif. | Heather Moor

A promotional graphic for new podcast "They Also Served." — The new podcast, They Also Served: Stories of Adventist Women, by Adventist historian, educator, researcher, and author Heidi Olson Campbell, highlights the contributions of women to the Seventh-day Adventist Church and American Christianity as a whole. Photo provided by Adventist Learning Community

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 Adventist and historian Dr. Heidi Olson Campbell created a podcast exploring the untold stories of women in Adventist history. Borrowing its namesake from Ava Covington’s important work, each of the twelve episodes of They Also Served: Stories of Adventist Women details the story of one or more incredible women whose impact on the Seventh-day 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 like Charlotte Blake, among the first Black women 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.

Subscribe to They Also Served: Stories of Adventist Women on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform, and uncover the untold stories of the women who shaped Adventism, American Christianity, and the world.

Heidi Olson Campbell, host of new podcast They Also Served: Stories of Adventist Women

Listen Links

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-also-served-stories-of-adventist-women/id1710398149

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4b1jCLfWLL3u5rhTJo7Zun?si=fbc36ca9938d4364

YoutubeMusic: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnPjGoqHCdBCB04x-9rIC4KHR_QPQLCD_

Podbean: https://theyalsoserved.podbean.com/

Click here to follow They Also Served Podcast on Facebook, and click here to follow it on Instagram.

About Heidi Olson Campbell

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

Heidi 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.

— Heather Moor is a project manager with Adventist Learning Community.

[1] Ava Covington, They Also Served (1940; Takoma Park, Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, n.d.), 5.

[2] George Eliot is the pen name of English author Mary Ann Evans.

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