Pen of Fire

Pen of Fire tells the stirring story of one woman's efforts to move an American church to confront its racism and bring African Americans into its community during the worst period of race relations in the United States. The story is unlikely because Ellen G. White (1827-1915) was a physically small, sickly, formally uneducated white woman from Maine who claimed that God spoke to her in visions. Cofounding the Seventh-day Adventist Church with her husband, Ellen White was one of the few women who operated in the typically male domain of upper church leadership, and throughout her life she defied traditional gender norms and the patriarchy to shape Adventism more than any other figure.As charismatic leader of thousands who considered her a prophet, Ellen White guided one of just a handful of nineteenth-century American-born churches through seven epochal decades of the racial upheavals of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Through leadership that was sometimes flawed and halting—like other leaders White was often baffled at how to deal with race—she worked toward making Adventism an antiracist, inclusive, multiethnic religious community. Accessing hundreds of never-before published letters and manuscripts, Pen of Fire shows how Ellen White moved thousands of white Americans to begin to remediate the harm that America had done to African Americans, and thus helped lay the foundation for Seventh-day Adventism to become one of the most racially diverse religious communions in the United States.