How fitting that this gracious saint, who always praised the Lord, entered Heaven on that blessed day. She was laughing and eating breakfast with a friend, Laura, while recovering from surgery in a Baltimore, MD hospital, when she suddenly fell asleep peacefully. I met Momma in 1998, while I was preaching at a convention, with my friend, Flo Ellers, at WhiteHorse Christian Center in IN, (pastored by Jeff Johns). She was an amazing woman of God, trained by a miracle worker, Rev. Smith Wigglesworth. Momma lived Luke 4:18 and she preached it too! And she expected signs and wonders and miracles to follow, blind eyes to see, deaf ears to hear, lame to walk, and the dead to raise! She said if the pastors would pray into that and preach it, the pews wouldn’t be so empty. She lived an abandoned life. Self & the preservation of reputation, was forgotten when God wanted to move. No matter what the cost, she followed him! It was a great privilege to be ordained with her hands, and asked to travel with her for four years. We set up tents, and rented hotel ballrooms, and preached in many a pastor’s pulpit through out New England and across the Midwest. She joined me in my prayer summits too and we Team Tag Preached with the fire of God! She rarely tired, and usually slept about two hours a night.
She taught by love and example. I often felt when I looked into her eyes, aflame with the passion of some story she was delighting to recall, that it was as if I were looking at God with black skin on!
Momma, was called out by the English evangelist, Wigglesworth, whom she called Poppy, when she was only 3. He gave her father a word about a baby being born at home in the Americas. Her father, living overseas, had lost track of the dates, while working on a rig off shore. Sure enough, when he called home to Georgia, “Cutie” Mary had been born. Later Wigglesworth returned to America to anoint the 7 yr old and later again to bring the 20 yr old into an apprenticeship with him on the road.
But he told her that her real ministry would not begin until she was in her sixties. It began after a life and death experience at age sixty-two. Meanwhile, the child was visited by angels and had accurate prophecies, growing up.
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She married a Bishop of seven churches, and raised a family, studied to be an LPN nurse, and conducted a 200 voice choir. She sang with her cousin, Mahala Jackson, in the White House and visited with every president since Roosevelt. Her offspring made her proud, one becoming a 4 star general in the Army. Others are preachers. And she had many spiritual children. She was raised from the dead herself in a hospital. She was healed of being blind in her sixties. And she was healed of kidney failure and heart disease, living to be a centenarian of plump and healthy stature, eating anything she wished. Her health food was simply GOD!
David and I were delighted to see her driving her own car last Christmas time, when she braved the work hour traffic on I-95, to bring a car load of her friends to our special holiday event in Maryland. And my friend, Rev. Billye Brim, last saw her a few weeks ago, driving herself all the way home from Branson, MO to Baltimore, MD where she lived. She ever remained active in ministry, loved to be with people, prayed every day of her life and was always a finely dressed lady with impeccable manners. “Praise the Lord” never sounded so delightful as from the lips of Momma Jenkins.
She is included in the miracle testimonies section of my 2001 book, Oceans of Glory, telling about Smith Wigglesworth raising a 14 yr old boy from the dead that she witnessed. But I heard her tell many stories of her own amazing adventures along that line. She raised over 27 babies from the dead, out of coffins and handed them back to their mothers. She scared an entire town, walking into a morgue, keeping the motor of a taxi waiting, and bringing back a corpse, alive to attend his own funeral! She once walked into an mental health facility in New England, and emptied it out. All the patients were instantly healed. The hospital closed shortly thereafter. She took me there to show me.
Then there was the story about the Siamese twins that God used her to separate. She was simply directed to take a bus to an unknown destination, got off in Phoenix, AZ, went to a premi hospital unit, overheard the nurses discussing the tragic birth, met the bereaved parents, separated the twins and left the hospital staff facing the media trying to explain how they were successfully separated!
I left her in the hot sun one day, in my car, waiting for a train, while I checked it’s belated status. When I returned to the car, I was shocked to hear a tape, that had been stuck in the tape player for two years, belting out sound. And the car window that had not worked either, due to a computerized short in the car, was rolled down! I asked her how on earth she had managed to get either item working. She simply said the devil had irritated her by not allowing the window to roll down when she was hot. She asked Jesus to do it, and commanded it to obey. Voila! The presence she kept with the Lord gave her that authority.
She stopped bank robberies. She emptied out bars in CT near her home. She took down an entire motorcycle gang in Central Park, knocking over their gang leader and all their bikes that had encircled her to mug her, like dominos! Then she didn’t let them back up off the ground until they said the sinner’s prayer and vowed to become preachers. Indeed they did too!
Momma saved my life once too, praying out the very exact number of my airline flight a few days before it almost crashed in St Louis due to Air Flight Control Tower error. It came within 300 ft of connecting with another aircraft on the ground.
Though we will miss her, I can not cry. I can only laugh and rejoice that she cheated death so many times, lived in the hope of the rapture, and stepped right over into glory!
“Well done! Good and Faithful Servant Mary Jenkins!”
With much love,
Dr. Shelli Jones Manuel
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