Hooked on History: Dolores Dudley gained national fame as 'girl evangelist'

Dolores Lee Dudley of New Philadelphia was one of hundreds of young girl evangelists who preached the Gospel to Americans living in large cities and small towns during the Roaring '20s.

Dudley was 17 when she conducted a revival at Cornell Memorial Methodist Church in New York City in 1930. She preached a fire-and-brimstone sermon with the message that the Big Apple faced certain destruction unless it changed its wicked ways.

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"New York is getting more wicked every day," she told a newspaper reporter at the time. "I've heard all about it ‒ nightclubs, speakeasies, gambling, empty churches. The city will surely be destroyed unless the people repent and are saved."

She was described at the time as "a lovely curly-haired girl, who has never seen a musical show, a nightclub or a talking picture."

Girl evangelists were a phenomena of the 1920s and the early 1930s.

Thomas A. Robinson, in an article published in the Assemblies of God Heritage magazine in 2013, explained that they were oddities in a decade that was obsessed with the odd, the quirky and the novel.

"More than anything else, what brought the girl evangelists to public attention was that they appeared to the press and the public as an ideal countertype to the new image of the feminine that marked the age ‒ the flapper," he wrote. "Indeed it was the newspapers and newswire services that first saw a connection (and a contrast) between the flappers and the girl evangelists, pairing them off as the modern girl against the traditional girl."

Most of the girls were associated with the Pentecostal movement.

Converted to Christianity at age 9

Dolores Dudley was born June 6, 1913, in Washington County, Ohio, the oldest of the three children of Leroy and Lulu Rardon Dudley. The family soon moved to Cambridge, where they lived for several years.

It appears that sometime in the early 1920s, Leroy and Lulu separated. Leroy remained in Cambridge, while Lulu and the children moved to New Philadelphia to live with her parents, Edward and Lizzie Rardon. The Rardons were active in the Foursquare Gospel Mission in Dover.

Dolores was converted at a revival meeting at age 9.

"I ran sobbing to the altar," she told a reporter. "I felt like a bird that is free. I didn't intend to be an evangelist then, but the pastor of the Foursquare Church, a tiny mission, began taking me round to prisons and infirmaries. I was so small that I stood on a chair, so they could see me when I talked. My message went straight to their hearts."

At first, she spoke to churches around this part of Ohio. One of the largest crowds she spoke to was in Canton around 1924, when she appeared with famed evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson at a mass meeting.

Dolores never planned a sermon in advance. She could speak for an hour at a time without notes, preaching salvation, healing, baptism and the second coming of Jesus.

"I am inspired," she told a reporter. "I hardly know afterwards what I have said."

Like many other girl evangelists, she attended a Bible school at the headquarters of the Foursquare Gospel Movement. She studied under McPherson, who pioneered the use of broadcast mass media, specifically radio, to reach large audiences. "Sister Aimee," as she was known, founded Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, one of the first megachurches in the U.S.

Enthusiastic converts call her 'Angel'

Eventually, Dolores began preaching outside Ohio, going to cities as far away as New York and Minneapolis.

"In cities of the Mississippi Valley, where Dolores has preached her gospel for the past seven years, enthusiastic converts call her 'Angel,'" a newspaper article published in 1930 said. "They clamored to touch the hem of her white robe."

A poster advertising her appearance at the Des Moines, Iowa, Full Gospel Tabernacle called her the "Famous Girl Evangelist."

"Miss Dudley has a marvelous message," the poster said. "Hear her once, you'll come again."

At the bottom of the poster was a quote from the Book of Isaiah, chapter 11, verse 6: "And a little child shall lead them."

When she was a freshman at New Philadelphia High School, she dropped out of school to become a full-time evangelist. She traveled around the country with her mother, Lulu.

Reservations about 'girl evangelists'

The girl evangelist phenomena came to an end in the early 1930s.

"In part, it declined as the flapper era declined, for in some ways both girl evangelists and flappers grew in the same soil, each representing opposite extremes of the cultural revolution of the 1920s," Robinson wrote in his article.

In addition, the Pentecostal movement began to have increasing reservations about women and girl preachers.

When Dolores Dudley was 21, she married Foster "Zeke" Sipprelle, a native of Canada, in Los Angeles on Aug. 21, 1934. They had one child.

She died March 21, 1992, in Glendale, California.

Jon Baker is a reporter for The Times-Reporter and can be reached at jon.baker@timesreporter.com.

This article originally appeared on The Times-Reporter: Dolores Dudley of New Philadelphia gained fame as girl evangelist