Conejo Area Preacher Truly One for the Books

In January, Adele Carmichael marked her 80th year as an Assembly of God preacher.

But the 97-year-old Thousand Oaks resident is taking that accomplishment in stride. After all, she just followed her calling--a calling that spurred her ordination at age 16 in Davis City, Iowa.

When Carmichael was ordained in 1918, women hadn’t yet won the right to vote in the United States. Although Assembly of God churches have always permitted women in their pulpits, a 16-year-old girl preacher was not a common sight in small-town Iowa.

“I met some opposition,” she said. “But I had a call to preach the Gospel.” She supposes it was unusual for someone 16 to be ordained, “but, you see, I’d been preaching with my dad for a long time.”

Carmichael’s 80-year career sets a record for active ministry in Assemblies of God nationwide. However, she isn’t about to retire. On the contrary, Carmichael will teach her regular class Sunday morning at New Hope Church in Thousand Oaksn at 9 sharp.

“She has people come from Hollywood and Santa Barbara just to hear her declare the word with boldness,” said Kent Ingle, the pastor of New Hope Church, where Carmichael also teaches a Bible study class on Tuesdays.

“Every time she steps up to the podium to share from the Bible, there is this incredible anointing from God,” he said.

*

Carmichael has actually practiced as an evangelist and preacher for closer to 86 years. Along with her parents, she converted to the Assembly of God faith in 1910, when she was 8. The next year, her father “felt the call into the ministry. He became a roving evangelist.”

And he took his daughter with him.

“We went around the state in a Model T Ford. We preached on the street, in tents or in the downtown slum missions. I always had a part in his talks, quoting scripture,” Carmichael said this week as she sat in her double-wide mobile home in a Thousand Oaks senior citizen mobile home park.

She hops up with the agility of a 60-year-old to point to memorabilia such as her framed ordination papers or a page from one of the many “Who’s Who” tomes she is listed in or to play the organ--perhaps part of a hymn that her musician son, Ralph Carmichael, has composed.

“I’m 97 and I weigh 98 pounds,” she said briskly. “Everyone always asks, ‘Where’s your cane?’ . . . And no, I don’t take naps.”

On her feet are a pair of gold running shoes, for her twice-daily walk. “I walk, but I’m a poor eater,” she said.

Before she met her future husband, Richard, in a Nebraska Bible college, she traveled the countryside with a pianist, often by train, evangelizing in a tent. “I was a singing preacher,” she said.

*

She preached for a number of years in what is known as Shepherd of the Hills country around Branson, Mo. “If they didn’t have a tent, they’d build me a brush arbor to preach under--that’s a canopy of tree limbs.”

Once she met and married Richard Carmichael in 1923, they became a preaching team. “We evangelized in 40 states altogether,” Carmichael said.

Adele and Richard Carmichael also were co-pastors in Ventura for eight years at an Assembly of God church on Main Street during the 1950s.

Her husband died when Carmichael was 58. After that, she taught in mission schools and was dean of women at Evangel College in Springfield, Mo. Having earned a master’s degree in education, she was also a substitute high school teacher in Ventura County schools.

These days, she does not take it easy. Besides her two classes at New Hope Church, she bakes--especially pies for her son--sews, paints and does some housekeeping.

“And sometimes a Christian radio station out of St. Louis calls me in the morning while it’s on the air and I preach on the radio for a bit,” she said.

Carmichael is amused with the idea of preaching by phone from her easy chair or--if the hour is really early--from bed.

“Every time I open the Bible and begin to preach, something comes over me,” she said. “I don’t even know I have a body when I’m preaching.”

She is likely to recite her favorite Bible verse on the air, from Matthew 11:28: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

And she does mean recite, for she nearly has the Bible memorized.

“I read the Bible straight through six times a year,” she said. “That’s partly why all denominations come to my Bible class. We go verse by verse, and anyone who loves Christ is interested in that.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

FYI

Adele Carmichael teaches her Sunday school class at 9 a.m. in the sanctuary at New Hope Church, 880 Hampshire Road, Westlake Village. Her Tuesday Bible study class begins at 9:30 a.m.