Virginia Healey Asher
| Virginia Healey Asher | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
December 18, 1869 Chicago, Illinois |
| Died | February 2, 1937 (aged 67) Florida |
Virginia Healey Asher (December 18, 1869 – February 2, 1937) was a gospel singer and evangelist to women.
Virginia Healey was born in Chicago to Irish Catholic parents, who however, did not seem to mind their daughter attending services at Moody Church, then pastored by R. A. Torrey, an associate of evangelist Dwight L. Moody. Healey was converted to evangelical Christianity at the age of eleven and shortly thereafter became involved in the church’s Sunday School ministry. Healey had a fine contralto voice and apparently received some professional training from George F. Root.
In the service of Moody Church she met her future husband, William Asher, who had been converted at the same evangelistic meeting as Healey, and they were married on December 14, 1887. Their only child died at birth. Virginia Asher attended classes at the precursor of Moody Bible Institute, although she did not graduate.
In the 1890s, the couple held open-air evangelistic meetings near the original Ferris wheel, built for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893). Their success there led to William Asher being called as assistant pastor of Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church, where both Ashers worked for five years during the pastorate of J. Frank Talmadge. During this period, professional baseball player and future evangelist Billy Sunday attended services at the church.
The Ashers moved on to Duluth, Minnesota where they evangelized in the slums and at Duluth Bethel, a ministry to seamen, miners, and lumberjacks in the frontier port city. The Ashers then became assistants in the evangelistic campaigns of J. Wilbur Chapman, for whom Billy Sunday eventually became the advance man. The ministry of the Ashers focused on sailors, prisoners, and the working poor, until ill health forced Virginia Asher to return home to Winona Lake, Indiana, where both Chapman and Sunday also owned cottages.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, the evangelistic ministry of Billy Sunday had grown dramatically in both size and income, and Sunday’s wife, Nell began to travel with her husband and manage the campaign staff. Nell Sunday first hired two female Bible teachers, Grace Sax and Francis Miller, and then in 1911 invited the Ashers to become part of the organization.
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