Marjorie
Tyson
“I’ve had an
adventuresome and exciting life,” declares Marjorie Tyson. A
native of Virginia, she has an older brother, Roy, and a younger
sister, Dana. For seventeen years she was employed by the
Seaboard Railroad while serving as a youth worker in her
church--volunteer service that she loved. When she attended the
commissioning service for Dana to go to the Philippines as a
missionary, Mission Personnel Secretary Marguerite Twinem was
chatting with Marjorie about Dana when she asked Marjorie,
“And what about you?” “I’m a youth
worker.” “We need youth workers in the mission
field.” In 1959 she, too, went to the Philippines as a
missionary.
Marjorie has
degrees from the College of William and Mary, Northwestern
University and Scarritt College. She had seminary training at
Garrett Theological Seminary and other postgraduate studies at
Wesley Seminary, Vanderbilt University and Peabody College.
“My greatest surprise and delight when I arrived in the
Philippines was the discovery of the splendid corps of young
women called deaconesses.” She has a deep appreciation of
their commitment and service. At first, as Conference Missionary,
one of her assignments was supervision of the deaconesses in the
conference. At the beginning of her second term, in 1963, she
herself was commissioned as a deaconess of The Methodist Church
in the Philippines, related to the Northwest Conference. Her
responsibilities with the deaconesses gradually evolved from
supervision in in-service training to a consultant. While Betsy
Ewing was President of Diakonia (the ecumenical association of
deaconesses and other diaconal workers) this group met in Manila,
hosted by the Methodist deaconesses and those from other
denominations. Marjorie helped the others to have the courage to
extend the invitation. In June 1983 she took early retirement;
later she went back to the Philippines on her own. “My life
has been tied in with the deaconess movement.”
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