Eunice Jones Mathews
April 29, 1914 – February 27, 2016

Eunice Jones Mathews was born on April 29, 1914, in Sitapur, British India, six months before the outbreak of World War One. She was the daughter of missionary and evangelist E. Stanley Jones, and missionary and educator Mabel Lossing Jones. She grew up in Sitapur, where her mother had founded a school for boys, still in existence today. Her first language was Hindustani, which she learned from the cooks and helpers around the house and the school, much to her mother’s chagrin, who found it unseemly for her daughter to play in the dust with the local children. Her childhood was like a lost chapter of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. She even had a pet mongoose named Rikki Tikki Tavi, after one of Kipling’s stories. Her house in Sitapur had been infested with cobras, but with Rikki’s arrival, the snakes vanished! Her self-reliant, independent and even mischievous streak would come to characterize her personality for the rest of her life. She was always her own person, despite other’s expectations of what a daughter or wife should be and do.

Her mother home-schooled Eunice until she was almost twelve, when she attended middle school at Wellesley Girls School, in the Himalayan hill town of Naini Tal, India. There, she came to know a wide range of young women, from American, British, Indian, and Anglo-Indian backgrounds. At sixteen, she transferred to the Woodstock school, in the hill station of Mussourie, where she met other children of all faiths and denominations, including Muslims, Hindus and Parsees (the Zoroastrians of Persia). All of these encounters and friendships helped to make her an accepting, citizen of the world. In later life, she also credited all the mountainous hiking she had done as a child for her remarkable strength, even in old age.

In 1932, she left India to attend college in the United States, first at the Oberlin College Music Conservatory. In 1933, she joined her mother on a ten-month sabbatical to Rome, where she studied French and Italian at the Crandon Institute, a school sponsored by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society. There, she and her friends could hear Pope Pius XI address the crowds in Saint Peter’s Square, or listen to Benito Mussolini’s diatribes at the Piazza Venezia. Upon her return to the United States, she completed her college education at American University in Washington, where she graduated in 1937 with a BA in English. At her father’s insistence, she then attended Baylor Secretarial School in Dubuque, Iowa, where she trained to become her father’s secretary and assistant for the next three years.

In 1939, she met a young American missionary named Jim Mathews, who had travelled to hear her father, E. Stanley Jones, speak. On June 1, 1940, Eunice and Jim Mathews were married in the Wellesley School chapel in Naini Tal.

During World War Two, Jim Mathews had volunteered for the US Army, CBI (China-Burma-India) Theater, and was made First Lieutenant of the Quartermaster Corps. For her part, Eunice became a typist at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA. Sworn to secrecy, she never divulged, even to her children, her role in those OSS years. At the war’s end, pregnant with her first child, Anne, Eunice flew from India to the United States, to await her husband’s arrival, some months later. Because she was pregnant, she was given top priority on military planes, normally given only to spies, so that she could avoid lengthy stopovers en route to New York City.

In New York, Eunice embarked on an entirely new phase of her life, as wife, mother, and homemaker. She acquired an upper West Side apartment that had once belonged to Harry Houdini’s sister, and began to make a home for her young family. Daughter Anne, born in 1946, was soon joined in 1947 by Janice, and by son Stanley in 1952. The Mathews family eventually settled in Montclair, New Jersey. Jim Mathews had been elected Associate General Secretary of Missions for the Methodist Church, and began a career of constant global travel. Eunice’s independent self-reliance served her well as she worked, often on her own, to make a home for her husband and children, becoming, among other things, an accomplished wallpaper hanger! In the summer of 1960, having just returned from a six week family camping trip across the United States, the family learned that Jim Mathews had been elected Bishop of the New England Conference. Once again, Eunice valiantly packed and moved her family to Newtonville, Massachusetts, while her husband, Jim, began his Episcopal career.

Their relationship was never simply that of Bishop’s wife and mother. Eunice and Jim Mathews were collaborators and partners in this new endeavor for the whole family. She was his wife, partner and counsellor. As her husband once put it, “There is such a mingling of lives that even separate identity seems somewhat obscured. What one does, both do. …Eunice has been my most constant, stern, and usually constructive critic, often snatching me back at the very brink of what might have been disastrous decisions.”

In 1972, Jim and Eunice Mathews moved once again, as Jim took up the role of Bishop of the Baltimore/Washington Conference. At Bishop Mathews’ retirement service in 1980, addresses were made by Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, John Brademas. But that was not the end of Eunice and Jim Mathews’ journey.

In 1985, Bishop and Mrs. Mathews were called out of retirement to replace Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Methodist Bishop of Zimbabwe, Bishop Mathews served in Harare for a year, and helped to found Africa University. In 1987, he was recalled a second time to replace a retired bishop in the Northeastern Jurisdiction of upstate New York. He then served another two years as Bishop of the Albany Area. His sixth and final assignment was to the New York City Area. He finally retired in 1996, sixteen years after his first “retirement.” Each time, Eunice was his constant companion.

Eunice Jones Mathews skillfully balanced each of her cherished roles as missionary, wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother. In addition to providing a comfortable home for her family and constantly assisting her husband with his international pastoral and leadership responsibilities, Eunice herself tirelessly advocated for tolerance and goodwill, moving with her husband among personages such as Arun and Rajmohin Gandhi, the Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President George H. W. and Mrs. Barbara Bush, President Bill and Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Pope Paul VI. In 2001 only three years shy of her 90th birthday, she and her husband traveled back to Naini Tal, India to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Sat Tal Christian Ashram, a renowned religious retreat founded by her father. She was also an accomplished editor for twenty-eight of E. Stanley Jones’ books, and for nine of her husband’s publications.

She lived through amazing times. Born in British India, she witnessed the collapse of an empire and birth of a nation. She witnessed the introduction of radio, telephones, airplanes, electric lights (these were all late to arrive in India), as well as television and computers (which she mastered at age 90!) Moreover, she has been an integral part of the life of the United Methodist Church for over half a century.

In 2004, on the occasion of her 90th birthday, she remarked, “Now as I enter my tenth decade, which seems rather ridiculously impossible, I’ll share a little secret with you, and that is that I do not have to be identified always as the daughter of E. Stanley Jones, as great a missionary and as wonderful an evangelist that he was. Nor do I have to be identified always as a wife of a bishop – and that was very interesting, too. But, I do have, and I have had, permission to be myself; and I have done that. And may I say that this has been in the freedom of Jesus Christ.”

As Bishop Earl Hunt wrote, “one can never assess the varied and substantial accomplishments of Bishop Jim Mathews in either the missionary of Episcopal eras of his life without acknowledging the far more than usual role played in all of it by his brilliant and extraordinary wife, Eunice Jones Mathews.”

After the death of her husband in 2010, she continued to live independently in the Bethesda, Maryland apartment they had shared since 2000. She remained at home with the help of her devoted companion and caretaker, Gladis Foland, without whose help, she surely would have left us much sooner. She remained in good health until February 15, 2016, when she fell and fractured her pelvis, leaving her bedridden. Eunice Jones Mathews died peacefully, surrounded by family and friends, at her home on February 27, 2016, just two months shy of her 102nd birthday. She is preceded in death by her husband of 70 years, Bishop James K Mathews, and her daughter, Janice Mathews Stromsem, of pancreatic cancer in 2014. She is survived by her daughter, Anne and her son, Stanley, as well as by six grandchildren: Christine Hosch, Katherine Gross, Adrienne Mathews, Alice Mathews, Nicholas Younes, and Nora Younes, as well as four (soon to be five) great-grandchildren. At age 101, Eunice Mathews’ death is not a tragedy, but a triumph and an example of a life well and fully lived.