Ida Soule

Ida Soule, "The Mother of the United Thank Offering," photographed in her home in Massachusetts, undated.

Ida Soule (1849-1944) is best known as the originator of the United Thank Offering. She grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts and married Richard Soule, a railroad builder, with whom she had two children. The family traveled extensively as a result of his work and Soule lived in thirteen different dioceses over the course of her life.

A longtime friend of Julia Emery and Mary Emery Twing, Soule joined them at the Woman's Auxiliary Triennial Meeting of 1886. Despite there being five hundred women in attendance, fewer than one hundred dollars were collected as the offering. Soule suggested that donations might increase if the offering was made for a specific purpose. As a result of her efforts, at the next Triennial Meeting in 1889, the first United Offering was made for the construction of Christ Church in Anvik, Alaska and to send missionary Lisa Lovell to Japan. In 1893, the year in which Christ Church was completed, at the cost of $1,200, Soule entertained the Anvik missionaries, Rev. John Chapman and May Chapman, when they were on furlough in the United States.

In addition to planting the seed of the United Thank Offering, Soule was involved with chapters of the Woman’s Auxiliary in multiple cities, founded the branch at St. John’s Church in Roanoake, Virginia, and served as a missionary herself in Oregon after her husband’s death. In 1921, she traveled to China at the invitation of another church worker and visited the mission stations there. In 1937, when a pension fund for women church workers was finally established, it was named in her honor: the Ida Whittenmore Soule Pension Fund. Ida Soule died in 1944.