Lambuth, Walter Russell

Walter Russell Lambuth (1854-1921), an American bishop, medical doctor and missionary, was born in Shanghai on November 10, 1854, the son of missionary parents, James William and Mary Isabella (McClellan) Lambuth. In 1859, he was sent to his relatives in Tennessee and Mississippi for his early education. His parents returned during the Civil War, and the Lambuth went back to China with them in 1864 and remained five years. He graduated from Emory and Henry College in 1875, studied theology and medicine at Vanderbilt University and received a medical degree.

In 1877 he was ordained an elder in the Tennessee Conference and was sent to China, where he worked in Shanghai and adjacent areas. During that same year he married Daisy Kelly. Mrs. Lambuth was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on February 24, 1858. Lambuth returned on furlough in 1881 and studied at Bellvue Hospital Medical College in New York and received a second degree of doctor of medicine. He returned to China in 1882 and organized medical and hospital service at Soochow and Beijing. In 1885, with his father, the founded the Japan Mission of his church and established the notable Kwansei Gakuin and the Hiroshima Girls' School. In 1891 he was assigned to field service in the United States and became editor of the Methodist Review of Missions. In 1894 he was elected general secretary of the Board of Missions, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. In this capacity he helped to unite Methodism in Canada and to form the autonomous Japanese Methodist Church, a union of all Methodist bodies working in that field.

Lambuth was elected bishop by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1910 and was assigned to Brazil. In the same year the Board of Missions projected a mission in Africa and in 1911 Lambuth, accompanied by John W. Gilbert of Paine College and a leader in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, went to that continent. They traveled 2,600 miles by boat and rail and 1,500 miles on foot through the jungles to the village of Wembo Nyama in the Belgian Congo. Their cordial reception by Chief Wembo Nyama convinced Lambuth that he had been providentially led to the Batetela tribe, and he proceeded to arrange for a mission. After more than a year, he returned home and recruited a group of missionaries, whom he took to the Congo in 1913. For his travels through Africa he was made a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in London. During World War I, Lambuth went to Europe, visited the front, and made arrangements for establishing Southern Methodism in Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia. In 1921 he took a party of missionaries to Siberia and founded a mission there, but it met opposition and was of short duration. He served briefly on the Pacific cast and for a period resided at Oakdale, California. Bishop Lambuth participated in the Ecumenical Methodist Conferences, the World Missionary Conference and other movements involving the cooperation of the churches. He wrote three books on medical missions, the Orient and the missionary movement. Lambuth died at Yokohama, Japan, on September 26, 1921, and his ashes were buried by the side of his mother in Shanghai. Daisy Kelly Lambuth died on May 24, 1923 in Oakdale, California.