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Charles Coolidge Parlin, an American lawyer and business executive, was an important Methodist layman. He was born July 22, 1898 in Wausau, Wisconsin, the son of Charles Coolidge and Daisy (Blackwood) Parlin. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and received the LL.B. degree at Harvard Law School in 1922. During World War I he served in the U.S. Army as a private.

In 1923, Parlin was admitted to the New York Bar, practicing law in New York City with the Wall Street firm of Shearman and Sterling. Through the years he served on the boards of a number of major corporations, was the chief counsel of the First National City Bank and was an authority on taxation. He was president of the United States and Foreign Securities Corporation and served for a time as president of the Celanese Corporation.

Parlin was thought by some to be one of the most important Methodist laymen in the history of the American Methodist Church. He was a member of successive General Conferences in 1940, 1952, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1970. In the immediate post-World War II period he took a leading role in the establishment of the National and World Council of Churches. Long a supporter of the World Methodist Council, he was elected president in 1970. His roles were many in the work of the larger church. He was secretary of the Commission on Church Union, 1948-64; chair of the Committee to Study the Jurisdictional System, 1956-60; on the Ad Hoc Committee on the Union with the Evangelical and United Brethren Church in 1964, at which General Conference and its adjourned session in 1966 he presented the report of the Committee calling for union. He was a member of the General Board of the National Council of Churches and its first vice president from 1958-1961. He was chair of the U.S.A. committee which raised the money for the founding of the World Council of Churches. From 1962 to 1968 he was one of the presidents of the World Council.

During the McCarthy era Parlin gained considerable attention when he counseled Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam in a hearing before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee and its investigation of communist influence in the U.S.

Parlin's interests were many. Among them was his chairmanship of the committee to restore Wesley's Chapel in London, securing over $1 million dollars. His own personal gifts were significant in developing the program of the World Methodist Council. Through his own Epworth Foundation he helped more than one hundred young people, many from minority groups and developing nations, obtain an education. He was a trustee of American University, Bethune-Cookman College, Drew University, Union Theological Seminary in New York, Wesley Seminary in Washington, D.C. and North Central College. Honorary degrees were awarded him by a number of colleges and universities.

Charles Parlin was married twice. His first wife, Miriam Boyd of Philadelphia, was born 1924 and died 1972. Before their marriage, she was a missionary to China. Three children were born of that marriage: Charles C. Jr., Blackwood B., and Camilla. After Miriam's death, Parlin married Kaye Chiang. Together they had a step-daughter, Jean Chiang. Charles Parlin died on November 15, 1981.

Josiah Lamberson Parrish (1806-1895) was an early American missionary to the Indians, U.S. Indian agent and leader in Christian education in the Pacific northwest. He was born in Onondaga County, New York, on January 14, 1806. He learned the blacksmith trade from his father, and worked on the Erie Canal.

Parrish was converted in 1816 and renewed (?) in 1824 before being licensed to preach in 1830. Parrish heard the call to the Indian mission in Oregon in 1839. Jason Lee, the superintendent of the Indian mission, had already filled his quota of ministers, so Parrish entered the Indian mission as a blacksmith.

Parrish arrived in Oregon in 1840, having come by ship around Cape Horn. He served for two years as a blacksmith at the main mission station in the Willamette Valley, before he was given charge of his own station among the coast Indians in 1842.

From 1843 to 1846, Parrish was a missionary to the Clatsop Indians. After the close of the Indian Mission in 1846, he worked as a preacher among the white settlers, first as a lay preacher and later as a conference member in full connection. From 1847 to 1848 Parrish served the Yamhill circuit. In 1844 he became a trustee of Willamette University. Between 1849 and 1854, at a time when the government was trying to move the Indians of the Pacific northwest onto reservations, Parrish was a government Indian agent.

Parrish was interested in public affairs, and helped establish the provisional government of Oregon, which was the only government in Oregon until the United States Government established the Oregon territorial government in 1846.

Parrish was admitted to the Oregon Conference in 1853 and ordained elder by Bishop Ames. Parrish was one of the first men in the Oregon Conference to be ordained elder. In 1854, Parrish returned to missionary work on the Grande Ronde Indian reservation, but retired for health reasons in 1856.

In 1857, Parrish returned to active service and was active until 1879.

Though he spent a lot of time with the Native American people on the reservations, Parrish maintained a home on his Donation Land Claim, land used for homesteading in Oregon, in what is now the city of Salem.

After his retirement, Parrish served for sixteen years as a prison chaplain at the state prison. He was an original member of the board of directors of the Oregon Institute, which was chartered as Willamette University in 1853, and remained a member of the board for the rest of his life. In fact Parrish was elected president of the board of trustees of Willamette University in 1869.

Parrish was married three times.

He married Elizabeth Winn in 1833, and had four children with her, all boys - Lamberson, Norman, Samuel, and Charles. Elizabeth Winn Parrish died in 1859.

In 1860, Parrish married Jennie L. Lichtenthaler, by whom he had two children, both girls - Josie and Grace. Jennie died in 1887.

The next year, 1888 Parrish married Mattie A. Pierce, who had one child, LaRonda Pierce, from a previous marriage.

Robert Thomas Parsons (1904-?) was a Church of the United Brethren in Christ missionary, pastor, and academic. Parsons was born on September 27, 1094 to J.B. Parsons, D.D. and Ada Parsons in Dayton, Ohio.

Parsons received the Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana Central College in 1926, and a Bachelor of Divinity from Bonebrake Theological Seminary in 1929. He was ordained, and in 1929 went to serve as a missionary under the Foreign Missions Board of the United Brethren in Christ to the Kono tribe in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

Parsons would return to the United States on his first furlough in 1933 to enroll as a Ph.D. candidate in the Kennedy School of Missions at Hartford Theological Seminary. During his second furlough in 1937, alongside his Ph.D. work, he received a Master of Arts from Cornell University. Parsons then returned to Sierra Leone for two years and taught at Union College in Bunumbu.

Parsons completed his dissertation in 1940, and went on to serve Fifth Ave Church in Columbus, Ohio. Parsons would join the faculty at Hartford in 1947 as a Professor of African Studies, and would later become Dean of the Kennedy School of Missions. Parsons would make a handful of other trips back to Africa for research. He also went on to serve on committees of the Division of Foreign Missions of the National Council of Churches. His dissertation was published in book form as "Religion in an African society: A Study of the Religion of the Kono People of Sierra Leone in its Social Environment With Special Reference to the Function of Religion in that Society" by Brill in 1964.