Daniel Kumler Flickinger (25 May 1824 – 29 August 1911)[1] was an American bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, elected in 1885.
Jacob's ancestors were Swiss Mennonites; Hannah was the daughter of Henry Kumler Sr, a Bishop and influential leader in the early years of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.
At that time he owned 317 acres (1.28 km2) of fine farming land in Butler County in the Miami Valley of Ohio.
John Coons, who had also served as Bishop for one quadrennium, asked the local congregation to recommend Daniel Flickinger for quarterly conference License to Preach.
Flickinger purchased a home in Oxford, Ohio, planning to enter Miami University.
However, in September he was called away from the conference session to find his sick wife's condition so grave that she died a few days later, leaving him with two children (one about two and one-half years old and the other less than a week).
Flickinger served as a colporteur for the American Tract Society, and as a City Missionary in Cincinnati, Ohio.
At the 1853 autumn session of the Miami Conference, Flickinger was ordained by Bishop David Edwards.
He was appointed as Junior Preacher (with William R. Rhinehart) on the circuit consisting of Dayton, Miami Chapel, and Beavertown.
The Miami Conference session of 1854 divided the Dayton Circuit, and Flickinger was appointed to the city church.
Shuey and D.C. Kumler as the first missionaries of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ to go to Africa,[3][5] "provided no better person could be secured."
He returned to Dayton, resigned his pastorate on Christmas Day, and went back to New York on 4 January to board a vessel en route to Sierra Leone.
One of these six, Miss Susanna Woolsey of Willoughby, Ohio, a teacher in the Mendi mission, became the wife of Daniel Flickinger 30 October 1855.
[4] After additional surveying, as well as a period of critical illness, the Flickingers sailed for the U.S. 31 March 1856, arriving in New York City 11 May.
There he gave a full report of the conditions he found in Sierra Leone during the fourteen months he spent there.
When his Annual Conference met in September 1856, he was appointed Pastor of a mission church in Piqua, Ohio.
He introduced them to the field, then left them to carry forward the work, while Flickinger returned to the U.S. in time to again attend the meeting of the Board of Missions (and the General Conference of the U.B.
During the twenty-eight years Daniel Flickinger served as Secretary, he made six trips to Africa to organize, counsel and encouraged the missionaries there.
Concerning a trip during the Winter of 1861-62, Daniel wrote: He had a personal conference with President Abraham Lincoln once, concerning establishing a school in Vicksburg, Mississippi for former slaves.
In 1880 the university honored Daniel Kumler Flickinger by bestowing upon him the honorary degree Doctor of Divinity.
He therefore wrote articles for the denominational periodicals, published books, and introduced a missions magazine in 1865, the Missionary Visitor.
In his book titled Our Missionary Work he described Africa as having over a hundred million people that worshipped idols and Satan.
[7] The 1885 General Conference of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ convened in May in Fostoria, Ohio.
The General Conference adopted this plan, and Daniel Kumler Flickinger was elected on the first ballot the first Missionary Bishop of the United Brethren Church.
Bishop Flickinger gave himself and his own personal means to the furtherance of his work during the following quadrennium.
The 1889 General Conference of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, meeting in York, Pennsylvania in May, discontinued the Missionary Bishopric.
Flickinger joined the Scioto Annual Conference of the "break-away" segment of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (that one, led by Bishop Wright, which continued by means of the former denominational Constitution).
On 1 July 1897 he was appointed to the office of Secretary of the Domestic, Frontier, and Foreign Missionary Society of this denomination.
Another son, Dr. Elmer Ellsworth Flickinger, practiced medicine six years and then went into business in Indianapolis, where he was also known as one of the leading laymen of the U.B.
When past eighty-seven years of age, he attended the session of the Miami Annual Conference, 23–28 August 1911 in Dayton, Ohio.