Two days ago was an amazing coincidence of events.
Over the summer, I wrote this blog about the installation of Timothy Tennent on July 1, 2009, as the eight President of Asbury Theological Seminary. Two days ago, on November 9, 2009, was his official inauguration service. You can read more about that here on the Asbury website.
Two days ago, I also posted up this blog giving a Biblical case for women’s equality in church ministry. It just happened to be my slot in the “Feature Essay” category and I had slated this essay (Part 2 of my argument) for this date for some time now.
Two days ago, I also lectured in my Intercultural Studies class, “Expansion of the World Christian Movement,” on the topic of “Women in Missions.” I teach this class every Monday night, and we’ve covered a variety of topics such as Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, Protestant Missions, “The Great Century,” Evangelicalism, Ecumenism, and this week just randomly happened to be on Women in Missions.
Also two days ago, one of my colleagues, Prof. Joe Henderson (who graduated from Asbury) showed me the Asbury alumni magazine (Fall 2009 issue which just came out) which featured a story by Tim Tennent about the topic of “Women in Missions”!
It was too much of a happy coincidence of events. None of these were intentionally designed to coincide with each other; and yet somehow they did.
Why is this topic, “Women in Missions,” important? Because Protestant women often were not allowed to serve in their home churches, so they went abroad to serve and usually outnumbered men 2:1 on the mission field! They also were pioneers in the most difficult missions work. Thus, Protestant women were more responsible than Protestant men for the evangelization of the world. I don’t know what our world would look like without their efforts—perhaps Christianity would be a minority religion today, instead of the largest religion in the world (which is mainly now due to the growth of Christianity in the non-Western world). Knowing what we know now about missions history and women’s contributions to it, I think it would be very difficult to be a missiologist today and be a complementarian!
Let me reprint Dr. Tennent’s article for you here, since it has not yet been posted online on the Asbury website (I expect it will be soon). His eloquence says it much better than I could ever hope to.
Women in Missions: A Global Perspective
by Dr. Timothy C. Tennent, President and Professor of World Christianity
One of the prevailing misunderstandings about the role of women in ministry is the widely-held belief that this a relatively-recent development in the church. On the contrary, women have played a vital role in ministry for centuries. Indeed, I do not think that a proper understanding of the role of women in ministry is complete without a reflection on the remarkable role women played in the history of the expansion of global Christianity.
The year 1865 is often cited as a watershed in the history of women in missions. This is the year Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission (today, OMF). This mission represented a dramatic shift in missionary recruitment and service with important implications for women. As a Brethren, Taylor did not believe in ordination and, therefore, was eager to mobilize as many lay missionaries as possible. Taylor was the first Protestant leader of a mission to directly recruit women as full missionaries in their own right. Because the China Inland Mission was a “faith mission,” there were no financial support concerns which had often hindered the denominational efforts from recognizing women as full-fledged missionaries. Mission historian Rhonda Semple highlights the watershed change represented by Hudson Taylor when she wrote of the CIM that, at least when it came to missionary recruitment, “the differentiation between male and female candidates and between single and married female workers did not exist.”[1] Single women received the same training as the men. The women were not just permitted to preach, they were expected to.[2] Drawing from working-class peoples, men and women, who were prepared to live by faith and face new challenges, became part of the missions ethos from the beginning. Taylor founded the CIM while on furlough in England and returned in 1865 with the first 15 missionary recruits, seven of whom were single women.
Many of the new “faith” mission societies which had been inspired by Taylor’s CIM also actively recruited women as full-fledged missionaries. Mission organizations such as the North Africa Mission, the Gospel Missionary Union and the Algiers Mission Band all mobilized more women than men for cross-cultural service. In fact, Lilas Trotter, the well-known artist-missionary to the Islamic world, was the founder of the Algiers Mission Band, making her the earliest Protestant woman to found and lead a mission society.
Taylor’s pioneering effort to mobilize and send out single, female missionaries was also followed by the earlier mainstream societies. For example, in 1866, the London Missionary Society authorized an auxiliary organization known as The Ladies’ Board, “to examine and train women candidates and to help place them in their fields of work.”[3] In the same year, the Society for Propagating the Gospel (SPG) set up an auxiliary structure known as the Ladies Association which was also solely for the purpose of recruiting female missionaries. An advertising pamphlet which was used later by the SPG to recruit women gives several reasons why women are needed on the mission field. The pamphlet, quiet naturally, pointed out the need for “professional qualifications…especially in medicine, nursing and teaching.” However, in an early foreshadowing of what is today called “friendship evangelism,” the SPG also stressed the relational skills of women. The pamphlet states that, “in the work of evangelism women are needed abroad not only as district visitors, but as friends—the importance of friendship with educated women must be emphasized, especially in China, Japan, India, etc.”[4] These auxiliary societies were soon followed up by mission societies solely dedicated to mobilizing women. By the end of the 19th century, “there were more than 40 women’s mission societies in the United States alone,” and, by 1910, the end of the “Great Century,” the number of women outnumbered the men in Protestant missions.[5]
Few women embodied the new possibilities for the single, female pioneer missionary like Charlotte “Lottie” Moon (1840-1912), sometimes called the “patron saint” of Baptist missions. Lottie and her sister were teachers in a school for girls in Cartersville, Ga. When the door opened for single women to become missionaries, Lottie applied, was accepted and arrived in China in 1873 as a Southern Baptist missionary. After 12 years in China serving in fairly traditional roles, Lottie decided to move from Tengzhou to the interior city of Pingtu more than 100 miles away and start her own work. This was the first time a single female had ever started a new mission work in China. Moon eventually saw hundreds of Chinese come to the Lord, and her ministry led to the establishment of more than 30 new Chinese churches. Over the next 20 years, thousands of new believers were baptized, making Pingtu the “greatest evangelistic center…in all China” for the Southern Baptists. Moon worked tirelessly, spending several months each year doing evangelism in villages and the rest of her time training new missionaries and writing influential articles and opinion pieces which were published in Southern Baptist mission magazines back in the United States. She encouraged Southern Baptist women to organize mission societies to fund and recruit more missionaries. In 1887, Moon wrote to the Foreign Mission Journal and proposed that the Sunday before Christmas be set aside for a special offering for missions. This annual offering, today known as the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, remains the largest single annual offering for missions in history, raising more than $140 million last year and setting this year’s goal at $175 million.
It is truly remarkable that most North American ministries which supported, and even extolled, the ministries of these heroic women in faraway lands would have prevented these same women from doing many of these ministries right here in North America. Thus, even in the 19th century, the younger, global church was teaching the older churches of the wonderful potential if the church would have the courage to unleash all of God’s children into active ministry.
[1] Rhonda Anne Semple, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2003), 55.
[2] Klaus Fiedler, The Story of Faith Missions: From Hudson Taylor to the Present (Irvine, CA: Regnum Books, International, 1994), 292.
[3] Rhonda Anne Semple, 20.
[4] Deborah Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women” chapter two in Women and Missions: Past and Present: Anthropological and Historical Perceptions. Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood and Shirley Ardener, eds. (Providence, RI: Berg, 1993), 1, emphasis original.
[5] Ruth A. Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983, 2004), 288.
