EMQ » July–September 2020 » Volume 56 Issue 3
By Miriam Adeney
In 1800 in Boston, an invalid named Mary Webb challenged her friends to save one penny a week for missions. In time “cent societies” spread all over New England, and eventually throughout North America. Few women held paying jobs, but they saved their chicken-and-egg money, their bake sale money, and their second-hand clothes money so as to give one penny a week. A servant girl named Sally Thomas gave the first bequest — her life savings of $345.38 (Robert 1996:137).
Out of this humble beginning — the invalid Mary and the servant Sally — women’s mission concern spread like a fire across New England and eventually across North America.
By 1910, North American women had founded, were administering, and were supporting over forty mission agencies undergirding 2,500 foreign missionary women, 6,000 indigenous Bible women, 3,263 schools for girls, 80 hospitals, 11 colleges and innumerable orphanages and dispensaries. These ministries were largely among Muslim, Hindu, and Chinese women who lived in interior Asia, the Middle East, and Africa (Robert 2019).
From England, the parallel zenana mission movement sent missionaries into the harems or zenanas or purdah enclosures where elite Muslim or Hindu women lived. Although these missionary women had no jet planes, no antibiotics, and sometimes no diplomatic protection, they traveled inland, passed behind the walls, taught women to read — sometimes in three languages, like Urdu, Bengali, and English — healed their diseases, and gave them the gospel. This article relates a few priorities and illustrative stories from this movement. In the future we look forward to Arab, Iranian, and Pakistani women missionaries’ stories as well.
Feeding a Vision
The supporters of women missionaries from 1800 to 1940 had no videos of themselves on the field, no short term trips, no cell phones, and no Internet. But they had passion and perseverance, which not only blessed women worldwide but also the church’s next generation. Children grew up in mission meetings, absorbing God’s love for the whole world as naturally as mother’s milk.
Sarah Doremus spearheaded support for women on the field. In 1812, when Sarah was twelve years old, her mother took her to a “cent society” meeting where they gathered “to pray for the conversion of the world” (MacLeod 1999:2). As Sarah grew up, she became active in prison work, hospital visiting, caring for the young and the elderly, the City Mission, and the Tract Society. She married and had nine children. She also founded the pioneer American women’s overseas mission organization, the Woman’s Union Mission Society.
It was a male missionary from China who in 1833 first voiced the need for distinct focus on women. Without this, many of the world’s women could not be reached, and they were in great need, he said. Men on mission boards immediately opposed this emphasis. Funds would be diverted, they argued, and it would be inappropriate to send single women without the protection of husbands. “I oppose sending single women,” said Bishop Wilson of Calcutta. “It is almost an absolute certainty they would get married within a month of their arrival” (MacLeod 1999:8). Rufus Anderson, the highly influential secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, wrote a letter asking women to defer organizing. Because of this negative pressure, women’s missions were retarded by thirty years.
But in 1860 the possibility of women-focused mission arose again. As before, objections were voiced. At that point Sarah Doremus stood up and said, “it would be a sad thing if Christian women for the second time should be prevented by prejudice or narrow views to attempt a work for our Lord and Master” (MacLeod 1999:8). Women’s missions were launched.
Treasuring Souls and Bodies
Lilias Trotter was a well-educated Englishwoman and a gifted painter who gave up very promising prospects in order to pour out her life in Algeria. In the 1880s she felt God call her to the people of this North African region; people who had never heard the good news of the gospel. She applied to the North African Mission but was turned down for health reasons. So she raised funds and traveled out on her own to work alongside the mission. Over the next forty years, she would set up thirteen mission stations stretching from the coast to the inland mountains.
Besides witnessing to women and men and nurturing new believers, Lilias wrote, illustrated, and distributed Christian publications. She traveled deep into the desert, where she found spiritually hungry people. She cried with those who suffered and even with those who gave up the faith and apostatized. Men as well as women were blessed by her ministry. Even in the Sahara Desert they begged her for books. “I don’t know anything like the joy of reading with these men and seeing them begin to understand,” she said (St.John 1990:52).
Lilias loved Algeria, its people, its cultures and its natural setting. As an artist, she decorated her manuscripts with sketches of the faces and flowers of the desert. She filled her journals with sunsets, rock formations, oases, questions and testimonies of men and women, and promises of God. She reveled in trips to simple villages — “living in a real native house… (where) they come in and out promiscuously — now a couple of women in their thick woolen plaits, now a troop of girlies in all colors of the rainbow, now a set of boys sitting as still as can be” and then the evening walk “where you can see the irregular line of palms against the dead blue of the eastern sky, the ‘old gold’ of walls and sand still clutching the western sky and the dark brown silhouette of a camel here and there. Oh, how I love it!” (Huffman Rockness 2007:np). And with Abraham she cried out, “Oh, that Ishmael might live before You!” That prayer has been heard. Today in the mountains of the land where Lilias prayed and painted and published, there are strong churches among the Berber people.
Ida Scudder built the Vellore Medical Hospital and Training School, one of the outstanding health centers of South Asia. This hospital serves Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsees — anyone who needs care. Originally Ida had no interest in this kind of project. Although members of her family had served as missionary doctors in India for two generations, Ida did not intend to be the third. She loved life in America where she was studying in the 1890s.
However, during her university years, there was a period when her mother was sick. So Ida traveled to India to spend the summer with her mother. One evening a man came to the door. “Excuse me,” he said, “my wife is having a baby and something has gone wrong. Is there a doctor who could come to her?” Ida’s father picked up his medical bag, but the husband objected. “No, not a male doctor. Isn’t there a woman doctor?”
There was none, so the young husband went away. Although it sounds like a fairy tale, this happened twice more. As the evening progressed, two more husbands arrived, the first a Hindu and the second a Muslim. Their wives were in labor, and difficulties had developed. They too wanted a woman doctor, and both of them left unsatisfied. Bells tolled that night, indicating that someone had died. The next morning Ida learned that all three women had perished in childbirth. She went back to the United States, graduated from university, enrolled in medical school, raised funds, and returned with enough finances to start her renowned medical center which has focused on serving and training women (Tucker 1983, 368-9).
Ida is one of the thousands of true pioneer missionary women who reached out to sick, blind, and leprous people, moved by the compassion of Jesus. Missiologist Phil Parshall observes, “In 1873 when there were only two qualified women doctors in England, (missionary women) extended the work to include medical as well as literacy work in the zenanas and changed the name to Zenana Bible and Medical Mission” (Parshall 2000:501).
Dr. Clara Swain traveled from America to India in 1870. After fifteen years treating seven thousand patients a year, she was invited by the Muslim Rajah of Khetri to become the palace physician for women. She accepted, while prioritizing Christian witness: “We brought a quantity of religious books, parts of the Bible and our hymn books, all in the Hindustani language, and as we have opportunity we distribute them. I suppose there are more than thirty persons singing our hymns … and the singing women in the palace sing them to her highness every morning” (Gracey 1898:214–15).
In Poona, when the wife of the Maharaja was healed in 1880, she told a missionary, “I have written a letter, and put it inside this necklace, and I want you to wear it until you can give the letter to Queen Victoria. I am asking for medical help for the women of India.” The letter was given to the queen. Four years later Queen Victoria commissioned the viceroy’s wife to do something for Indian women’s medical needs, and the Dufferin hospitals for women were founded (Pollock 1958:42-3).
Mildred Cable had been a missionary in China for twenty-one years when she heard about the “great cities” beyond the wall, where Jesus’ name was not known. She and two fellow teachers felt called to go to those people. Others criticized them. “To a good many people it seemed just plain foolishness. Why leave this important and successful school work to go off on some harebrained scheme of roaming over vast deserts looking for a few isolated tent dwellers and remote villages, when there were literally tens of thousands of people near at hand, all needing to hear the Gospel?” (Cable and French 1934:122). However, the call persisted. So they resigned from their teaching jobs and, during the eight months of the year when the weather allowed travel through the desert, they took the gospel to Chinese Muslims. Mildred kept careful records. Here is one excerpt:
At last they came to the Great Wall and, passing through the massive gates, they stopped the cart, standing together to thank God for his guidance and protection through all their wanderings over the mighty desert. They had lived and preached in twelve towns and many hamlets…They had left Christian books in temples and given away more tracts than they could keep count of. They had entered 2,700 homes to tend the sick and tell of a Savior. They had held 656 meetings, and sold 40,000 portions of Scripture (Thompson 1957:70).
In this record Mildred noted social chaos: “The highways over which they had traveled were no longer safe, and the storms that had been gathering over the Great Northwest were breaking fast. But in the lull before the storm they had sown seed which sooner or later would surely bear a harvest” (Ibid.). Because Mildred Cable crossed the Gobi Desert five times in the 1930s and wrote unique and fascinating books about it, she is read today not only by missiologists but also by feminists and adventure travelers.
Sarah Belle Sherwood blessed the people of Iran for thirty-six years, from 1883 to 1919. On one trip she traveled for seventeen days on horseback, passing through twelve villages and two cities. She talked with women in their goat pens and their homes. Sometimes she could offer a prayer, sometimes read from the Persian Bible, or sometimes even conduct a Bible study.
One rainy season local women asked the missionary women to accompany them up the mountain to pray against landslides. “After the local women prayed, they wanted us to pray, and all gathered around us. There on that mountain side, the rain falling slowly and gently, Miss J. stood and boldly preached ‘Christ and Him crucified’ to the waiting company of 150. Then we sang, and she prayed. It was an impressive hour” (Poage 1880:100).
Judith Campbell Grant also went to Iran, but she started from Mt. Holyoke College. Many missionaries were well-educated. Judith handled six languages: she spoke English, French, and Turkish, read ancient Syriac (which she learned through a Latin dictionary and grammar), wrote in modern Syriac, and read her Bible in Greek. Judith was married, had three children, and started a school for girls.
The local leaders had not believed that their girls could learn. But they were so impressed that, when Judith died young, they hoped that another teacher might come. During evening Prayers at Mt. Holyoke College, the college president Mary Lyon asked, “Do any of you feel called to replace Judith?” Within one hour, forty women had volunteered, including both teachers and students.
Fidelia Fiske was sent and began a long ministry. All together 178 graduates from Mt. Holyoke Women’s College went out as missionaries between 1837 and 1888 (Robert 1996:17, 109).
Discipling and Reflecting
Women not only evangelized, healed, and educated. They also valued theological education and systematic theoretical reflection.
Maud Cary started from scratch in Morocco and spent half a century there. When a Bible school opened, two of the three students in the first class were from her ministry, because she saw the value of theological training. Leaving Kansas for Morocco in 1901, Maud learned the languages and traveled the land, often talking with women at rivers or springs. They would listen with interest until a man appeared, then melt away. When Maud took her first furlough after twenty-three years to return home to help her parents through their final illnesses, she had little to show for her work. However, when she returned to Morocco, women began to come for Bible teaching, as well as men.
World War II broke out. All the missionaries left except for four single women. They determined to maintain three widely separated mission stations. As a result, after the war it was found that the ministry had not slowed down at all. At age seventy-one, Maud moved to a new city to open work, accompanied by one young woman who was still in language school. When the Bible School began in 1951, it started with just three students. Two were from Maud’s new station. By 1960, thirty thousand Moroccans were enrolled in Bible correspondence courses, and there were many Bible study gatherings. In 1967 the government expelled all foreign missionaries, but not the seed that Maud had sown over fifty pioneer years (Stenbock 1970).
Constance Padwick was a missiologist fluent in biblical Greek and Arabic who wrote and published over forty years, beginning in Egypt in 1916 and later working in Palestine, Sudan, and Turkey. Starting with the Nile Mission Press, she eventually became part of the Church Mission Society. Constance “inspired and became the energetic mainspring of the Central Literature Committee for Muslims,” which was headquartered in Egypt (Tucker 1988:187). Here she coordinated diverse publications and tried to improve their quality. As a keen student of the culture, Constance worked for positive, contextualized presentations of the gospel. She struggled to improve “literature that was often filled with the spirit of disputation rather than of worship and love, and apt to hammer rather than to woo and win” (Hewitt 1971:316).
Not only did Constance write in Arabic for Arabs, but also in English about Arabs and other Muslims. Along with numerous books, she published articles, the last when she was eighty-one years old. Some Christians questioned the value of putting a great deal of energy into Muslim ministry, given their minimal response. “Can it really be right, when in mass movement areas souls are pressing into the Kingdom, for whom we cannot find shepherds, can it be right in those circumstances to send men and women to an Islam that consistently rejects their message?” (Hallencreutz 1966:272).
Constance had responded with words which resonate today in the face of many Christians’ antipathy to Muslims in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. She wrote,
The Church through long centuries … showed not only the negative of neglect but the positive of hostility and retaliation. Therefore are we bounden as members of that Church of Christ … to go not in superiority but in penitent love to the Muslim, to make what loving reparation is allowed us to the heart of our forgiving Lord and to the unforgiving Muslim world. And this duty lies upon us, inescapable, whatever are the opportunities of joyful service elsewhere (Padwick 1938: 351).
Women who Dared
“In recent decades it has become clear that the role of women in mission, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been greatly undervalued,” observes historian Scott Sunquist. “In fact the majority of missionary work was done by women during this time period” (2013:109). Admittedly, these missionaries were not perfect. Some saw Western culture as superior, especially when struggling with social abuses. Others like Lilias Trotter delighted in local cultures, recognizing both sin and beauty in every way of life. In any case, women’s work together — feeding, tending the sick, training children, making homes, passing through life’s transitions, mourning loved ones who died — leveled and bonded missionaries and local women.
Today the priorities of those early missionaries continue: care for souls and bodies, discipling, reflecting missiologically, and providing support for field workers. But as women’s missions have been absorbed into general missions programs, grassroots ownership has eroded. Missions have become the concern of specialized church committees. Children are no longer raised in their mothers’ mission meetings. We may lament this, but we cannot go back. In a new era, we must step into the opportunities of our time, recognizing that each era has its own organizing patterns.
Nevertheless, we will never forget the fine foundation laid by women, and the great cloud of witnesses like Mary Webb, Sally Thomas, Sarah Doremus, Lilias Trotter, Ida Scudder, Clara Swain, Mildred Cable, Sarah Belle Sherwood, Judith Campbell Grant, Maud Cary, Constance Padwick and innumerable others whose names are known to God: women who dared to follow God’s call and love their Muslim sisters.
Miriam Adeney (BA, Wheaton Coll.; MA, Syracuse U; PhD, Washington State U) is an anthropologist/missiologist, a professor at Seattle Pacific University, and an author. She has served as President of the American Society of Missiology and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Media Associates International.
References
Cable, Mildred and Francesca French. 1934. Something Happened. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Gracey, Annie Ryder. 1898. Eminent Missionary Women. New York: Eaton and Mains.
Hallencreutz, Carl. 1966. Kraemer Towards Tambaram: A Study in Hendrik Kraemer’s Missionary Approach. Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksells.
Hewitt, Gordon. 1971. The Problems of Success: A History of the Church Missionary Society, 1910-1942, Vol. 1. London: SCM Press.
MacLeod, Judith. 1999. Woman’s Union Missionary Society: The Story of a Continuing Mission. Upper Darby PA: Interserve Publications.
Padwick, Constance. 1938. “North African Reverie,” International Review of Missions.
Parshall, Phil. 2000. “Interserve,” in ed. A Scott Moreau, Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions. Grand Rapids MI: Baker Books.
Poage. 1880. “Letter from Miss Poage.” Women’s Work for Women 19 (3).
Pollock, John. 1958. Shadows Fall Apart: The Story of the Zenana Bible and Medical Mission. London: Hodder.
Robert, Dana. 1996. American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice. Macon GA: Mercer University Press.
Robert, Dana. 1910. Personal Communication, referring to Hellen Barrett Montgomery’s Western Women in Eastern Lands: An Outline Study of Fifty Years of Women’s Work in Foreign Missions. New York: The Macmillan Co.
Rockness, Miriam Huffman. 2007. A Blossom in the Desert: Reflections of Faith in the Art and Writings of Lilias Trotter. Grand Rapids MI: Discovery House.
St. John, Patricia. 1990. Until the Day Breaks: The Life and Work of Lilias Trotter. Carlisle UK: OM Publishing.
Stenbock, Evelyn. 1970. “Miss Teri:” The Story of Maud Cary, Pioneer GMU Missionary in Morocco. Lincoln NE: Good News Broadcasting.
Sunquist, Scott. 2013. Understanding Christian Mission: Participation in Suffering and Glory. Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic Publishing.
Thompson, Phyllis. 1957. Desert Pilgrim. Lincoln NE: Back to the Bible Publishing.
Tucker, Ruth. 1983. From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan.
Tucker, Ruth. 1988. Guardians of the Great Commission: The Story of Women in Modern Missions. Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan.
EMQ, Volume 56, Issue 3. Copyright © 2020 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
