Gina Zurlo says women have been very active in mission, though their contribution has been undervalued.
I posted seven articles earlier this year in a series called ‘Christianity: a missionary religion.’
At the time, I said the seventh one was the last – but I’ve changed my mind, having discovered that many good books on missions and missionaries are continuing to be published. Thus, I will add a few more posts to the series over the next few months.
As I said in the introduction to the series:
Mostly, I’ll look at recently published books. It is encouraging to see that, while most churches and Christian bookstores have largely forgotten missionaries, a few publishers continue to produce some fascinating books.
Some are devotional; some are aimed at the Christian public. But many have an academic focus, both from within the Christian community and from secular publishers.
No longer do we see much in the way of hagiography (probably a sign of maturity) and many are critical of the missionary movement. But they do take it seriously, and I hope pastors and other leaders will increasingly follow suit.
It probably goes without saying that I will just scratch the surface of each topic (at times simply quoting from the publishers) – but I do hope people will go on to read some of the books, which are of high quality.
The series
• Introduction
1. History of Missions
2. State of World Christianity
3. Specific Areas: Africa
4. Specific Areas: Asia
5. Specific Areas: Latin America
6. Not So Good News
7. New Approaches to Missions
8. Women
VII. Women
- Gina A. Zurlo: Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement (Wiley Blackwell, 2023)
Gina Zurlo has become well known over the past few years for her work on major projects which assess the nature, breadth and significance of Christianity worldwide.
Women in World Christianity features findings from the ‘Women in World Christianity Project,’ a groundbreaking study launched in 2018, aiming to determine the percentage of females in every Christian denomination in every country of the world.
The introduction to the project states:
Missiologist Dana Robert described World Christianity as a “woman’s movement” and estimated the historical missionary movement from the United States as two-thirds female.
Historians have also indicated that Christianity has always been majority female: women were the last at the cross, the first at tomb and make up the majority of Christians today. Many church revitalization movements – both historically and currently – are led by women.
Zurlo’s book places special emphasis on women in the 20th and 21st centuries, the period of Christianity’s shift from the global North to the global South. Though the book is not only about missions and missionaries, she does address those topics throughout the book.
Women in World Christianity should be seen in the context of Zurlo’s work over the years. She is Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity and Research Fellow at Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. She is the author of Global Christianity: A Guide to the World’s Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and From Nairobi to the World: David B. Barrett and the Re-imagining of World Christianity.
She is also co-author of the World Christian Encyclopedia, 3rd edition, and co-editor of the World Christian Database. She was named one of the BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2019 for her work in quantifying religion worldwide.
She said during a Lausanne Movement interview in July (linked just below) that the project came from “a mix of academics and my personal experience as a women in World Christianity”:
So academically, I’m working with a mentor [Dana Robert] who’s very tuned into what’s happening with women in the global church and learning a lot about women in church history, women in mission, women in missiological thought.
But then I have my own person experience as a woman in World Christianity. . . . I was going to all these [global Christian] meetings and I was noticing over and over and over that I was one of the very few women in the room.
It really started to bother me that I knew, intellectually – women make up the majority of churches; missionaries around the world, kind of the boots on the ground, are women; the worker bees are the women; everyone’s saying, on the one hand, women are the backbone of the church – and then I’m going to all these meetings where there’s hardly any women to be found. And so, to me, this kind of reached a climax in 2018.
Zurlo says the key role of women in Christian history is becoming better known, particularly because of the work of female historians and theologians:
It is becoming increasingly popular in World Christianity books and courses to highlight well known Christian women such as Pandita Ramabai in India, the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, and American and British missionaries like Ann Hasseltine Judson, Lottie Moon, Amy Carmichael and Gladys Aylward. However, their presence is still relegated to the margins, a mere addition to an existing framework, rather than a much needed rewriting of the framework altogether.
She also shows that women are probably even more significant to the growth of Christianity today. For example:
The Pentecostal/Charismatic movement [the fastest growing wing of Christianity around the world] has always had a strong missionary impulse and outward facing vision, and women were at the forefront of the movement’s expansion from the beginning. . . .
No data are available on the number of Pentecostal/Charismatic missionaries in the world today, and especially not on the gender makeup of those missionaries. Well known is that the growth of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement would not have been possible without the “vast number of ordinary and virtually forgotten women and men who networked across regional and even national boundaries,” proclaiming the Spirit-empowered message (Allan H. Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism, 2013, p. 213).
- Daniel L. Akin: 10 Women Who Changed the World: Inspiring Female Missionaries Who Fulfilled the Great Commission (B&H Books, 2024)
Daniel Akin, President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina, wrote 10 Women Who Changed the World because he loves missionary stories and because he has read many such stories about impressive women.
In an interview on his seminary’s site, he said:
The book is about 10 wonderful women missionaries, many whose stories have been neglected or forgotten in missionary history.
For example, Harriet Newell was headed to the mission field at 19 immediately after her marriage. She got pregnant, but she and her baby would die on a ship before they ever reached their planned destination. On her deathbed she begged her husband to tell her family back home, “I have never repented leaving all for Christ.”
We need to hear words like that today.
Among the other women he writes about (from the interview):
- Betsey Stockton has especially been an inspiration. She was born a black slave in America, came to Christ, and would be one of the first single women to go to the nations as a missionary.
- Consider the life of Eleanor Chesnut and how her life reflects so beautifully John 13:34-35. A medical missionary in China, she served the people there with a Christlike love only to be brutally martyred. In the last year of her life, she cared for 5,479 patients at a women’s hospital in southern China.
- Think about Yvette Aarons. She is the first deaf missionary ever appointed by Southern Baptists. She had all sorts of obstacles in her path, but she never allowed them to stop her from getting to the unreached deaf of the world.
- Darlene Deibler Rose served as a missionary in Southeast Asia during WWII. She and her husband would be imprisoned by the Japanese. Both would be brutally tortured, and he would die. Yet, following the end of the war, she remarried and returned to the field, serving our Lord for 40 more years.
Akin demonstrates how each of the 10 women embodies a certain passage of Scripture:
- Sarah Hall Boardman Judson (Psalm 138)
- Eleanor Chesnut (John 13:34–35)
- Ann Hasseltine Judson (Psalm 142)
- Harriet Newell (Psalm 116)
- Darlene Deibler Rose (Psalm 27)
- Betsey Stockton (1 Corinthians 7:17–24)
- Bertha Smith (Galatians 2:20)
- Charlotte Atlee White Rowe (1 Corinthians 9:19, 22-23)
- Yvette Aarons (Proverbs 3:5-8)
- Lilias Trotter (2 Corinthians 12:7-10)
Asked why Southern Baptists have historically commissioned more women than men as missionaries (and this would apply across most denominations), he replied:
The answer to that question is painfully simple: Women have been more willing to go. Therefore, the challenge in every generation is to call the men to follow the example of their sisters and go.
For an in-depth look at Southern Baptist missions, go to Make Disciples of All Nations (Kregel Academic, 2021).
- Gale L. Kenny: Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024)
Two brief reviews describe the focus of Christian Imperial Feminism:
“Expertly written. . . . Will be of most interest to historians, particularly those working on missions, Christian women and US Christianity in the 20th century.”
– Hillary Kaell, author of Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage
“Through close examinations of a wide range of practices from mission study to pageants to committee meetings to worship services, Christian Imperial Feminism reveals the ways that Protestant women embraced a Christian cosmopolitanism that simultaneously embraced diversity and sought to manage it. . . .
A thoughtful exploration of Protestant churchwomen as full people with good intentions and deep flaws who took action in a world that they thought they understood far better than they actually did, with effects that they could not always predict.”
– Emily Conroy Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic
Christian Imperial Feminism illuminates how white American Protestant women embraced a racially specific version of social inclusiveness that centred themselves as the norm
Amidst the global instability of the early 20th century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an ’empire of Christ’ that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism.
Gale Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s missionary movement to create a Christian world order. She shows that this Christian imperial feminism marked a break from an earlier Protestant world view that focused on moral and racial purity and in which interactions among races were inconceivable.
This new approach actually prioritized issues like civil rights and racial integration, as well as the uplift of women, though the racially diverse world Christianity it aspired to was still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered, with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians.
In exposing these dynamics, this book departs from recent scholarship on white evangelical nationalism to focus on the racial politics of white religious liberalism. Christian Imperial Feminism adds a necessary layer to our understanding of religion, gender and empire.
Reviewing the book in E3W (Ethnic and Third World Literatures), Kerri Kilmer concludes that it “leaves readers with compelling arguments for the complicity of liberal religious feminism in imperial thought and action and feminism’s continued resonance and impact on American imperialism today.”
- Mary F. Ehrlander & Hild M. Peters: Hospital and Haven: The Life and Work of Grafton and Clara Burke in Northern Alaska (Bison Books, 2023)
Many women missionaries went out on their own, but many were also very active with their husbands.
Hospital and Haven tells the story of an Episcopal missionary couple who lived their entire married life, from 1910 to 1938, among the Gwich’in peoples of northern Alaska, devoting themselves to the peoples’ physical, social and spiritual well-being.
The era was marked by great social disruption within Alaska Native communities and high disease and death rates, owing to the influx of non-Natives in the region, inadequate sanitation and hygiene, minimal law enforcement and insufficient government funding for Alaska Native health care.
Hospital and Haven reveals the sometimes contentious yet promising relationship between missionaries, Alaska Natives, other migrants and Progressive Era medicine.
St. Stephen’s Mission stood at the center of community life and formed a bulwark against the forces that threatened the Native peoples’ lifeways and lives.
Dr. Grafton (Happy or Hap) Burke directed the Hudson Stuck Memorial Hospital, the only hospital to serve Alaska Natives within a several-hundred-mile radius. Clara Burke focused on orphaned, needy, and convalescing children, raising hundreds in St. Stephen’s Mission Home. The Gwich’in in turn embraced and engaged in the church and hospital work, making them community institutions.
Here are links to a couple of articles on Church for Vancouver that address women missionaries:
- One particularly interesting female missionary was Isobel Kuhn, who came from Vancouver and spent decades with the Lisu people of southwest China and Thailand, serving with China Inland Mission. Go here for an introduction.
- Local academic Sonya Grypma wrote Nursing Shifts in Sichuan: Canadian Missions and Wartime China, 1937-51 (UBC Press, 2021).