A missionary is someone who goes out into the world and explains the gospel. They lead others to Christ in settings other than a local church. An ideal example of one active female missionary in the New Testament is Priscilla (mentioned in Acts 18:24–28). She and her husband (Aquila) are described as teaching Apollos the correct view of the good news of Jesus.
Throughout history, female missionaries have served as an essential component to God's work worldwide, Women have always helped change many lives for the work of God. Here are some historical women that have made all the difference spiritually:
1.
Adele Marion Fielde (1839 – 1916) was a
working-class native of Rodman, NY, who followed her
fiancé, a Baptist missionary, to Bangkok, Thailand. She discovered he’d died of
typhoid fever ten days after she’d set sail from New York. She carried on for a
couple of years. Later she went on a mission to China for training women.
Adele mastered the Chinese
language and was also a powerful writer.
She encouraged each of her Chinese women to
tell their stories, and then translated these stories and got them published in
magazines back home. She retired from missionary work, went home, and became
involved in scientific research.
A free
thinker since childhood, Adele
broke away from her family’s Baptist roots only to return after becoming
engaged to a Baptist missionary candidate. She faithfully served as a Baptist
missionary for two decades, and then turned to science.
2.
Amy Carmichael
(1867 – 1951) was a small-village girl from a devout Presbyterian family in County Down, Northern Ireland. She was called first to work among the mill girls of
Manchester, England, and then overseas. She found her life-long vocation in
India. In those days, Hindu priests kept temple children (mostly young girls
who were forced into prostitution to earn money for them).
Amy tried to rescue them by setting up a hospital in Tamil Nadu (thirty
miles from the southern tip of India). She would dress in Indian clothes, dye
her skin with dark coffee, and travel long distances on hot, dusty roads to
save just one child from suffering. Amy died
in India at the age of eighty-three.
She asked that no
stone be put over her grave. Instead, the children she had cared for put a bird
bath over it with the single inscription Amma,
which meant mother in Tamil. She served in India fifty-five years
without furlough, and produced a total of thirty-five published books about her
experiences.
3.
Betsey Stockton
(c. 1798 – 1865) was a freed slave who left domestic service to travel as
America’s first single female missionary to Hawaii. After being asked by the
son of the Hawaiian king to teach him English, Betsey started up a school at Lahaina, HI,
for the fishermen, farmers and craftsmen who lived off the land, which
continued after she left in 1826. She
died in Princeton, NJ, and is buried in Cooperstown, NY.
“It is Satan's work to fill men's hearts with doubt. He
leads them to look upon God as a stern judge. He tempts them to sin, and then
to regard themselves as too vile to approach their Heavenly Father or to excite
His pity. (Ellen G. White)
Gladys Aylward (1902 – 1970) was a
working class London, England, girl who left domestic service for Yuncheng, Shanxi Province, China, in the tumultuous years leading up to World War II.
She worked with an older missionary, Jeannie Lawson, to found an inn where
traveling merchants could get a hot meal and hear stories from the Bible.
Gladys was initially rejected as a potential missionary to
China because of her lack of education. She spent her life savings on her
passage. Appointed by the local official to serve as a foot inspector, she
toured the countryside to enforce the new law against foot binding
and met with much success. She also took in orphans and adopted several for
herself.
Amy intervened in a volatile prison riot, and advocated for
prison reform. When the region was invaded by Japanese forces in 1938, Gladys
led around a hundred children to safety over the mountains despite being
wounded herself. She returned to England in the 1940s, and then tried to go
back to China but was re-denied entry by the Communist government. Gladys ended
up in Taiwan where she started another orphanage until her death. She was known
in China as Ai-weh-deh (Virtuous
One).
4.
Lottie Moon
(1840 – 1912) was a highly educated Virginia native (she was born “Charlotte
Digges Moon”) on her family’s ancestral slave-run tobacco plantation. She
became a teacher and then was called, at age 33, to serve for decades in China
with the Southern Baptist Convention. She went to join to her sister, Eddie, who was stationed
at the North China Mission in the treaty port of Dengzhou.
When China was facing plague, famine, revolution, and war,
Moon shared her personal finances and food with anyone in need around her. She died of starvation, in the harbor
of Kobe, Japan,
while en route back to the United States. (At that point she weighed only 50
pounds.) Southern Baptists have named their annual mission fund after Lottie
Moon.
It finances half the entire Southern Baptist mission’s
budget every year. Lottie Moon Cookies:
Moon won over the children in her Chinese village by making tea cakes for them
— they called her “the cookie lady” instead of “foreign devil.” Baptist
families bake Lottie Moon Cookies for Christmas.
5.
Mary Slessor
(1848 – 1915) was a Victorian mill girl who left the slums of Dundee,
Scotland,
to live among the
tribes of Calabar, Nigeria,
to take up the mantle of David Livingstone
two years after he died. While in Africa, Mary became acquainted with the
writer Mary Kingsley.
Although the latter had never been brought up a Christian,
their common status of being single females living among native populations
with little company created the basis for lasting friendship.
The tribal people believed that if a woman gave birth to
twins, one of the twins was the offspring of the Devil who had secretly mated
with the mother. Since the innocent child was impossible to distinguish, both
should be killed (the mother was often killed as well). Mary fought hard to end
this practice. Mary died in
Nigeria at age sixty-seven.
There was great mourning among the tribes to whom she’d
dedicated her life. During London Fashion Week in 2010, Nigerian-born designers
Bunmi Olaye and Francis Udom named Mary as one of
the muses behind their collection, which
fused Victorian costume with furs of the African tribe Mary had lived in. Mary
had rescued Francis’s great-grandmother, who was born a twin, from human
sacrifice.
6.
Ann Haseltine
Judson (1789 – 1826) was a Bradford, Massachusetts teacher, and the wife of Andoiram Judson. Two weeks after
they married, the couple set out on a mission trip to India, and then to Burma.
While her husband was imprisoned in Burma under suspicion of
being a spy, Ann wrote stories of the struggles she faced on her own in the
mission field. She included tragic descriptions of child marriages, female
infanticide, and the trials of the Burmese women who had no rights except for
those their husbands gave them. She
died of smallpox in Burma at age thirty-seven.
The Lord understands all
this. Jesus assures His disciples of God's sympathy for them in their needs and
weaknesses. Not a sigh is breathed, not a pain felt, not a grief pierces the
soul, but the throb vibrates to the Father's heart.” (Ellen G. White) [i]
 |
| Ellen Gould. White (Harmon, 1827-1915) - an American Christian pioneer |
[i] Sources used:
·
“7 Extraordinary Women Travelers with a Passion to Save Souls” by ML Awanohara
·
“Can Women Be Missionaries? What
Does the Bible Say About Women Missionaries?” (https://www.compellingtruth.org/women-missionaries.html)
·
“Manchester,” “Dundee,” and “Ellen G. White” from Wikipedia
Inspired by
my daughter, Allena Kinker
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