CHAPTER 46
Marguerite Kraft and Meg Crossman
Marguerite Kraft served as a missionary to the Kamwe people of Northern Nigeria. She also served many years as professor of anthropology and linguistics at the School of Intercultural Studies at Biola University. Now retired, she is the author of Worldview and the Communication of the Gospel and Understanding Spiritual power.
Meg Crossman mobilizes churches for cross-cultural ministry among the unreached overseas and with local groups of refugees and immigrants. Her major involvement has been through networks of classes and curriculum development.
From pathways to Global Understanding edited by Meg Crossman, YWAM Publishing, Seattle, WA, 2007. Used by permission of the author and YWAM Publishing.
After the last road ended, it was a two-day hike to where the Balangao people lived. The Balangao, a tribe of former headhunters, still sacrificed to powerful and demanding spirits who caused sickness, death, and constant turmoil. Two single women missionaries, trained in Bible translation, were on their way to work among them.
When they arrived, they were greeted by men wearing G-strings and women wrapped in cloth from homemade looms. It is hard to say who was more amazed. The Balangao had asked for Americans to come live with them and write their language, but they never dreamed the Americans would be women!
An old man offered to be their father and was faithful in looking after them. Besides the work of translation, these women began giving medical assistance, learning about the spirit world, and answering questions about life and death. One of them, Jo Shetler, stayed for twenty years, winning her way into the hearts and lives of these people and completing the New Testament translation. Because of this dedication, thousands now know Jesus as Lord of the Balangao.1 Jo Shetler, a shy farm girl with a dream, has stirred many with her story. However, stories remain unwritten of multitudes of women who likewise obeyed the call of God to serve Him on the far horizons. Many women do not realize how greatly God can use their giftedness and commitment in situations such as this.
From the Earliest Days
The Book of Acts records the account of Priscilla, a woman specifically used by God to touch people in at least three different nations: Rome, Greece, and Asia Minor. Apparently a native of the eastern area of Asia Minor, this woman of Jewish faith lived with her husband, Aquila, in Rome until the Jews were expelled. When they met Paul in Corinth, they may already have become believers. They hosted Paul, led a house church, and were assigned by Paul to disciple the eloquent and committed Egyptian Jew, Apollos, explaining “to him the way of God more accurately” (Acts 18:26 ESV).
Paul recognized and honored their gifts and they moved with him to the work in Ephesus. Since Priscilla’s name is almost always listed first, some scholars suggest that “the wife was more prominent and helpful to the Church.”2 It is perhaps most interesting to note that her roles in cross-cultural service, leadership, and teaching were perceived as so normal they did not require special comment or explanation by the writer of Acts. Her role seems to have been accepted and expected rather than extraordinary.
Many women were martyred for their love for Jesus in the first three centuries of Christianity. Lucia of Sicily, who lived about AD 300, was involved in Christian charitable work there. After marrying a wealthy nobleman, she was ordered to stop giving to the poor; she refused and was sent to jail. There she was persecuted and condemned to death. Melania the Younger, coming from a wealthy family in Rome with estates all around the Mediterranean, used her resources to give to the poor and to build monasteries for both men and women in Africa and Jerusalem and many churches. Her missionary journeys started as she fled from Rome during the invasion by the Goths in AD 410. As a refugee, she and many other women played an important role in the great missionary movement. Some women were taken as hostages to northern Europe, where they later married their captors and evangelized them.3
Clare, who lived and worked in association with St. Francis of Assisi in the early thirteenth century, was a reformer during a time in which Christianity seemed to have forgotten the poor. She founded the Franciscan order of Poor Clares in Italy.4 Women who chose to remain single, serve God, and live the cloistered life were given the opportunity through the accepted ecclesiastical framework to proclaim the gospel. In the Catholic tradition, priests, bishops, and nuns built churches and hospitals and founded schools and orphanages in order to establish the faith.
In the Early Protestant Missionary Movement
The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century brought about changes in the role of women in Christianity. The reformers reemphasized that women’s role was in the home, supportive of men. Arthur Glasser writes, “The reformers also subjected women to the confining perspective that their only recognized vocation was marriage. With the dissolution of the convents, women lost their last chance of churchly service outside the narrow circle of husband, home and children.”5 Within Protestantism, the problem then arose as to whether women had the right to respond to the promptings of the Holy Spirit to proclaim the word of God.
In the early days of the Protestant mission advance, most women who went to the field were wives of missionaries. Discerning men recognized that contact with women in most non-Western societies was impossible for them, so missionary wives had to undertake this responsibility. They received little recognition for the heavy load they carried, managing the home and children as well as developing programs to reach local women and girls.
Initially, single women could only go to the field to care for missionaries’ children or serve alongside the missionary family. However, little by little, new opportunities arose. R. Pierce Beaver describes the work of Cynthia Farrar in India, Elizabeth Agnew in Ceylon, and other single women who began to supervise women’s schools.6 Quietly, they helped in zenanas and harems. Doors opened through medical service. Yet their effective work was seldom publicized.
However, leaders like D. L. Moody, A. B. Simpson, and A. J. Gordon believed in encouraging women’s gifts for public ministry. Both J. Hudson Taylor, founder of China Inland Mission, and Fredrik Franson, founder of TEAM (the Evangelical Alliance Mission), saw the need to recruit and send women to evangelize cross-culturally. In 1888, Taylor wrote, “We are manning our stations with ladies.”7 Throughout its initial history, his mission expected women, both single and married, to carry out all the missionary duties, including preaching and teaching.
In Jane Hunter’s study of correspondence and published articles from women on the field, she discovered the “vast majority of women missionaries were motivated by a deep sense of commitment to God, far more than by any desire to attain personal recognition or power.”8 From such moving reports, women in the churches at home caught a dynamic world vision. They volunteered their money, time, energy, organizational ability, and prayer support. Leaders such as Annie Armstrong and Helen Barrett Montgomery dedicated themselves to mobilizing Christians to support fieldwork of all kinds.9
A New Way of Sending from America
The Civil War in the United States (1861–1865) became a catalyst for change in the way women were sent. After the Civil War, so many men died that women were either widowed or unlikely to marry. This forced women into an unusual range of responsibilities. They ran businesses, banks, and farms. They even formed colleges, and for the next fifty years inherited a larger role than men as the major muscle of the mission movement.10
Since mission agencies still refused to send women directly to the work, women simply organized their own boards. First was the Women’s Union Missionary Society. In the years to follow, many others were created. Their funds were raised above and beyond the regular denominational mission giving, indicating the phenomenal job of missions awareness these boards were achieving on the home front. They built women’s colleges specifically to train women for missionary service. Besides rousing women to go overseas, thousands of women’s missionary societies became active in local churches as a base for prayer and funding.
By 1900, over forty denominational women’s societies existed, with over three million active women raising funds to build hospitals and schools around the world, paying the salaries of indigenous female evangelists, and sending single women as missionary doctors, teachers, and evangelists.11 By the early decades of the twentieth century, the women’s missionary movement had become the largest women’s movement in the United States, and women outnumbered men on the mission field by a ratio of more than two to one.12 Sadly, as these societies were persuaded to combine with the denominational structures in the 1920s and ‘30s, women gradually lost their opportunity to direct the work.
And Still Today
Overall, probably two-thirds of the missions force has been, and currently is, female. Many mission executives agree that the more difficult and dangerous the work, the more likely women are to volunteer to do it! David Yonggi Cho concludes from his experience that women are the best choice for difficult, pioneering work. “We have found that in these situations, women will never give up. Men are good for building up the work, but women are best for persevering when men get discouraged.”13
Some fear that because of the unique obstacles of reaching the Muslim world, Western women can play no part. Yet in a nomadic Muslim group in sub-Saharan Africa, a single woman is effectively training imams (Islamic teachers) in the gospel. They perceive her to be nonthreatening, “just a woman.” Building upon a foundation of interpersonal relationship and biblical knowledge, she does not give them answers herself, but directs them to the Bible. The Lord has confirmed her teaching, giving dreams and visions to these leaders. As they have been converted, they are now training many others. She is accepted as a loving, caring elder sister, who gives high priority to their welfare.
One mission leader who advocated for more training and more support for women received an almost immediate letter of thanks from a missionary to a Muslim group in Southeast Asia. He wrote:
Interestingly enough, despite the common emphasis on training and sending men to this country, some of the best evangelists are all women! In fact, three of our most important co-workers (who are really doing the most cuttingedge ministry) are women. Right now, we only have one single man who sacrificed to come here but four single women, with more on the way. In the face of religious structures in which males dominate, it is good to be reminded that true Christianity is an equally exciting call to a new, fulfilling life for women and men.14
Opportunities in Special Areas
Women in mission have demonstrated a holistic approach with emphasis on both evangelism and meeting human needs. They have shown a deep commitment to and concern for women and children. Education, medical work, struggles against foot binding, child marriage, female infanticide, and oppressive social, religious, and economic structures were commonly the focus of their work. This called for a holistic approach to missions in which women were committed to bringing healing.
There are many creative and specialized ways of serving in which women have excelled. Wycliffe Bible Translators found over the years that teams of single women did well on the field—a far greater number of such teams successfully finish translations than teams of single men. Elizabeth Greene, a woman pilot who served in the Air Force in WWII, was one of the founders of Mission Aviation Fellowship, helping thousands of isolated mission workers with flights and communications. Joy Ridderhof founded Global Recordings, which provides Christian recordings that bring the gospel to many places and languages. Ruth Siemens’s creative idea helped lay people serving in difficult access situations find tentmaker positions overseas and founded Global Intent. Women have been permitted great latitude in Christian ministry, with their work ranging from evangelism and church planting to translating Scripture and teaching in seminaries.
It is beneficial for believers today to know and celebrate these stories. We learn from the lives of these women who served Christ’s cause. From Mary Slessor, a single woman pioneer in Africa, to Ann Judson of Burma and Rosalind Goforth of China, wives who fully served; from Amy Carmichael of India to Mildred Cable in the Gobi Desert; from Gladys Aylward, the chambermaid determined to get to China, to Eliza Davis George, Black missionary to Liberia; from translator Rachel Saint to medical doctor Helen Roseveare; from Isobel Kuhn and Elisabeth Elliot, mobilizing missionary authors, to Lottie Moon, pacesetting mission educator; from Filipino housemaids in the Middle East to women executives in denominational offices to unsung Bible women in China, the roll is lengthy and glorious!
The roll is, however, incomplete, expectantly awaiting the contribution of current and future generations. God’s women now enjoy freedoms and opportunities their ancestors in faith never anticipated. Women in our day hold responsible positions in government, business, law, and medicine. How will women of God today harvest opportunities for God’s purposes? 
RETURN TO LESSON 8: Pioneers of the World Christian Movement
Notes
1. Joanne Shetler, The Word Came with Power (Portland, OR: Multnomah Press, 1992).
2. Robert Jamieson, Andrew Robert Fausset, and David Brown, Commentary on the Whole Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1961), 1, 117.
3. Kari Torjesen Malcolm, Women at the Crossroads: A Path beyond Feminism and Traditionalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1982), 99–100.
4. Malcolm, 104.
5. Arthur Glasser, “One-Half the Church—and Mission,” Women and the Ministries of Christ, ed. Roberta Hestenes and Lois Curly (Pasadena: Fuller Theological Seminary, 1978), 88–92.
6. R. Pierce Beaver, American Protestant Women in World Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 59–86.
7. R. Pierce Beaver, All Loves Excelling (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 116.
8. Ruth Tucker, Guardians of the Great Commission (Grand Rapids: Academie Books, 1988), 38.
9. Tucker, 102–10.
10. Ralph D. Winter, personal interview, September 1991.
11. Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996), 129.
12. Tucker, Guardians, 10.
13. Paul Yonggi Cho, El Shaddai Pastor’s Fellowship luncheon in Phoenix, AZ, March 1988.
14. In personal letter to Jim Reapsome, October 25, 1992. Used with permission.