In the early 1980s, Dana L. Robert, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at the Boston University School of Theology, set out on a seemingly impossible task: writing a history of Christian missions focused on women. At the time, there was only one overview of American missions history in print, William R. Hutchison’s Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions.2 Hutchinson focused on intellectual history coming out of mainline Christian denominations and missions boards, such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and ignored numerically significant groups like Methodists. Moreover, the only woman mentioned in the book was the second-generation Presbyterian missionary to China, Pearl S. Buck, a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author.3 Therefore, in writing a history of American women in mission, Robert had the double challenge of constructing a primary and denominationally inclusive narrative of American mission history centered on women’s thought and practice.
Beyond lacking published work on the subject, Robert had to break new ground in discovering sources for her project. Moving away from Hutchinson’s intellectual history approach, Robert pursued social history. To find women’s mission theories, understand their development, and craft her historical narrative, Robert could not rely on consulting missiological treaties or histories written by women because they did not exist. Instead, she had to do the painstaking work of combing through popular journals, biographies, church literature, and denominational women’s missions magazines.4 As a result, Robert constructed a chronological narrative of American missions history that put Evangelical, Mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Pentecostal women and their mission theory and its respective developments side by side where women often focused on concrete acts of love and service, critical to Christianity’s cross-cultural growth.
In doing this painstaking work, Robert’s socio-historical and inclusive approach provided a methodological framework that helped launch other scholarly agendas that explored the impact of underrepresented people in Christian history. For example, Ann Braude’s analysis of Robert’s work in her essay, “Faith, Feminism, and History,” highlights the importance of Robert’s findings as Braude demonstrates that women play a crucial role in the story of American religion.5 After the publication of American Women in Mission, Robert’s students have continued to build on her work and demonstrate Braude’s point beyond the American context. Anneke Stasson has recently co-authored an incisive history of women in Christian history, Women in the Mission of the Church.6 Gina Zurlo, another of Robert’s students, has initiated a demographic project on the gendered nature of Global Christianity through her work at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, which led to the recent publication of her book, Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement.7 These projects demonstrate how women have shaped the Christian movement across the globe over two-thousand years.
Robert’s work has engendered a legacy of outstanding scholarship, but how does it impact the classroom? How does emphasizing the contributions of women in Christian history form students in the context of evangelical Christian universities? While I am not the first to riff on Anne Braude’s brilliant title from her essay, “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” I chose to do so in this case because it conveys the spirit with which I write this paper and teach my classes.8 Missionary women play a critical role in the expansion and development of the Christian movement throughout its history. Therefore, professors who leave women’s stories and theology out of the Christian history classroom at their peril. They construct a skewed narrative that deprives their students of the complete picture and, in my context, critical resources for Christian living and ministry. This paper explores how incorporating missionary women’s history into standard courses on Christian history empowers students to reinterpret the nature of the Christian tradition and their role in it as they wrestle with how to apply the lessons of the past to their present.
Missionary Women in Christian History and Theology III
I am a professor in the College of Biblical Studies at a small liberal arts university in West Texas associated with Churches of Christ. Students who attend the university predominantly come from conservative American evangelicalism.9 Those who matriculate into the College of Biblical Studies intend to enter some form of Christian ministry, from preaching to youth and family ministry to missions. Currently, forty-three percent of our students identify as female and fifty-seven percent as male. Students take ministry, biblical text, and Greek language classes to prepare for ministry. In addition to this assortment of courses, we require our majors to take four Christian History and Theology courses (CHAT) in their junior and senior years of the program: (1) Patristics; (2) Augustine to Aquinas; (3) Reformations to contemporary Christianity; and (4) American Christianity. I teach the latter two courses, CHAT III and CHAT IV.
In teaching CHAT III, I decided to organize the course around two central pillars that have profoundly affected Christianity’s development in the last 500 years: (1) the Reformation period and (2) Western expansion and colonialism. As Justo González argued in his book The Changing Shape of Church History, the demographic shift within Christianity from the Global North to the Global South in the last century has demanded this new syllabus for teaching Christian history. For example, the same day that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V passed the Edict of Worms banning Martin Luther’s writings, condemning him as a heretic, and labeling him an enemy of the state, Hernán Cortés was laying siege to the capital city of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlán. The former represents a critical moment in the development of sixteenth-century European religion that has implications for my American students. At the same time, however, the latter event represents an equally critical moment to Christians and non-Christians alike as Western Europeans began a colonial enterprise that would touch every corner of the globe.
As Europeans expanded their global influence, they brought their Christianities with them. As Scott Sunquist argues in his book, The Unexpected Christian Century, missionary Christianity was more than a spiritual component of colonialism. Instead, Christian missions set the stage for the revival and survival of the faith in the Global South, so much so that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Christianity had become a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic religion not dominated by one geographic area but almost equally distributed across the globe.10 If I wanted my students to understand Christianity’s contemporary global shape and character, they needed to understand Western colonialism and Christian missions’ roles in creating this reality.
By including women in the historical narrative from the beginning of the semester, my students dove into a social history that they could put in conversation with the intellectual histories they were used to from their previous CHAT courses. For example, while we discussed Martin Luther’s theological emphases and read his Freedom of a Christian together, we also saw the Lutheran Reformation’s impact on women. Kathryn von Bora, Luther’s wife, inhabited the prototypical role of the minister’s wife in Protestant Christianity. Through her story, students saw how many women escaped claustration in the sixteenth century and had new ministry opportunities but also faced and navigated gender-based restrictions and frustrations.11 Moreover, von Bora foreshadowed a critical role and missiology that missionary women later inhabited in the nineteenth century: the missionary wife and the missiology of the Christian home.12 By bringing women into the conversation during the Reformation period, I could establish themes in women’s history that our class could trace together into the twenty-first century.13
In the colonial context, exploring the lives and work of American missionary women provided my students with the perfect entry point for discussing the complex history of Christianity in the Global South. On the one hand, we studied the positive aspects of American women’s missionary work. As they navigated gender-based restrictions on their ministries, American women funneled their energy into pragmatic work that affected the day-to-day lives of the people they sought to evangelize. Rather than verbally proclaiming the gospel, American women educated children, met the medical needs of the women where they were working, and advocated for women’s rights abroad even when they often did not enjoy those rights at home.14 American women also trained and educated “Bible women,” indigenous Christian converts who served as effective partners in ministry in spreading the gospel. Such training often represented the only educational and leadership opportunities that nineteenth and early twentieth-century women had access to in places like India or China.15
On the other hand, the mission theory developed by women that anchored this pragmatic work, “Woman’s Work for Woman,” carried problematic suppositions about the superiority of Western culture and civilization. Indeed, as Dr. Robert pointed out in American Women in Mission, missionary women were often maternalistic in their work, assuming that non-Western women could only truly be liberated from oppression when they and their broader cultural contexts were “civilized.”16 The good that missionary women did, coupled with their problematic ethnocentrism, problematized Christian missions for my students. They had to sit with the difficulties inherent in cross-cultural ministry and reflect on how such tensions continue to be present in the ministries they were pursuing.
Student Impact
At the end of the semester, I gave my students an anonymous survey to evaluate specific aspects of the course. Among my questions, I asked them, “In your opinion, beyond the arguments that I have made in class, what has been the value or impact of studying women and missionary women in Christian history?” As you can imagine, I received a range of responses from “They [women] minister very different than men” to “I have learned that women are historically a vital part of Christianity.” One response stood out: “I have loved being able to find myself in their [women’s] stories of leadership and realizing that women have contributed a lot to Christianity and [are] equal members of the body of Christ.” Representation is important. Many of the women in my class had grown up in church environments where they were effectively treated as second-class citizens and told that women were to remain silent in church. Others had resigned themselves to the notion that historically, women in the church did not have a voice, but maybe things would be different for their generation. Now, my students understand that women have not been silent actors in Christian history. Instead, they understand how women have been and are a central part of Christianity, shaping and expanding the movement throughout its entire history.
My students also have a new set of historical resources to draw on for their future ministries. For example, this past summer, one of my students interned for a local church called “Open Door.”17 Since 1997, this church has worked toward eliminating homelessness in Lubbock, providing safe spaces for women experiencing sex trafficking and providing resources for impoverished individuals. For her final project, my student, who spent the summer working with and alongside sex-trafficking victims, chose to write her final paper for the course on Maria Skobstova (1891-1945), also known as “Mother Maria,” an Orthodox missionary and activist in Paris during World War II. In wrapping up her paper on Mother Maria, my student reflected,
Historically, women had been placed in boxes that allowed them to minister to people through care in their circles of influence. Women were primarily teaching in schools and providing medical care. Maria took this idea a step further and went into the dark pits of the world. She insisted on going straight to those experiencing homelessness and those being held captive by German soldiers. She created her own circle of influence within the most marginalized of people by providing holistic care . . . Maria was frequently encouraged by her friends and supporters to slow down because the work she was doing was so radical. A woman was creating entire communities of misfits and marginalized people, and this did not fit the culture.18
I cannot help but wonder if, as my student was writing and reflecting on Mother Maria’s life, she was not also reevaluating her recent experiences in conversation with the historical story she was narrating. For this student, who was also going into the dark pits of the world to minister to suffering humans, Mother Maria served as a source of inspiration and validation for her ministry.
Further Research
For the course’s final project, I provided students with a list of missionary women they could choose from to write a short biographical paper. As I put this list together, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of print and online primary and secondary resources available.19 In the twenty-five years since Robert wrote American Women in Mission, numerous individuals have built on and extended her work to the point that asking undergraduate students to write research papers is not a niche project requiring difficult archival work. Nevertheless, despite the production of secondary sources and the organization and digitization of primary sources, women still seem to have difficulty finding their way into the Christian history classroom. While I expected my students not to know this history, I continue to be surprised at how many of my colleagues within and outside of my University or graduate students I meet at conferences know little about women’s contributions to Christian history.
When I began forming this course, I discussed my plans with a friend who also taught Christian history courses in a university context. He was suspicious and somewhat anxious about my plan to focus on women in Christian history. He explained that he did not discuss women in his early Christianity courses beyond the martyrdoms of Perpetua and Felicity because writing from women hardly existed in the first millennia of Christian history. I left this conversation feeling concerned and frustrated. There are other ways of getting at women’s participation in the history of the Christian movement beyond reading theological treatises written by men. Perhaps this interaction also points to why women rarely are in the history classroom. At the end of American Women in Mission, Robert explains why the mission theory of women has been hidden from view. While women had shared the social, political, and theological contexts of male co-workers and their husbands, missionary women did not have the influence to set the framework for the kind of missiological conversations that historians paid attention to for their work. Men shaped those conversations through formal theological writing and sermonic literature.20 In the same way, perhaps women remain hidden in the classroom for the same reason: intellectual history is the low-hanging fruit of historical inquiry, and men largely dominate it.
Challenges remain. Despite numerous resources, university courses, seminary courses, and doctoral seminars that explore and analyze women’s presence and agency in the historical narrative, these are usually presented par
allel to the general historical narrative and are not effectively integrated into it. Such integration is difficult because it would necessarily require a thorough reevaluation and reconstruction of the historical narrative in question. Indeed, writing a general history of the Christian Movement that effectively integrates women would be one aspect of a daunting task. Such a project would also demand incorporating the stories of other marginalized groups and people, while also considering how the demographic shifts of Christianity away from the Global North to the Global South impact the historical narrative.21 Such a task may seem overwhelming, but the time is ripe for a project that reevaluates and adjusts the narrative considering the developments and discoveries of the last fifty years.
Beyond the call to reevaluate and restructure the historical narrative, work abounds in discovering and uncovering women’s stories and their impact on Christian denominations and para-church movements. Twenty-five years after Robert’s work, information abounds on Methodist and Baptist women, but what about women from denominations that do not have the same record-keeping and reporting mechanisms as these groups? For example, in Churches of Christ history, between 1886 and 1939, of the 172 missionaries the denomination sent to 24 different countries, 80 of those missionaries were women, 27 of whom were single.22 Outside of doctoral dissertations, there is no critical biography or history of the work of any of these women.23 How would uncovering and analyzing the stories of Churches of Christ missionary, and for that matter non-missionary, women impact our understanding of the denomination’s history? What would they teach us about the current state of Churches of Christ as a global Christian movement proliferating in the Global South that parallels the broader Christian Movement in its growth?
Despite the current availability of resources on women in Christian history, questions and avenues of inquiry remain. To what extent are women included in Christian history classrooms in seminaries and undergraduate institutions? What potential barriers prevent a fuller history of Christianity from being taught? What impact would including women as a normal part of the Christian movement’s story have on students and the church’s ministry? Twenty-five years after the publication of American Women in Mission, there is still much work to do.
1 I presented a shorter version of this paper at the 2023 Annual Meeting for the American Society of Church History. As one of Dana Robert’s former students, I was asked to participate in a panel titled “American Women in Mission: A Retrospective After 25 Years,” which explored the impact and legacy of her groundbreaking book, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice.
2 William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (The University of Chicago Press, 1987).
3 Pearl S. Buck represents a late stage in the development of women’s mission theory that moved away from lifting women up socially and culturally to emphasizing partnership and friendship. For more information see Hutchinson, Errand to the World, 166-169 and Robert, American Women in Mission, 297-299.
4 For more information on Robert’s method, see Robert, American Women in Mission, xvii-xxii.
5 Anne Braude, “Faith, Feminism, and History,” in The Religious History of America Women: Reimagining the Past, ed. Catherine A. Brekus (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 246-249.
6 Leanna M. Dzubinski and Anneke H. Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church: Their Opportunities and Obstacles throughout Christian History (Baker Academic, 2021).
7 See “Women in World Christianity,” Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, accessed December 13, 2022, https://www.gordonconwell.edu/center-for-global-christianity/research/women-in-world-christianity/ and Gina A. Zurlo, Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023).
8 Anne Braude, “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed (University of California Press, 1997).
9 Students at the university predominantly come from three Christian backgrounds: Churches of Christ, conservative evangelicalism, and Roman Catholicism. While there is considerable overlap between Churches of Christ and conservative American evangelicalism, I will not argue for or against Churches of Christ’s inclusion in American evangelicalism as it is outside the scope of this paper.
10 See Scott W. Sunquist, The Unexpected Christian Century: The Reversal and Transformation of Global Christianity, 1900-2000 (Baker Academic, 2015), 23. In using the term “Global South” I am referring to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the new centers of Christianity across the globe. Some scholars prefer the term “Two-Thirds World” to “Global South.” A detailed conversation on those terms is outside the scope of this paper. While there is a wealth of scholarship that examines the demographic shift of Christianity from the Global North to the Global South and its meaning for the Christian movement, two sources stand out in particular: Dana Robert’s Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion and Gina Zurlo’s recent book, Global Christianity: A Guide to the World’s Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. See Dana L. Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 79 and Gina A. Zurlo, Global Christianity: A Guide to the World’s Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 3.
11 For more information on the minister’s wife, see Leonard I. Sweet, The Minister’s Wife: Her Role in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelicalism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1983), 12-14.
12 For more information, see chapter 2, “The Missionary Wife: Models and Practice of Mission” in American Women in Mission by Dana L. Robert. Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Mercer University Press, 1997), 56-75.
13 For example, themes like patronage, celibacy, motherhood, education, medical care, social work, and holistic ministry run through the complete history of women in the Christian faith.
14 Dzubinski and Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church, 174.
15 Dzubinski and Stasson have an excellent and succinct discussion in their book on the role and importance of Bible Women in western missions. See Dzubinski and Stasson, Women in the Mission of the Church, 171-173.
16 Robert, American Women in Mission, 130.
17 For more information, see this organization’s website. “Home,” Open Door, accessed December 19, 2022, https://opendoorlbk.org.
18 Used with permission.
19 Beyond the work I mentioned above by Zurlo and Stasson, see also Brabara Reeves Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo, Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960 (Duke University Press, 2010); Rebecca Moore, Women in Christian Traditions (New York University Press, 2015); Elizabeth Gillan Muir, A Women’s History of the Christian Church: Two Thousand Years of Female Leadership (University of Toronto Press, 2019); Christine Lienemann-Perrin, Atola Longkumer, and Afrie Songco Joye, eds., Putting Names with Faces: Women’s Impact in Mission History (Abingdon Press, 2012); and Susan E. Smith, Women in Mission: From the New Testament to Today (Orbis Books, 2007).
20 Robert, American Women in Mission, 416.
21 This project represents one of the essential tasks of World Christianity scholars. Currently, one of the best histories of Christianity on the market is Dale T. Irvin and Scott W. Sunquist’s two-volume History of the World Christian Movement. This two-volume history represents a good step forward in integrating multiple narratives into one coherent history. For more information, see Dale T. Irvin and Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, vol. 1, Earliest Christianity to 1453 (Orbis Books, 2001) and Dale T. Irvin and Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, vol. 2, Modern Christianity from 1454-1800 (Orbis Books, 2012).
22 These numbers may not be accurate since Churches of Christ did not keep official records of its missionary enterprise. To check their accuracy, scholars would need to comb through popular denominational journals. I derived these numbers from Phillip Wayne Elkins’s book, Church-Sponsored Missions. For more information see Phillip Wayne Elkins, Church-Sponsored Missions: An Evaluation (Firm Foundation Publishing House, 1974): 94-97.
23 There are, however, at least three popular denominational biographies that often border on hagiography. “Ah Wing’s” Elizabeth Bernard: Forty Years Among the Chinese by Tom Tune is the story of Elizabeth Bernard, a single missionary who ran an orphanage for blind children in Hong Kong from 1932 until her death in 1971. Bernard was suffering from macular degeneration when she left the United States in 1932 to begin her work.. See Tom Tune, “Ah Wing’s” Elizabeth Bernard: Forty Years Among the Chinese (Tune Publications, 1975). Messengers of the Risen Son in the Land of the Rising Sun: Single Women Missionaries in Japan by Bonnie Miller explores the biographies of the single women from Churches of Christ who worked in Japan from the beginning of the denomination in 1906 through the end of World War 2 in 1945. Though Miller’s work is meant for a popular audience, she constructs a careful narrative and relies heavily on primary sources, but does not offer any in-depth analysis. See Bonnie Miller, Messengers of the Risen Son in the Land of the Rising Sun: Single Women Missionaries in Japan (Leafwood Publishers, 2008). Finally, Fiona Soltes’s Virtuous Servant: Sarah Sheppard Andrews Christian Missionary to Japan is a hagiography of Sarah Andrews’s life as a missionary in Japan from 1916 until her death there in 1961 (Soltes also misspells Andrews’s middle name in her title and throughout the book). See Fiona Soltes, Sarah Sheppard Andrews Christian Missionary to Japan (Providence House Publishers, 2009).
