when we studied the modern missionary Movement we had a case study on husbands and wives going to the mission field and we looked at whether or not you should go if your spouse is not align with calling or has some trepidation about going on the mission field but often when we look at the Modern missionary movement the the missionary couple was considered one unit in missions and so it was considered like a dual career structure where where they were seen as the woman was usually supportive which was fine but I also want to give some examples of women who were leading and many of them did when they were spouses but in this case I'm going to look at women who were evangelist preachers and who started churches so when we're training women in the Seminary it it's it's very important to consider these because we're training preachers we're training women for Apostolic leadership and to be involved in global missions crosscultural missions as well so my first the question arises why don't we have a lot of women in the textbooks for the history of the church and for Missions and I'll give you several reasons for this so first there are cultural views of women so from the beginning the beliefs about female inferiority pervaded Christianity and influence the early church fathers many were influenced by Aristotle and other Greek and Roman thinkers who viewed women as irrational cowardly and more susceptible to Temptation than men Aristotle believed that women were defective or incomplete men and portrayed them as passive and weak in comparison and then this pre-christian thought regarding female inferiority and unsuitability for leadership it meshed together with Christian Theology and practice so Jerome and Clement of Alexandria characterized spiritual growth for women as a progression towards Manliness Jerome who viewed women as fit for birth and childbearing wrote but when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man we might consider that quote a bit a bit extreme today but that's that was the Viewpoint and then women are also missing from the historical record because there's an obstacle for women and that the church tends to favor a certain has tended to favor a certain uh church history that focuses on the major the iians Bishops the founders of new monastic movements and denominations so telling the story in this way tends to leave out all but a few women but with the move towards more social and cultural history and the entrance of numerous women historians including one of the texts that I've used for the course the contributions of women are making their way into mainstream church history textbooks however some of women's most significant contributions to church history continue to be over look because it hasn't the church may not have deemed their work significant enough to remember so we'll look at the the Bible women in uh in Asia and Africa and many of them were unamed but their work was sign significant we also look at some well-known uh examples there are also some cultures that consider it inappropriate for women to take individual credit for their work for example the modesty and humility of the medieval nuns LED them to leave their literary works Anonymous so while we might enjoy these works we don't know who wrote them or we find may have found out later and I mentioned the two person career struggle for Western missionary women and the historian that I'm using as well as as my viewpoint is that it's completely fine for women to be be supportive of their husband's roles to have a role that's only at home or to be engaged in uh ways that they're taking the lead and all of those are certainly uh important contributions but we're we're looking at certain uh certain roles in this lecture so in the early church we're going to go back to that time and consider the patrons and the House Church host in the earliest days of the church there was a significant openness to the ecclesial leadership of women and scriptures provide the best literary evidence that Independent Women such as Lydia the purple dye Merchant and Philippi where the the church first began in in Europe uh actually in the Macedonian culture it was common for women to lead and then we have Mary in Jerusalem and nimva in leoda and they were heads of their own households and patrons who hosted the church in their homes they also introduced Paul to people in their Social Circles facilitating the continued spread of the Gospel into the upper echelons of society it was a common practice for the head of a household to apprciate the Eucharist and since Lydia Mary and NFA were hosts of the church that met in their homes they likely also led the communion service that was part of the early church worship and women were also missionary evangelists teachers and apostles one of the best places for claim given to women in the mission of the church is chapter 16 of Paul's letter to the Romans and I'll read to you I commend to you our sister Phoebe a deacon of the church in syrea I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you for she has been the benefactor of many people including me he said also greet Priscilla and Aquilla my co-workers in Jesus Christ they risk their lives for me not only I but all the churches of the Gentiles are grateful to them greet also the church that meets at their house greet Mary who worked very hard for you greet andronica s junor my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me they are outstanding among the apostles and they were in Christ before I was greet Trina and trosa women who work hard in the Lord greet my dear friend persus another woman who has worked very hard in the Lord so some of the women that Paul names in this list they were missionary evangelists and teachers so prisilla for one is particularly intriguing because her name is mentioned before her husband so mentioning her first could have suggested a difference than her social class or Paul considered her to be a more prominent Church leader or she may have simply been more memorable in some respect but Priscilla and Aquilla were Jews who followed Jesus's Messiah and they were part the growing band of his followers when Emperor Claudius expelled Jews from Rome in ad. 49 Priscilla and Aquilla moved to Corinth where they founded a church and they were tent makers by trade and they were also able to offer Paul who was also a Tent Maker lodging in steady work when he came to Corinth a few years later later they went with Paul as missionaries to Ephesus to found another church we can read about that in Acts 18 or it's mentioned and in Ephesus they met Apollos another Jewish follower of Jesus and a gifted preacher we learned in Acts that Apollos was already a learned man with a thorough knowledge of the scripture but then we find that Priscilla and Aquilla invited him into their home and explain to him the way of God more fully so the two couples Paul affirms in Romans 16 Priscilla and ailla and andronicus and Junior they took risk for the sake of the Gospel so Paul says of the first couple they risked their lives for me and of the latter they were imprisoned with them and both of these missionary couples proclaimed the gospel and there's really no indication that the female Partners had a different or any kind of diminished role and Romans 16:7 Paul calls Junia an apostle sometimes Paul uses the word to signify a messenger or an emissary of the church for example in 2 Corinthians 8 and he frequently uses the term for itinerate preachers of the Gospel the description of junia's work suggests that she and andronicus were atiner preachers just like Paul that some Scholars think Junia may have even known Jesus which would have made her an important leader in the early church but sadly her name has been changed in in many uh in certain versions of scripture it's been changed to Junius which is a male name Paul counted many women among his co-workers in his letter to the Philippians he names two women Yoda and cinti who contended at my side in the cause of the Gospel as he said and in his letter to the Romans he highlights three more women Trina trosa and perses as I mentioned who work very hard in the Lord so when he says work in Romans he's saying that this demonstrated that they were actually active in the mission of the church and in evangelism so it was a technical term that he used in missionary language and Paul uses the same word to describe himself in Galatians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15 so many of the many of the early Martyrs of the church if we look at that period they were also women and there's some prominent ones that we we read about but I'm going to move on to looking at the the deesses of the church so we find the deaconesses in the monastic period as a prominent role or prominent uh order wealthy women Scholars like Marcela Melania and olympius used their wealth and Prestige to establish monasteries and Inspire the growing aesthetic and dial communities they use their extensive biblical knowledge and Theological expertise to shape the theological conversations so the roles of the Virgin the desert mother and the Deacon offered ways for women in the early centuries to live out a Christian vocation and these vocations were kind of similar in their focus on aestheticism on Deeds of Charity prayer and fasting the position of a Deaconess was an ordained Ministry in the church with the responsibility and Authority that I recognized office brings so deaconesses were expected to evangelize to make disciples to assist with baptism and training of women converts and to be theologically equipped to engage in these Ministries the deaconesses were examined or they were tested to be approved before they could be admitted into their office and they were expected to remain faithful and living out this vocation usually for the rest of their lives the deet flourished in the early church but it faded around the 12th century and uh so women were not in those roles usually after the 12th century then we're then we'll look at Women's leadership in the western Faith missions organizations so the Faith Mission movement it represented a shift in missiology that we we've we're studying the earliest Faith Mission was called China inland mission founded in 1865 by Hudson Taylor so Hudson Taylor recruited and he sent out single women from the very beginning the first group to go to China he went with his family his wife and their four children and a married couple and they had 14 singles and out of those singles nine were women and there was something kind of casual about the way he recruited women but he had a purpose behind it so he considered that young women could quickly become fluent in Chinese so this was important but especially the single women when they were in charge of any aspect of the church or Mission then it was it was easier it was faster for them to become indigenous as Chinese men took up the roles and were able to to lead so this this helped and then we if we look at the Christian Missionary Alliance the CMA they went a step further women weren't sent as doctors teachers or caregivers looking at only uh the goal to have them interact and Minister and disciple women and children but they were recruited as full equal Partners in the task of the Gospel proclamation to to everyone other agencies uh quickly followed this this pattern for the role of women and the goal of Faith missions organizations to send single women in the field as full missionaries and evangelists alongside men it it quickly kind of floundered and uh it it didn't last for very long time we do have a very prominent woman in the history of missions from uh the United States Baptist missionary uh she moved away from this view of women's work for women as a strategy it didn't really sit well with her because she felt like she's called to be an evangelist and she was very passionate about evangelism so because she was a woman the board sent her to China in 1873 with an assignment to teach in the school and she briefly considered getting married to another missionary who was engaged to him but he chose to pursue an academic career in the states and she broke off the engagement but if we look at her at a time when some Mission boards were complaining that women were moving it more into what you call Holistic Ministry and this could distract from evangelism moon was developing into a very effective Evangelistic preacher she found a creative way around the constraints that were placed on her and she made her women's meetings and messages so interesting that men could not resist coming to hear her as well they they were very curious it was something that was not just for for the women and so she also worked to train and support local male Believers as they quickly would become uh leaders and take on the Pastoral roles among those who came to Faith and that way she was not going against her Southern Baptist board but actively evangelizing men but she actually reached them and and encourag their leadership to the members of her sending board she was outspoken in her insistence that missionary women would receive the same voice the same vote and support as their male colleagues and moon died on Christmas Eve in 1912 from starvation in China when she was 72 years old her region of China had been hit with a severe famine and she shared what little food she had with those around her and then died of Salvation so now we're going to look at more of the unnamed women the Bible women in the modern missionary movement but this is quite significant in missions history the role of Bible men women was the first independent Ministry role available to Christian women in Asia and Africa Bible women were local women who were hired and trained by the Western women's boards and they were paid a modest wage to take the gospel from one Village to to the next going from place to place they spent much of their time meeting with women in their home so there they would leave Bible studies and sometimes they had prayer meetings or even or would lead Sunday School in the homes some of them formed their own mission societies linked to this in this case the female education society that trained them this daughter organization was run completely by and for women and sought to raise the status of Indian women through education by the year 1889 the FES had so many Indian Partners in Mission it decided to list these Indian women missionaries in their annual reports the Indian missionaries outnumbered the British missionaries in the early 20th century women's Mission organization supported three times as many indigenous women as evangelists as they did the foreign missionaries so as I said they were they were unnamed but they were great in number and very impactful the earliest Bible women were simply trained to buy Western missionary women in their homes but gradually the women sending boards developed schools where they could train the Bible women in scripture theology history evangelism they trained them in hity and also in hygiene because they were meeting practical needs as they ministered and by 1900 there were 40 female training schools in China and more than 30 in India so you can kind of grasp the scope of this at the height of the the Bible women 40 training schools in China so this is quite a number uh and then as I said in India as well some Bible women evangelized in the public settings also and they spoke to audiences of men and women for example a WI a widow in the 1930s in India preached to a crowd of 400 prosperous Hindu farmers and there was a missionary who was present and could record what was what was was happening so I'll quote to him he said for 35 minutes that preacher held the attention of her audience her sermon and a language which the writer does not understand was said to be logical forceful and eloquent Bible women began to teach other women who would themselves become Bible women so does that sound familiar with we with how we train leaders and we Empower them so they they were training them to to take on this role and and disciple others and and lead some Bible women were also trained in medicine and by 1910 there were almost 6,000 Bible women and Native helpers around the world some of these Bible women worked closely with the missionaries While others were independent so look at South Africa in particular where the ministry of the Bible women was considered an order just like the orders of widows and deacons in the early church many Bible women in the early chur 20th century were paid at amount so small it was barely enough to cover their basic expenses and then they had an issue of their status the Bible woman catechist or evangelist it was the lowest employee on the hierarchy of the the mission churches so it's considered a a low role even though they were effective even though everyone acknowledged that the Bible women were doing important work and that the mission of the church would be greatly hampered without their participation the Bible women were not given the same respect as their male as the male evangelists or the Western missionary women we found that there was a closure of the women's missionary boards in the early 20th century so they were closed down and it was a major shift that could be called a sea change in missions in some ways it's surprising that a change of this magnitude is kind of unknown less than 100 years later The Disappearing of women's contributions and women's work happened with the loss of leadership opportunities for women in the early church it also happened when we look at the medieval times when women had forc claustra the nuns had to stay in one place and they they couldn't go out into the public and then also the suppression of women preachers uh this is something that happened in revivals and other places women did resist the closure of their Sydney boards but they simply were unable to prevent the closures from happening in many cases women as late people they didn't have a say in the denominational decisions or they were able to reach compromises that simply delay the closures but it did eventually end these women's uh boards ended in the mainline Protestant churches and that was followed quickly by A reduced emphasis on missions work overall because it was such a big part of Missions as the nomination women's boards were closing there were still opportunities for American women and independent faith missions organizations so they moved into these these these sending Orcs so now I want to focus on the uh the national women the women who were evangelists and missionaries in Asia uh so and Africa so we'll start with China as Western missionary women were joining the new Faith Mission organizations and hoping to serve as evangelists abroad several Chinese women were leading a Christian Revival in China notable among them is Dora U uh around 1873 and she passed away in 1931 she was the foremost female evangelist in the 20th century Chinese revivalism and she was also the first cross-cultural Chinese missionary in modern times she grew up in a Christian home and went to Korea as a missionary she was the only physician in Mission In Her mission where she served and she helped to establish a girl school she served as a Bible woman and in one year alone she visited 925 women and 211 children in their homes after such a strenuous schedule her health deteriorated and she returned to China in 1903 the next year she founded the first Chinese Faith Mission began to lead prayer meetings trusting God to tell her what she should say she conducted these PR these prayer meetings in several languages Chinese English and Korean and many Chinese people came to Faith through her work she published a Chinese Himel as well and she was the first Chinese woman to establish a Bible School you continued to be a revivalist preacher throughout the 1920s and then and then we'll look at PE Wang Ruth Lee and Christina Sai there were other prominent Chinese evangelists during this period major Chinese revivalists before 1927 were predominantly women peace Wang became a Christian when someone preached at her school so someone came in and she received the gospel uh and then when W's family discovered she was a Christian her father pulled her out of the school and she believed she was called to serve God as an evangelist but she was engaged and knew that backing out of this engagement would bring disgrace to her family so her father vowed to punish her with death if she wouldn't comply but following scripture the following scripture kept resonating in her heart anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me so her parents continued to resist her call and she locked herself in her room and fasted and prayed her parents feared that her hunger strike would ended suicide if they didn't allow her to go to Seminary so she was quite committed to uh to her calling and her father arranged for a cousin to marry her fiance so she was able to enroll in this Seminary and after finishing her education she began traveling as a preacher she W she led witness Lee to the Lord and he recalled uh the occasion he said I attended her meeting and I can testify that from that day to the present I have never seen preaching that was so prevailing she preached to a crowd of over 1,000 and it wasn't about sin or about hell but concerning how Satan possesses and occupies people but they were gender constraints that they had to navigate in the Chinese revivalism the women LED revivals in China until 1927 but after that there was a marked shift of gender selection in this revival movement the movement was taken over by a new generation of male Evangelical revivalists such as Watchman KNE John sun and others Watchman KNE was converted through the work of doru but after he read Darby's argument he read an argument against women's leadership NE n decided that women should not teach the men so he then convinced these evangelists Ruth Lee and P Wang to stop teaching men so Wayne and Lee are remembered as helpers who assisted the mail leaders even though co-workers was the was the title that God had apparently suggested to Watchman when he had a dream prior to meeting Ruth Lee and he recounts this he says the night before her arrival Watchman Nee was considering whether or not to join the reception thinking that although she might be a good evangelist since she was a female she should not be too highly esteemed however during the night he had a dream and in that dream he he and others met her at a pier and when he saw her he said that the Lord told him that she would be his coworker Ruth Lee and P Swang towards uh after after having these years of effective Ministry they were arrested in 1956 by the Chinese government for their leadership in the Christian movement and they died in prison so like dor youu these women's these women's influence on the spread of Christianity and China was immense so now we'll move on to women's leadership in Africa in Africa women preachers prophets and healers were essential to the founding and growth of what are called the African initiated churches or the aic's the East African Revival had a prominent woman named Paula Damani she was a member of the court of the Zulu King and she founded churches among the Zulu of southern Africa Civil War forced lamini to flee the court and eventually she well not working for a farmer Gert van Ruan she became a Christian through a dream and then she began leading worship services in the van Ruan home her Ministry was so effective that people began to call her the apostle so each week she and Ben Ruan would plan a sermon and then she would preach to the the black people and he would preach to the whites as the congregation began to spring up as a result of her preaching the German missionary who oversaw the evangelization of the region he sent male evangelists to lead the congregations and Damini was highly satisfied with her work that she was able to do as an evangelist she preached to two wives of the Zulu King who converted and and then later in her life she was instrumental in leading the commander of the royal Army to Faith lamini decided to remain unmarried to dedicate her whole life to the service of the Lord women also LED in the African initiated churches so Damini and others in the east African Revival worked within the denominations that were initiated by the Western missionaries but during the same time these new African initiated churches began to take off throughout the continent so women played a major role in The Establishment and growth of these aic's unlike Mission churches which took years to turn over leadership to Africans the aic's were governed by Africans from the very beginning women were so active in the AIC movement that it became it has been called a women's movement women addressed witchcraft healing and exorcisms so they discipled what is called the excluded middle that the missionaries did not address and I'll explain this so the missionaries might come in and and address issues of Salvation eternal life but the people were dealing with uh fears and and concerns in daily life that would lead them into uh these practices of uh of Witchcraft and and they also dealing with the health issues that immediately related to their their need for for their desire for healing so she uh she addressed these issues and said discipleship went much deeper than uh it would have gone with just the missionary approach there was an AIC founder also named Christina new and uh in uh 1894 to 1980 she experienced a c to Ministry in South Africa in the in the 1920s and they called her Mano and so she worked in the slums and she would invite people to her home for prayer and healing multiple times a day she'd meet them in the slums invite them to her home pray for them in 1924 she had a vision that she was supposed to build a church so she did and she called it St John Apostolic Faith Mission and it became one of the largest indigenous churches in South Africa attracting over 50,000 members as she aged and it became time for a new leader to take over she hoped that her son would become the new leader instead another leader was elected who broke ties with the new family and established himself as the founder of the church so it's hard to find uh the record perhaps due to him considering himself the founder of the work in Zimbabwe we can look at a woman who was impactful named ma chaza uh early 1900s to 1960 so she experienced a call to Ministry after series of personal crises she established a church that at the height of his popularity had nearly a million members uh quite a lot she was a Healer known for her ability to heal baren women so that people women would come with these these uh it was very important for them to be able to Bear a child and she would pray minister to them when she died her church was taken over by men from Malawi Now we move on to the Philippines in India where Bible women were prominent during a certain period and 1925 the American foreign missionary Society supported 138 missionaries and assistance and 250 Bible women in the Philippines there are two things that happened to bring an end to this what the denominational leaders in America they closed down the separate missions boards and Americans surrendered control of the missions institutions to the Filipinos the transfer of missions to Filipino hands meant the end of the women's work for the women and then it moved into a period where male pastors would become the vanguards of the Protestant Christianity there in the Philippines instead of the the Bible women and a similar thing happened in India where um the leadership moved on towards towards men and away from the influence of the Bible woman so I want to conclude with a story of a woman evangelist and Pioneer in every nation because the history of women and missions it continues with us so I I'll tell you about Nadia she was a a leader in a church in in Ukraine and in the late 1990s there was a boy who had tried to rescue his brothers and sisters from a fire in their home so he rescued his brother and then he was burned severely so he came to our city of laiv to get treatment in the hospital Nadia was involved in in uh helping him and then after he returned to her Village she kept she kept having dreams about his village and wanting to go there and she thought I need to go to Peter's Village and so finally she decided to just test give a little test and she prayed Lord if if you want me to go to Peter's Village the train leaves very early in the morning will you uh wake me up in time to to catch the train she woke up very early went to these to this poor Village in the Carpathian Mountains region of Ukraine and when she arrived there she saw needs everywhere she went into different homes and realized they needed medicine some of them were without shoes and and warm clothing for the winter so she began a Ministry in the village and the the ministry grew to to reach five villages in the Carpathian Mountains and she went to homes and she would have Bible studies she had summer camps for children she brought in humanitarian Aid me Medical Aid she she was involved in discipling and she she was often Fearless in her approach when she would go to one Village and she'd have to get to another one because people were expecting her there sometimes she would go through the the Wilderness even when it was dark and there wolves in the and the forest and she said I just trusted God to to protect me but she's she was she's quite an inspiration in her story and I just I end with that story because history is continuing and if we look at women and their impact as evangelists as preachers and as people who would women who would Pioneer new works Nadia did this in our in our um in our own movement and I'm sure you might have stories where you live and you may be you may be a story as well you may be the person as a woman who was uh who was pioneering new works who is his preaching who was an evangelist so hopefully you can be encourag as you've learned from the history of women in missions especially in these areas in different parts of the world thank you [Music]