Women In The Mission Of The Church

Women have been central to the work of Christian ministry from the time of Jesus to the twenty-first century. Yet the story of Christianity is too often told as a story of men. This accessibly written book tells the story of women throughout church history, demonstrating their integral participation in the church's mission. It highlights the legacies of a wide variety of women, showing how they have overcome obstacles to their ministries and have transformed cultural constraints to spread the gospel and build the church.

The stereotype of the woman missionary has ranged from that of the longsuffering wife, characterized by the epitaph Died, given over to hospitality, to that of the spinster in her unstylish dress and wire-rimmed glasses, alone somewhere for thirty years teaching heathen children. Like all caricatures, those of the exhausted wife and frustrated old maid carry some truth: the underlying message of the sterotypes is that missionary women were perceived as marginal to the central tasks of mission. Rather than being remembered for preaching the gospel, the quintessential male task, missionary women were noted for meeting human needs and helping others, sacrificing themselves without plan or reason, all for the sake of bringing the world to Jesus Christ.Historical evidence, however, gives lie to the truism that women missionaries were and are doers but not thinkers, reactive secondary figures rather than proactive primary ones. The first American women to serve as foreign missionaries in 1812 were among the best-educated women of their time. Although barred from obtaining the college education or ministerial credentials of their husbands, the early missionary wives had read their Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins. Not only did they go abroad with particular theologies to share, but their identities as women caused them to develop gender-based mission theories. Early nineteenth-century women seldom wrote theologies of mission, but they wrote letters and kept journals that reveal a thought world and set of assumptions about women's roles in the missionary task. The activities of missionary wives were not random: they were part of a mission strategy that gave women a particular role inthe advancement of the reign of God.By moving from mission field to mission field in chronological order of missionary presence, Robert charts missiological developments as they took place in dialogue with the urgent context of the day. Each case study marks the beginning of the mission theory. Baptist women in Burma, for example, are only considered in their first decades there and are not traced into the present. Robert believes that at this early stage of research into women's mission theory, integrity and analysis lies more in a succession of contextualized case studies than in gross generalizations.

"Demonstrates the integral participation of women in the church's mission from the first century to the twentieth century, showing how they have overcome obstacles to their ministry and have transformed cultural constraints to spread the gospel"--

In the past several decades, the issues of women’s ordination and of homosexuality have unleashed intense debates on the nature and mission of the Church, authority and the future of the Anglican Communion. Amid such momentous debates, theological voices of women in the Anglican Communion have not been clearly heard, until now. This book invites the reader to reconsider the theological basis of the Church and its call to mission in the 21st century, paying special attention to the colonial legacy of the Anglican Church and the shift of Christian demographics to the Global South. In addition to essays by the volume editors, this 12-essay collection includes contributions by Jane Shaw, Ellen Wondra and Beverley Haddad, among others.

Under the influence of wise and devoted and spiritually minded colleagues -- She is a lady of much ability and intelligence : the selection and training of candidates -- LMS work in North India : the feeblest work in all of India -- Good temper and common sense are invaluable : the Church of Scotland Eastern Himalayan Mission -- The work of the CIM at Chefoo : faith-filled generations -- Gender and the professionalization of Victorian society : the mission example -- Conclusion: fools for Christ

In matters of mission history, most major works that treat the full sweep of the church's missional self-understanding are less than helpful in understanding women's part of that narrative. Smith tries to redress the balance with a comprehensive history of mission that highlights the critical contributions of women, as well as the theological developments that influenced their role. --From publisher's description.

"This is the first book I will recommend to those who want to study what the Scriptures teach about the roles of men and women both in marriage and the church. . . I was amazed at how much wisdom is packed into this short book. Everything in the book is helpful, but the practical application section alone is worth the price of the book." — Thomas R. Schreiner, James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary A Biblical Primer on Men and Women in the Church There is much at stake in God making humanity male and female. Created for one another yet distinct from each other, a man and a woman are not interchangeable—they are designed to function according to a divine fittedness. But when this design is misunderstood, ignored, or abused, there are dire consequences. Men and women—in marriage especially, but in the rest of life as well—complement one another. And this biblical truth has enduring, cosmic significance. From start to finish, the biblical storyline—and the design of creation itself—depends upon the distinction between male and female. Men and Women in the Church is about the divinely designed complementarity of men and women as it applies to life in general and especially ministry in the church.

This book grew out of a panel on women missionaries given at the 1986 meeting of the National Association for Women's Studies. When the leaders of the Woman's Foreign Mission Society of the American Presbyterian Church chose the title Woman’s Work for Woman for their mission magazine in 1870, they chose the phrase that both overseas missionaries