Mission Issues

Men and Women’s Mission Agencies

By Justin Long ⋅ May 14, 2009 ⋅ Email This Post Email This Post ⋅ Print This Post Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Dell has recently introduced a part of their site for women, called Della. While reading Zdnet’s analysis (which was pretty negative), it got me to wondering why Protestants don’t have male and female mission agencies.

Roman Catholics, of course, have always had male-only/female-only missionary orders (brothers, sisters), but modern Protestant missions never have. Early modern missionary history sent out men, and hunted for women to be wives for missionaries in the field. Single women going to the field on their own were unusual. Betsy Stockton (African American, 1822, American Board of Missions to Hawaii) is the first single woman missionary “in modern missions” that I could locate (this via Wikipedia); Mary Slessor (1876) is perhaps the better known early female missionary.

Why? I don’t have any answers—I don’t know that anyone does—but I’d be interested in sources of published articles addressing the topic. Evidently early mission agencies had strong feelings about deploying single females, because there was established mission policy on the subject. Yet one wonders if we have felt that women had little to contribute to missions, because while early missionary leaders didn’t want to deploy single women along with unmarried men (this perhaps is understandable, even if untrusting), no one seems to have been interested in forming a women’s society.

Today it is interesting that anecdotally I have noticed women make up a much larger percentage of the missionary force (although it’s interesting that there are few women in high leadership). Women have been a key force in mobilization, training, member care, and on the field. Why no Protestant women-only mission agencies? What do you think?

Post a comment below or write an email to me: justinlong@gmail.com.

Updates

http://www.sistersinservice.org. HT: twitter.com…

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