From Mother Teresa to Ruth Carter Stapleton, from Corrie ten Boom to the legions of faithful local church leaders, models of women in ministry abound in today's Christian church. Tim Stafford, until recently editor of Step Magazine in Kenya, paints a picture of women ministering in a different cultural setting. But the challenge of fulfilling God's call crosses cultural and sexual lines.
I had a mental picture of single women missionaries when I came to Kenya. I knew them as faded women wearing faint mustaches and clothes cut for a sawhorse. They muttered to themselves. Quite obviously they had escaped from a country where no one wanted them, to hide harmlessly in a foreign land. Anyone who has attended a missions conference has seen the type. But I now think a missionary at a missions conference is like a fish on a wall. Out of context, and out of action, they have no juice. Of the missionaries I admire most, a large proportion are single women.
Discussions about women in ministry often float above the soil. Learned doctors and amateur theologians tell us the nature of mankind as man and woman, what it means to have authority over another person, what the sacraments are and who should offer them, why men may teach but women should "share." Such theoretical and theological points are essential, of course, but I think their focus is improved by data available about real life—about what happens when women actually minister. In many American churches, we have not seen enough women in leadership to know what they look like.
By a strange twist, the same people who would sputter and spew if their church chose a woman pastor have sent thousands of single women out—and have paid their salaries—to start churches, teach the Bible, and administer programs. Every mission I know of has routinely assigned women to "do a man's job." These women have often worked in lonely circumstances, with few Christian men to check their work or provide leadership. The first result we had better note is success.
Perhaps these women in leadership sparked no controversy because missions has become, at home, a totem. We display it during missions weeks and international conferences, but it has little life. Missionaries are not contemporary heroes. Maybe we have difficulty thinking of foreigners as real people. Possibly in our minds single women missionaries conform to the chain of command, in this way: God speaks to men, men speak to women, and women speak to children and foreigners.
But Christianity's widespread influence in the world today would be virtually unthinkable without missionary success. Western Christians are waking up to a world that outnumbers us, a world whose resources we need. What if Christianity were limited to Europe and America? What if it had shriveled all over the world, like a plant without roots, when the colonial empires broke down? What if we called our world conferences and could summon only a token African, a token Chinese? Would we not find it hard to maintain, before billions of eyes, that we held the hope of the world, rather than a facet of Americanism?
The church is no longer a western church; it is ineradicably international and intercultural. If America crumbles, Christ's body does not. We owe that in large part to single women, who have done a great deal to spread the gospel.
Second, we must note very few problems. Men and women missionaries have worked together with no more than normal tensions. A women-dominated church has not been created. I defy anyone surveying the church in Kenya to tell me which part was planted and nurtured by women and which by men. There is no difference. You will not hear stories about women missionaries out of control, dominating men or falling into cultic or heretical teaching because of the authority they have been given. These male nightmares have proven groundless.
Third, these single women have themselves been helped while helping others. This is what has most struck me in my African experiences.
It is no easy job to be single in our churches. Women in particular, when they reach a certain age, become objects of pity. But once women arrive overseas, no pity is wasted on them. They are given tough work to do.
Arlene, for instance, came to Kenya as a poor candidate for adventure. She was very particular that things be done "just so." She easily dissolved into tears, especially at a word of criticism. Yet she could be critical and perfectionistic with others.
No one who knew her would have chosen to send her to the Turkana region, but the denomination did. Turkana is a desolate sort of hell where people die on your doorstep of starvation, knife wounds, and crocodile bites. No doctor lives within a practical distance, so the few nurses there practice everything short of heart surgery.
The heat, the isolation, the scorpions, the midnight knocks at your door—surely not the atmosphere for Arlene. She went for two months without piped water. When she got it, she noticed a foul taste after a month and discovered one dead, disintegrating lizard and one similarly conditioned bat in the water tank. No transfer was available. Someone had to be there, and qualified nurses were in short supply. So she stuck it out.
A transformation took place. She gained confidence. Tears diminished. Tensions with other staff—often high in such conditions—lessened. She adapted to working in an environment where perfectionism is absurd, and what resulted was a fine drive to get work done but with less nitpicking.
"I've done things I never thought I could do, and that others didn't think I could do," she told me. "I didn't always like it. Some aspects I hate. But now I doubt I would want to work in a tamer environment."
So it often happens when people are pushed to do what they did not think they could. They gain confidence, and they become not only more productive but easier to live with.
Lorna is of an older school. She came to Kenya in 1953, bearing a poor self-image. She was easily hurt. The mission bounced her to various assignments until, after several years, she became intensely interested in the Masai. The Masai are a handsome, much-photographed people who have rejected western development, western education, and western religion. They live (many within a fifteen-minute drive of Nairobi skyscrapers) as nomadic cattle herders, sleeping in chest-high huts made from sticks and cow dung.
They live for their cattle; it is said they support cows and anthropologists. One wastes time feeling sorry for them. They are fiercely proud of their culture, tending to look down on us and our ways. Until very recently the few Masai Christians were those who had put on western clothes, gone to school, learned English, and as much as quit being Masai. Masai Christianity barely clipped the top of the hedge, certainly never reached the grass roots.
Lorna developed a deep concern for these people and started the first Masai girls' boarding school. She slogged at that for quite a number of years and learned the Masai language with fluency.
But there was little or no fruit to her ministry. The girls who went on for more schooling might retain Christian faith, but they were deserting their culture. Those who returned to the village simply could not survi.ve: Christianity was a hothouse plant, taking no root In the village. But all this time Lorna went into the villages every weekend to preach.
Then, about nine years ago, two uneducated village men became Christians. Lorna worked closely with them. Slowly but steadily through their witness, others were converted. Today, largely through the seed Lorna planted, substantial numbers of Masai people are becoming Christians within their own cultural context. They had been targets of missions for perhaps eighty years. But Lorna was a key agent in breaking through.
According to those who knew her, God also broke through to Lorna. She remains a strong-willed woman. But through the struggles in her work and her own identity, she came to terms with God's love. She described what happened in a letter to a friend, comparing herself to a bee trapped behind a window. She had spent, she wrote, many years looking out at the grass and flowers, but only bumping against the glass when she tried to reach them. Then someone opened the window. A beautiful grace and self-acceptance came into her life. Not long after that, those first two Masai men became Christians.
When people struggle, as Lorna did, to accomplish something hard, they can no longer nurse self-pity. It is exposed as an obstacle to ministry and to life. They must either despair or offer themselves to the mercy of God. It happened to Lorna, and she is better off for it. So are the Masai.
Joyce is a different story. She is at the age of fifty what I believe she has always been: vivacious, attractive, and burning with energy. She would have been so whether a missionary or not. But missions work has pulled her hidden talents into action.
With only high school and Bible school training, she was a secretary in South Africa before becoming a missionary. She has been in Kenya for twenty years, and the mission has assigned her to half a dozen different jobs, from selling books to teaching Bible. Now she has gotten the job that really fits: encouraging churches to develop authentic African music that teaches biblical concepts.
Most African hymnology is imported straight from the West. It does not fit African rhythms or melodies, and in most of Kenya, church singing is weak. Somewhere long ago someone became convinced that the exciting clashes of rhythmic sound that make African music—and that Africans most clearly enjoy—were ungodly. Joyce has been assigned by Kenyan church leaders to set the record straight, by training and encouraging composers, by seeing their work recorded and distributed, by developing grass roots interest in this "new" old music.
It suits her, even though she has no formal music training. She wishes she did. But who else will do the work, if not she?
"This is a have-not place," she says. "Many things in which you are peripherally skilled can be used for ministry. Where else would I have been involved in making television shows? I am always amazed when I learn that someone in Kenya has a talent and is not teaching it to someone else. Through the sharing, you form relationships, and that offers opportunity to minister."
Would Joyce have been equally challenged if she had stayed at home? It's not easy to know. She certainly would not have sat quietly. I doubt, however, if anyone would have thought unconventionally enough to throw her at such a job. She might have directed the choir, but she would not have explored a whole new way to minister through music. In Kenya she has been used to her limits, and she is happier for it.
I describe these three women because their lives excite me. They have been pushed close to their full potential. The results for them and for others are obvious.
There is another side of being a single woman missionary. As Joyce told me: "Life here requires more personal security than living at home. You are always a foreigner. Small mistakes that your own culture would forgive hurt the church here. And you can't just go next door and get another job. You go home as a failure, a missionary dropout. You have to love yourself in order to minister without needing to be needed." She told me of a woman nurse who so lacked security that she diagnosed disease in every person she met. She needed to create dependent relationships, and nearly killed people with her large doses of unnecessary drugs. "She's at home now, working in a laboratory and doing fine. Someone checks her there." When you challenge people, they sometimes fail. But the failures do not diminish the successes. Women who would, at home, have been set aside, have been used to accomplish astonishing work. Paul alluded to God's habit of using unlikely vessels when he wrote, "God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong." We do not know what people are capable of until we try them. They do not know themselves. When discussing women in ministry, I would rather not focus only on the women who clamor for a greater role. Why not think of the many women who have quietly accepted diminished roles? Their quiet may not mean all is well. Some women, like some men, need to be pushed to make the most of their time on earth. Many single women missionaries have been.
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