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‘Bible Women’ Founded and Established the Chinese Church
Please join me in welcoming guest blogger Dr. Cynthia Hester. She contributed her expertise on women’s history to the book 40 Questions about Women in Ministry Leadership. Today she’s sharing with readers about the remarkable women in ministry leadership in China and Cambodia. God chose to work largely through women to found and establish the Christian church in China and Cambodia. Nineteenth-century pre-literate Chinese women, evangelized by Protestant women missionaries, were taught how to read Chinese characters, which enabled them to teach from the Mandarin Bible. These ‘Bible women,’ such as Dora Yu (1873–1931), publicly shared the gospel and taught the Bible to mixed-sex groups. Peace Lin and her son…
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Women’s History Month: Meet Some Female Martyrs from the Early Church
When I spoke to a class of seminary students recently about women in public ministry in the early church, someone asked me to share some names and narratives about our foremothers. It seemed fitting to provide a sampling here during Women’s History Month. (Some day I hope we will simply learn “history”; but until women are included in the telling of history, we’ll continue to need a special annual focus.) You can find all the women listed below in the mosaics of Ravenna’s “new” (6th c) Basilica of Sant’Apollinare. I’ve included a summary of the stories that usually accompany them, as well. You will notice a theme of women exercising…
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Just Jesus…
When I was younger I thought a revival was a 3-night event where all the church folk would come together and sing longer than normal. I later came to understand revival as awakening the church ultimately to win others to Christ. My husband and I are inner-city missionaries so I have been thinking about, praying about, and meeting about revival for a while now. But if I can be honest for a bit—I am tired. Although we have been at this for three years now, at times it seems the lingo of “revival” is still as nebulous and undefined as it was when I was a little girl. It almost…
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Church History: What Do We Learn about Women in Public Ministry?
Have you ever heard comments about church history like these? “It was the feminist teachings of the past few decades that first spurred Christians to try to argue for [women in public ministry]. Like it or not, the two schools of thought are intertwined.” – Christian blogger “The role of women in church ministry was simply not a burning question until it asserted itself in recent decades in conjunction with the modern women’s movement” – Men and Women in Ministry: A Complementary Perspective, p. 20 When I took some doctoral courses in history, I read numerous primary documents which revealed that the question about women in public ministry in the…
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Women and Theological Education: Capitulating to Culture or Historically Rooted?
Not long ago, I overhead a female ministry leader noting with some enthusiasm that we are seeing the first generation in Christendom in which women have received theological higher education. But her statement, while well intentioned, was completely untrue. Some of our lack of knowledge about women’s history, particularly in the Protestant tradition, stems from post-Reformation amnesia about women in monastic spaces. About all we know—maybe—is that about 500 years ago a German nun, Katerina, married a former monk, Martin Luther, and religious living spaces were emptied of their occupants, partly in response to the Protestant Reformation. Here’s what we need to know, though: A similar phenomenon happened about that…
