CELEBRATING WOMEN
March is Women’s History Month, a time to celebrate women’s contributions, large and small, to make life better for others. Mao Zedong famously said: “Women hold up half the sky.”
In the history of the church, the first congregations met in homes. The husband owned the house, but the wife managed it. Women throughout the Roman Empire opened their homes to newly forming churches.
Women are prayer warriors and change agents in medical missions, education, social reform, relief and community development, activism, and advocacy. The women's foreign mission movement played a significant role in the golden age of missionary expansion in American Protestantism from the 1880’s to the 1920's. Many missionary societies believed that women provided the cultural values of a society, and that if a pre-Christian culture were to change, women had to be reached with the Gospel. Women served in unprecedented numbers: co-founding mission organizations, funding missions, and serving in all positions of leadership, as well as locations that their male counterparts had never even ventured.
Today, we give thanks for our female tentmakers and associates. One is an English professor who served in China for 30 years into her seventies, way beyond the official retirement age for women. Today, she still does campus ministry among Mainland international students. Another started a social enterprise with award money from a Kennedy School competition. The business has been an uphill battle for over 10 years, but she continues her work to better the lives of an ethnic minority in China’s interior. Two other associates have been called to help women trafficked in China’s sex trade. One left her corporate job to start an NGO and trained up an able local team to take over when she repatriated. Another is a lawyer and mother of two grade schoolers who has done frontline outreach in red light districts, mentored girls in safe houses, trained volunteers in case management, and now helps a freedom business network to develop protocols for policy and practice.
The women in our network include educators, engineers, therapists, physicians, homemakers, home schoolers, business and legal professionals, entrepreneurs–and much more. We celebrate them for the seen and unseen services they render to bring love, healing, safety, care, knowledge, growth, and justice into the places that God has sent them.
Pray for
Women to reflect the image of God and the Good News of the gospel in their many roles at home and at work
Partnership among women and with men to make the world a caring and neighborly place
The gospel to transform cultures where women are oppressed in order that both men and women can be free to flourish
Women in Christian and missions leadership to bring different perspectives, sensibilities and understanding to the people and causes we serve
Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates. (Prov 31: 30-31) In the last days, God says, I will pour out My Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. (Acts 2:17)