5 - The work of the CIM at Chefoo: faith-filled generations

Summary

‘I hold it to be sheer infidelity to doubt that God gives to every one of his children, without exception, those circumstances which are to Him the highest educational advantages.’

The China Inland Mission stands as one of the great successes of nineteenth-century mission expansion. Begun and sustained through the vision of one powerfully charismatic man, its vision and methods inspired additional faith missions in various parts of the world, and its base of support quickly spread from England to Europe, to Australia, and to North America. With Taylor– Broomhall descendants still at its helm today, the CIM survived great personnel and property losses in the Boxer Uprising in 1900 and left China later in the twentieth century to become the largest mission organisation working in Asia. No study of nineteenth-century missions can be complete without at least a mention of this faith mission with its stated commitment to employing lay workers as evangelists and having them identify as closely as possible with their Chinese constituents by assuming a local lifestyle and living without the trappings of the West. In particular, no study of nineteenth-century women's mission work should be considered as complete without an in-depth look at the aims and work of the China Inland Mission because, from the beginning, Hudson Taylor expressed a belief in the utility not only of male lay workers but of women lay workers as well.

This chapter aims to explore the CIM's unique professional identity, one that developed in some ways opposite to both the LMS and the Scottish Presbyterian missions and according to the interplay of class difference, gender, race, and theological belief within the mission. With increasing numbers of women applying to the mission only after the 1880s, it seems clear that the story of women in the CIM is one in which representation does not match with reality. The impression has been left that women were hired and employed by the CIM in a manner equal to that of men. A more careful reading of CIM material suggests that this is not quite correct.