No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2017
After World War II, American evangelicals realized that the European religious landscape had been seriously damaged, causing them to begin to include Europe in their mission programs. Their initiatives reversed the established direction of things, changing the pattern of who sent and who received missionary support. The religious aid flowing from the US fell almost entirely within the masculine framing of the American state, which had so recently exerted its influence in Europe in the military, economic, and cultural spheres. This essay explains how, as a result of practical experience and general social change, gender relations in American missions came to embrace greater inclusivity. European evangelicals, in turn, were both empowered by working with the American missionaries and impacted by the American debate over the separation of male and female roles in the mission field.
1 Koop, Allen V., American Evangelical Missionaries in France, 1945–1975 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 24, 77–78 Google Scholar.
2 Stenning, Robert E., Church World Service: Fifty Years of Help and Hope (New York: Friendly Press, 1996), 3–9 Google Scholar.
3 Loveland, Anne C., American Evangelicals and the U. S. Military, 1942–1993 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
4 See Grubb, Norman, Modern Viking: Abraham Vereide, Pioneer in Christian Leadership (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1961), 105 Google Scholar; Krabbendam, Hans, “Zenden en ontvangen: De vestiging van Amerikaanse christelijke jeugdbewegingen in Nederland,” in Harinck, George and Krabbendam, Hans, eds., A Spiritual Invasion? Amerikaanse invloeden op het Nederlandse christendom (Barneveld: De Vuurbaak, 2010), 55–78, 66Google Scholar; Balbier, Uta, “‘Youth for Christ’ in England und Deutschland: Religiöser Transnationalismus und christliche Nachkriegsordnung 1945–1948,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 51 (2011), 209–24, 219Google Scholar.
5 Kirby, Dianne, ed., Religion and the Cold War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)Google Scholar; Preston, Andrew, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 440–95Google Scholar. Wyneken, JonDavid K., “The Western Allies, German Churches, and the Emerging Cold War in Germany, 1948–1952,” in Muehlenbeck, Philip E., ed., Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), 18–43 Google Scholar.
6 The first evangelical international organization was the Evangelical Alliance in 1846, dominated by England. Since then a steady stream of the Anglo-American songs, such as by Ira D. Sankey in the 1870s, helped to cement a religious vocabulary and established a dynamic repertoire of sacred songs expressing religious longing. After World War II the number of cultural exports greatly increased. Dijkerman, Els, “Sing to Jesus: De rol van Amerika in de verspreiding van gospelmuziek in Nederland,” in Harinck, George and Krabbendam, Hans, eds., A Spiritual Invasion? Amerikaanse invloeden op het Nederlandse christendom (Barneveld: De Vuurbaak, 2010), 79–108 Google Scholar; Stowe, David W., “Transatlantic Exchange in Protestant Revival Hymns,” in Krabbendam, Hans and Rubin, Derek, eds., Religion in America: European and American Perspectives (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004), 250–62Google Scholar.
7 Robert, Dana Lee, “Women in World Mission: Controversies and Challenges from a North American Perspective,” International Review of Mission, 93, 1 (2004), 50–61 Google Scholar. American women campaigned for temperance, set up schools for girls and training centers for teachers, served in hospitals, and taught children Sunday School. See Tyrrell, Ian, Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
8 Robert, Dana Lee, “The Influence of American Missionary Women on the World Back Home,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 12, 1 (2002), 59–89, 69–70 Google Scholar.
9 Snape, Michael, God and Uncle Sam: Religion and America's Armed Forces in World War II (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015), 395, 483–86Google Scholar; Brereton, Virginia Lieson, Training God's Army: The American Bible School, 1880–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 57–58 Google Scholar.
10 Koop, American Evangelical Missionaries in France, 42–43.
11 Du Plessis, David J., “The Agonies of Europe,” Australian Evangel/Glad Tidings Messenger, 14, 12 (1948), 7–9, 7Google Scholar.
12 Franks, J. D., “Europe Today,” in Weeks, N. F., ed., Europe, Whither Bound? A Symposium Telling of Southern Baptist Missionary Work in Italy, Spain, and the Balkan States – Hungary and Yugoslavia (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1951), 1–36, 3Google Scholar.
13 Interview by the author with Samuel Faircloth, Carol Stream, IL, USA, 15 June 2011.
14 Evangelical qualifications of Europe can be found in Evans, Robert P., Let Europe Hear: The Spiritual Plight of Europe (Chicago: Moody Press, 1963), 17, 33Google Scholar; James DeForest Murch, Amsterdam, 1948: An Evangelical View of the World Council of Churches (n.p.: n.d.), 42, reprinted from United Evangelical Action, 1 Feb–15 May 1949.
15 May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 2008)Google Scholar. A gendered perspective on the Russian nation was phrased by George Kennan, who “cast himself as the male lover and Russia or the Russian people as the feminine beloved.” See Costigliola, Frank, “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan's Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of American History, 83, 4 (March 1997), 1309–39Google Scholar. Cuordileone, K. A., “‘Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity,” Journal of American History, 87, 2 (2000), 515–45Google Scholar; Dean, Robert D., Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 66–70 Google Scholar.
16 Battleground Europe (Great Commission Films, 1955).
17 In the late 1970s Graham changed to accept women's expanding roles, even ordination. Marshall, Ellen Ott, “A Matter of Pride: A Feminist Response,” in Long, Michael G., ed., The Legacy of Billy Graham: Critical Reflections on America's Greatest Evangelist (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 83 Google Scholar.
18 Gilbert, James, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 106–34Google Scholar.
19 Hoyle, Lydia Huffman, “Queens in the Kingdom: Southern Baptist Mission Education for Girls, 1953–1970,” in Robert, Dana L., ed., Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 101–12Google Scholar.
20 Laville, Helen, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women's Organizations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 197–204 Google Scholar, showed how American women embraced the foreign-policy goals of their government even if they confessed that their gender should transcend national identity. In the public diplomacy campaigns the United States highlighted “their” women benefiting from consumerism against the Soviet Union's emphasis on the productivity of women which gave them equal pay and a strong presence in the workforce.
21 Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, IL, archives (hereafter MBI), Report of the Educational Branch for the Year Closed at 31 Dec. 1952, Annual Reports Educational Department 1948 and 1953, 2–4, 9.
22 MBI Archives, Foreign Missionary Report, 1953. Annual Report Educational Department 1953, 7. Between 1948 and 1990 women had a 53% majority.
23 “What Is the Missionary Union?” MBI Archives, Departmental Missions, Box 1, Missionary Union [1952] history file.
24 Ibid., June 1952 Program.
25 Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton, Illinois USA (hereafter BGCA), Collection 171, Oral History Bobby, Mary Lee (1928–) and Albert Edward (1925–1998) Papers; 1953–1978. The interviews with them were conducted by Galen Wilson in their private home in Bowie, Maryland, on 21 May 1982.
26 Mary Lee Bobby Oral History, BGCA.
27 By August 1940, 53 out of 1,597 active missionaries trained at Moody worked in Europe (mostly in Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, and Poland). MBI Foreign Mission Reports, 1939 and 1940. Forty of them stayed there till the end of the war. In 1951 ten new missionaries left Moody for a European country. MBI Archives, Foreign Missionary Report 1979.
28 Jon P. DePriest, “Send the Light: TEAM and the Evangelical Mission, 1890–1975,” PhD dissertation, Claremont Graduate University, 2001, 18–45, 110, 214. Albert Bobby Oral History, BGCA.
29 Al Bobby to Augie, 3 Oct. 1960, BGCA, Collection 171, File 6, Bobby correspondence 1953–1961.
30 In 1921 French evangelicals Ruben and Jeanne Saillens had established the Institut biblique de Nogent-Sur-Marne. Portugal Team field committee minutes 1, 2, 3 Oct. 1951, TEAM archives, Carol Stream, IL. The team voted for supporting the Leiria Bible School and accepted the Conservative Baptist doctrinal statement in April 1952. Berry, Mary Anne, Unless the Lord Builds the House: A Brief History of the Faculté Libre de Théologie Évangélique Vaux-sur-Seine, France (Vaux-sur-Seine: FLTE, 2011), 6 Google Scholar.
31 DePriest, 81–111.
32 Robert, American Women in Mission, 219, 239. Williams, Daniel K., “Sex and the Evangelicals,” in Schäfer, Axel, ed., American Evangelicalism and the 1960s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 106–11Google Scholar.
33 The Evangelical Alliance Mission archives, Carol Stream, IL (hereafter TEAM), Team minutes, 24 Oct. 1952; Report 1950 Marjorie Ruth Hawes; Portugal Team field committee minutes 30 June 1953; Minutes Annual Field Conference TEAM Portugal, 1 Oct. 1951, TEAM archives.
34 Newsletter, 13 Nov. 1953, BGCA, Collection 171, File 6, Bobby correspondence 1953–1961.
35 “More Blessed to Give,” Missionary Broadcaster, Dec. 1956. Mortenson, Vernon, God Made It Grow: Historical Sketches of TEAM's Church Planting Work (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1994), 723–65Google Scholar.
36 “The Life of a Teenager between the Ages of 12 and 16 in Portugal” [between 1956 and 1958], BGCA, Collection 171, File 4, Bobby Notes. Brusco, Elizabeth, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
37 Mary Lee Bobby, notes, 12 Jan. 1955 and March 1956, BGCA, Collection 171, File 4.
38 After their return Albert joined the staff of Voice of America, Mary Lee went into education and assisted Portuguese-speaking congregations in the Washington, DC area. The transnational contacts continued in a different form.
39 Mary Lee Bobby interview, BGCA.
40 Glenn F. Arnold, “A Comparative Study of the Present Doctrinal Positions and Christian Conduct Codes of Selected Alumni of Moody Bible Institute: 1945–1971,” PhD dissertation, New York University, 1977, 95; Policy Book Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society (1962–64), 11, 12A, 34, 74A.
41 Robert, Dana L., American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996), 216 Google Scholar. For tightening of control see Koop, Allen V., “American Evangelical Missionaries in France, 1945–1975,” in Carpenter, Joel A. and Shenk, Wilbert R., eds., Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 180–202 Google Scholar.
42 Robert, Dana L., “The ‘Christian Home’ as a Cornerstone of Anglo-American Missionary Thought and Practice,” in Robert, ed., Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 158–65Google Scholar. See, for instance, the memoirs of two American missionary families in France: Ken and Lois Beach, In the Shadow of the Almighty: The Autobiography of Ken and Lois Beach (n.p., privately printed, Dec. 2010). Ivan (Pete) and Peterson, Donelda, “Tears and Triumphs”: Fifty Years of Overseas Ministry (n.p.: Xulonpress, 2009)Google Scholar.
43 Sarah Page, “A Profile of Single Women Missionaries in France,” MA thesis, Wheaton College, 1979, 3.
44 Interview with Sarah Page by the author, 2 April 2013.
45 Page, 3.
46 Page. Interviews with Sarah Page by the author, 30 March and 2 April 2013. Simultaneously women in the Division for World Mission and Ecumenism of the Lutheran Church in America discussed the neglect of women in mission in their conferences. See Bowers, Joyce M., “Roles of Married Women Missionaries: A Case Study,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 8 (Jan. 1984), 4–6 Google Scholar. A survey among 53 couples was held and a heated debate followed between proponents of quick and radical change and those who were satisfied with the situation. The majority of women complained about the lack of job descriptions. Also in this mainline organization (female) staff hesitated about claiming their rights. The result was the appointment of advisers for couples and opportunity for dual pay, but not (yet) opening leadership positions.
47 Page, 32. Interview by the author with Sarah Page, 25 Feb. and 2 April 2013.
48 Page, 36.
49 Email, Sarah Page to author, 20 June 2015.
50 Finzel, Hans, ed., Partners Together: 50 Years of Global Impact – The CBFMS Story (Wheaton, IL: Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 1993)Google Scholar.
51 Page interview, 2 Apr. 2013.
52 Email, Sarah Page to author, 30 March 2013.
53 Ibid.
54 Greater Europe Report, March–April 1974, 5.
55 Interview with Sarah Page, 2 April 2013. Retreats were also an American innovation. Williams, “Sex and the Evangelicals,” 108–9.
56 The speaker was the female Lutheran evangelist from India Subbamma, B. V., “Evangelization among Women,” in Douglas, J. D., ed., Let the Earth Hear His Voice (Minneapolis: World Wide Publications, 1975), 765–73Google Scholar; and Gien Karssen, “Evangelism among Women Report,” in ibid., 774–75.
57 Hansell, Joy, “An International Forum for Evangelical Women,” in Scott, Waldron, ed., Serving Our Generation: Evangelical Strategies for the Eighties (Colorado Springs: World Evangelical Fellowship, 1980), 149–60Google Scholar. Waldron Scott, the executive secretary of the WEF, added the Women's Commission to the agenda of the WEF in 1978: Scott, “Double Helix: A Missionary's Odyssey” (n.p., n.d.), 710, 725, Web. 16 Feb. 2012. This might seem insignificant, but it was an explicit recognition of the importance of the issue, similar to President Jimmy Carter's decision to appoint an assistant to the President on women's affairs. In 1978 the Korean missionary Chun Chae Ok became the first female executive secretary of the World Evangelical Fellowship's Missions Commission. Scott, “Double Helix,” 719. The inclusion of majority world male leaders came decades earlier than the inclusion of women in the top leadership: Fuller, W. H., People of the Mandate: The Story of the World Evangelical Fellowship (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1996), 133–44Google Scholar.
58 Jackson, Elizabeth C., “Women's Role in Mission: Issues and Expectations,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly, 16 (Oct. 1980), 197–205 Google Scholar. Reapsome, James W., “Where Are Female Leaders in Mission?”, Evangelical Mission Quarterly, 16 (Oct. 1980), 234–35Google Scholar.
59 Catherine B. Allen, “Shifting Sands for Southern Baptist Women in Missions,” in Robert, Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers, 113–26. See Stackhouse, John G. Jr., “Women in Public Ministry: Five Models in Twentieth-Century North American Evangelicalism,” in Stackhouse, Evangelical Landscapes: Facing Critical Issues of the Day (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 121–39Google Scholar. This essay was originally published in 1988.
60 Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts, “Fundamentalism and the Family: Gender, Culture, and the American Pro-family Movement,” Journal of Women's History, 10, 4 (1999), 35–54 Google Scholar. Stephens, Hilde Løvdal, “Money Matters and Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family on the Traditional Family and Capitalist America,” in Stievermann, Jan, Goff, Philip, and Junker, Detlef, eds., Religion and the Marketplace in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 102–21Google Scholar.
61 Flippen, J. Brooks, Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 38–39, 128–32, 152–53, 194, 272Google Scholar.
62 Fuller, 142.
63 Dzubinski, Leanne, “Women in Mission: Women Workers in the Harvest Force,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly, 46, 2 (2010) 150–56Google Scholar. “If women are not thriving, the team cannot reach its potential”: Lindgren, L., “Helping Women Thrive: A Key Component of a Healthy Team Approach,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly, 48, 1 (2012), 109–13, 113Google Scholar.
64 Ruble, Sarah E., The Gospel of Freedom and Power: Protestant Missionaries in American Culture after World War II (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 11 Google Scholar.