10. Anne-Marie Javouhey and British and European Missionaries
10
Anne-Marie Javouhey and British and European Missionaries
Who is your favorite biblical character? I am sometimes asked that question when I am being interviewed on my books The Biographical Bible and Dynamic Women of the Bible. The word favorite is not the word I would use because it suggests the one I like best—like my favorite flavor of ice cream. But my favorite biblical character is the one I find most fascinating. King Saul sometimes holds that position for me. We meet him as a youth with everything going for him. He is handpicked by the prophet Samuel to be Israel’s first king, but he thoroughly botches things up. He struggles with mental illness, and in the end, just after he has gone to a witch to contact the spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel, he’s wounded in battle and commits suicide by falling on his sword. Would I want to hang around with Saul? Surely not, but his is the kind of story that biographers relish.
My favorite figures in church history are similar. For me it is more difficult to recount in an interesting way the life of a super-saint who has no identifiable flaws or failures. I want my characters to be real, not plaster saints of medieval hagiography. I’ve been faulted for writing too much about the sins of the saints, but others have found encouragement in how God has used flawed individuals. Often the flaws and imperfections combine with eccentricities. How true of Anne-Marie and Mary Slessor. Mary was a pioneer missionary to Africa who climbed trees when she was bored. Writing in her Scottish dialect, she chided the apostle Paul in the margin of her Bible for his insistence on wifely submission: “Nay, nay, Paul, laddie, that will not do.”1
Anne-Marie Javouhey did far more than chide her bishop when they clashed over which one of them wielded final authority over her mission society. Amy Carmichael, a missionary to India, often considered too good to be true, clashed with a fellow missionary in such a way that two lives were nearly ruined. Gladys Aylward set out on a journey across two entire continents with pots and pans clanging from her baggage. In fact, she endured such an unbelievable series of events that her life story was turned into a movie starring Ingrid Bergman. Such conflicts and quirks intrigue me and fire up my curiosity to dig deeper. Mildred Cable traveled nearly as far on her trek through China on the Silk Road to the Gobi Desert beyond the Great Wall.
Anne-Marie was the first of these women to claim God’s call to the far-flung fields of foreign missions, and she did not stop. One ship’s captain declared her to be his “most seasoned sailor.” Unlike the others featured in this chapter, who were Protestants and hailed from the United Kingdom, she was French and a devout Catholic as was Madeleine Sophie Barat. Unfortunately these missionary women have suffered from biographers who have given them super-saint status. But if remarkable holiness does not sum up their personalities, a strong will, an independent spirit, and more than a touch of eccentricity certainly do. They simply refused to be pushed around. Having sacrificed so much for overseas ministry, they were bound and determined to carry out their callings.
ANNE-MARIE JAVOUHEY
Founder of the Sisters of Saint Joseph
Venerated and beatified, though not yet canonized, the blessed and holy Anne-Marie Javouhey takes her place among thousands of other Catholic saints or would-be saints. In many ways, however, this French nun stands alone and is far better served without the official designations that often distort more than they describe. She challenges us in her strong convictions more than in her so-called saintliness. Today it is tempting to take her side in the fierce struggle she waged with her bishop and simply dismiss his point of view. But there is surely no denying that from his standpoint she was no saint.
Born into a prosperous family, she was the fifth of ten children. From childhood, she had a resolute mind of her own, and during the French Revolution (which erupted when she was nine), she would stand guard to warn priests and nuns whose very lives were in danger. The whole of society seemed to be turning upside down, and she feared for the future of the church and dreamed of one day helping to reverse the losses. At nineteen, by way of a visionary call that included dozens of dark-skinned children, she received her marching orders. A voice spoke: “These are the children God has given you. He wishes you to form a new congregation to take care of them. I am Teresa [of Ávila]. I will be your protectress.”2
This call to ministry is stunning, especially if we assume that she had not been contemplating such a ministry before the vision in the night. She had already become a novitiate with the Sisters of Charity, though she had not yet taken her final vows. But in less than a decade, having moved from convent to convent, she had founded the Sisters of Saint Joseph, and some years later would establish her base in an abandoned monastery at Cluny purchased by her father. Among those who served alongside her were three of her sisters. In the early years the nuns focused on the needs of the poor and on education in the aftermath of the revolution.
By the 1820s, however, she had launched missionary work in Africa, where she was involved in a variety of charitable endeavors in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Gambia. Her most far-reaching endeavor began in 1828, when she was commissioned, with help from the French government, including the king and queen, to establish a settlement in Guyana (South America), to be known as Mana. Only months after she arrived, she wrote:
Everything is progressing steadily towards good order—the work is moving forward, the lands under cultivation are visibly growing, religion is becoming stronger in the hearts of those who had only a superficial idea of it, and all this by means of good example. . . . We brought with us fifteen well-chosen workers for the most useful trades. . . . With the good Sisters, I am hoeing and planting beans and cassava; I am sowing rice, corn, etc., as I sing canticles, tell stories, and regret that our poor Sisters in France are not sharing our happiness.3
As carefree as she sounded, her assignment was daunting. Her job was to oversee a large tract of land—a safe haven for some five hundred slaves who had been taken by force from slave traffickers. Though she spoke of her task as being “a mother in the middle of a large family,” the risks were high, and there was danger at every turn. Nevertheless, she oversaw the farming venture and health care and educational facilities, all of which were infused with her devout Catholic faith. In 1838, a decade after she arrived, she presided over a ceremony that gave nearly two hundred slaves their freedom.
The success of her work was not appreciated by everyone, particularly Bishop d’Héricourt, a onetime military officer, whose diocese included her convent in Cluny. He maintained that he, as her bishop, was the head of the religious order, and that she had sought to “extricate herself from episcopal authority” by, among other things, appointing nuns without his approval. She regarded his claim to authority preposterous: “I am not only the Superior General of the Congregation of St. Joseph of Cluny; I did not merely cooperate in the foundation of that Order; I am its sole and solitary foundress. I am its Mother General as God is its Father, since it is I who created and have developed it.”4
In her lengthy dispute with her bishop, she did not so much fear the loss of her seasoned nuns, many of whom were stationed abroad and loyal to a fault. But he threatened to close her convent in Cluny and return all the novices to their families. What he actually did was to inform them that their very salvation was at risk by having entered a religious order whose founder was in “open revolt against bishops and against the church.” He likewise reminded other bishops that “episcopal authority sticks together” and that this was a time when “more than ever [they had] to stay united.”5
Like Bishop d’Héricourt, Anne-Marie herself was an authoritarian leader whose orders came straight from the Almighty: “God has made known to me what he wants me to do.”6 As to the bishop, she argued that he was her superior only in personal matters—that he was not the superior over her religious order. He agreed, at least on the former point, and took it upon himself to excommunicate her, thus denying her the Eucharist while her nuns were able to partake.
In the end she won the battle when the archbishop sided with her. But she was physically exhausted by the ordeal. With a tone of lighthearted sarcasm, she credited him as a benefactor of the sisters: “God made use of him to try us when as a rule we were hearing around us nothing but praise. That was necessary, for since our congregation was succeeding so well we might have thought we were something if we hadn’t had these pains and contradictions.”7
When she learned of his death, she wrote to one of her nuns: “We almost met, he and I, on that very day, before the judgment seat of God. So he’s gone in ahead of me, that good Bishop. Well, that is correct; that is how it ought to be.”8
MARY MITCHELL SLESSOR
Missionary and Magistrate
Like her hero, the great missionary explorer David Livingstone, Mary Slessor was part of the vast and largely undocumented child labor force in the nineteenth-century Scottish textile mills. By the time she was fourteen, she had become the family’s primary wage earner, working twelve-hour shifts and attending classes at night. Her paltry earnings intended to support the large family were squandered by her abusive alcoholic father. Life was grim. But Mary was by nature optimistic and carefree—and, like her mother, a devout Christian.
It was not until she was in her twenties that Mary’s early childhood vision of following in the footsteps of Livingstone began to take form. Her father died in 1870 and three years later her older brother, who her mother had hoped would serve in Africa. With his death and the news of Livingstone’s death in 1873, Mary was now confident that her time had come.
Ministry was surely not new to her. From her youth she had taught Sunday school and for some years had been actively involved in the work of the Queen Street Mission, which served the blighted slums of Dundee, marked by street gangs, open sewers, sickness, and poverty. Yet she left her mark. Years later an elderly resident spoke of her sacrificial ministry: “She sat down among the poor as one of themselves. . . . She stooped very low. She became an angel of mercy in miserable homes.”9
This description of her fits precisely her forty years in Africa. She became an African perhaps more than any Western missionary before or since. When she arrived in Calabar (now Nigeria) in 1875, she quickly realized how utterly out of place she was. Missionaries were men accompanied by their wives—Victorian ladies—who worked with African women and children on the mission compound and met together each day for afternoon tea. Mary opted out, preferring to climb trees. She begged to leave the compound to move upcountry, and her request after some years was finally granted, despite objections that the region was too dangerous for a lone missionary, particularly a woman. Her first days of settling in must have made her wonder if she had made the wrong decision.
In the forenoon I was left alone with the mud and the rain and the general wretchedness. . . . I looked helplessly on day after day at the rain pouring down on the boxes, bedding, and everything. . . . I am living in a single apartment with a mud floor and that not in the best condition. Moreover it is shared by three boys and two girls and we are crowded in on every side by men, women, children, goats, dogs, fowls, rats and cats all going and coming indiscriminately.10
Having left the missionary compound behind, she no longer felt pressure to fit in. In the years that followed, a visitor might find her attired in a short sack-like garment, barefoot, red hair chopped short, and without her false teeth—sometimes her skin covered with boils. The Africans accepted her with mixed emotions. She was confrontational, vehemently protesting such cultural practices as twin murder. Some such babies she was able to rescue and raise as her own.
Despite opposition, her perseverance paid off. Less than a decade after she had gone upcountry, Mary Kingsley, writing a travelogue, summed up her work:
This very wonderful lady has been eighteen years in Calabar; for the last six or seven living entirely alone, as far as white folks go, in a clearing in the forest near one of the principal villages of the Okoyong district, and ruling as a veritable white chief over the entire district. Her great abilities, both physical and intellectual, have given her among the savage tribe a unique position, and won her, from white and black who know her, a profound esteem. Her knowledge of the native, his language, his ways of thought, his diseases, his difficulties, and all that is his, is extraordinary, and the amount of good she has done, no man can fully estimate. Okoyong, when she went there alone . . . was given, as most of the surrounding districts still are, to killing at funerals, ordeal by poison, and perpetual internecine wars. Many of these evil customs she has stamped out. . . . Miss Slessor stands alone.11
That Mary was “ruling as a veritable white chief” was no accident. She had been appointed by the British government as a vice-consul in the region, acting as a judge in cases involving everything from marital disputes to theft and murder. Her style was drawn from her no-nonsense personality far more than conventional standards of law and justice. But her sense of fairness served her well. In a letter to a friend, she wrote: “I have always said that I have no idea how or why God has carried me over so many funny and hard places, and made these hordes of people submit to me, or why the Government should have given me the privilege of a Magistrate among them, except in answer to prayer.”12
In this official capacity, she came in contact with bureaucrats who were fascinated by her living conditions and repartee with the Africans. Indeed, she had an unusually cordial relationship with British officials, who were often in the region and sometimes traveled far out of their way to visit and listen to her stories. They delighted in her sense of humor and teased her to their heart’s content, she enjoying every minute of it. One of them later quipped that the whole consulate was given over to “Mariolatry.” That fellow Brits enjoyed her quick-witted retorts, her laughter, and sense of humor was only natural, but Africans found her equally clever and were often observed having great fun with her.
Nevertheless, Mary felt at times a deep sense of loneliness. Single women who were assigned to work with her were not able to endure the privations. Nor was Charles Morrison, who had come to Calabar as a teacher. He courted her and presented her with an engagement ring. But due to health concerns he was not able to join her upcountry, and she was unwilling to leave her ministry. She broke the engagement, though not without sadness. “When you have a good thing or read a good thing or see a humorous thing and cannot share it,” she wrote, “it is worse than bearing a trial alone.”13
In 1904, having served in Africa nearly three decades, Mary moved with her seven adopted children to open up a new field of ministry among the Ibu peoples. That missionaries were following in her wake and picking up where she had left off was, to her, good news. Her daughter Jamie was now a young adult and worked faithfully alongside her. But disease and debilitation took a toll after forty years in the tropics. She succumbed at age sixty-six, surrounded by her African family in her simple thatched hut.
AMY CARMICHAEL
Mission Founder and Writer in India
In many respects Amy Carmichael was Mary Slessor’s polar opposite. It would be difficult to imagine British officials teasing and bantering with Amy and her enjoying such frivolity. Nor would Amy ever offer Mary’s confession: “I don’t half live up to the ideal missionary life.”14 Both would become famous in their lifetimes, Amy as the most revered of Protestant saints.
Born in Ireland in 1867 into a wealthy family, Amy would later realize how fleeting the glitter of gold could be. At the time of her father’s death when she was eighteen, it was learned that his flour mills were in serious financial straits. The good life was over. Having been reared a devout Presbyterian, Amy now focused almost entirely on spiritual endeavors and became part of the Deeper Life movement, which offered a perfectionist theology not so different from the Wesleyan emphasis on entire sanctification.
At twenty-five, despite serious health problems, she was convinced that she was called by God to be a missionary to Japan. There she suffered from a nervous condition and became convinced that God was calling her to Ceylon. After a short while there, she returned home all in the space of two years. In less than a year she then sailed for India, this time remaining until her death more than fifty years later, not once returning home.
Despite her poor health, Amy would see significant success in her mission work in India. During the next half century she established Dohnavur Fellowship, a mission compound with an orphanage, school, and medical center. She wrote more than thirty widely circulated books, and she founded the Sisters of the Common Life, a religious order of women pledged to celibacy. Within a decade, there were more than one hundred girls and young women housed at Dohnavur.
Throughout her ministry Amy was deeply fearful that her mission would be contaminated with worldly missionaries. “The saddest thing one meets is a nominal Christian,” she wrote. “The church here is a field full of wheat and tares.” Again, she wrote: “O to be delivered from half-hearted missionaries! . . . Don’t come if you mean to turn aside for anything. . . . Don’t come if you haven’t made up your mind to live for one thing—the winning of souls.”15 Missionaries who worked with her were allowed to take a retreat each year but never to associate with anyone outside her mission. “The devil is awfully busy,” she lamented. “There are missionary shipwrecks of once fair vessels.”16
Her insistence on separation from the worldly, halfhearted Christians, however, did not preclude her going out of her way to snub such perceived individuals. On one occasion when she was on horseback, she could not conceal her contempt on seeing her enemies enjoying a walk: “Oh, that you could see us as we tear along,” she wrote in a letter. “We are called the mad riders of Kotagiri.” They had intentionally headed in the direction of the Anglican Mission compound, where she had spotted the retiring bishop, his replacement, and “various old ladies.” She and those with her galloped directly toward them. They “parted with alacrity as we shot through, and we caught a fleeting glance at the gaze of astonishment and horror.” She went on: “Once I ran over a man. I did not mean to—he wouldn’t get out of the way and one can’t stop short in mid-gallop.”17
Some have found humor in such accounts; the man she ran over undoubtedly did not. She wrote to missionary candidates: “Bring to India a strong sense of humor and no sense of smell.”18 Amy was accused by other missionaries of walling herself up and separating herself not only from them but also from the Indian people themselves, never acknowledging her gratitude for being a guest in their land. She loathed Hindu religious rites. Once while walking in the hills with Saral, a native coworker, she spotted stones piled by a tree, which Seral told her were idols. Amy was quick to respond: “To see those stupid stones standing there to the honor of the false gods, in the midst of the true God’s beauty, was too much for us. We knocked them over and down they crashed. . . . It makes one burn to think of His glory being given to another.”19
In some instances she appeared to be almost itching for battle against Hindus. In the case of a high-caste married woman who she hoped would convert to Christianity, she wrote: “If so, we shall be in the very thick of the fight again—Hallelujah!” In another situation she wrote: “Will God move in [her] heart so that she will dare her husband’s fury and the knife he flashed before her eyes? If so, our bungalow will be in the very teeth of the storm, angry men all around it, and we inside, kept by the power of God.”20
Nearby missionaries were troubled by such threats and openly criticized her. Hearing such censure only made her more determined. She was convinced that she was directed by God and that her actions should not be questioned. “Our Master . . . demands obedience. . . . Sometimes the Spirit of Jesus gave a direct command. . . . Sometimes an angel was sent, sometimes a vision. . . . In the end our God justifies His commands.”21
Rarely was she challenged. When Saral suggested organizing a knitting class for Hindu women who then might be open to the gospel, Amy insisted that the gospel alone was power enough without the need for such frills. Saral, knowing all too well who wielded the power at Dohnavur, backed down. Stephen Neill did not.
In 1924, the Neill family arrived in India to work with Amy. They had heard of her work and offered their expertise to serve alongside her—all four of them, the parents who were both medical doctors, their daughter, and Stephen, a brilliant Cambridge graduate. The elder Neills realized within months that the situation was not workable and severed their ties with her. But Stephen stayed on. There was something so compelling about her, and the feelings were mutual.
He soon realized, however, that Amy’s way was the only way to do things at Dohnavur. As with Saral, Amy accused him of wanting to introduce frills. No knitting, of course, but to organize sports teams so that the boys could play other teams outside the compound. But such, she was convinced, would contaminate them.
Stephen stayed on for more than a year until one night in late November 1925. Amy summed up the situation as “one of the saddest nights of my life.” The incident came to a head, according to Amy, after “a dreadful time of distress. . . . Never such known before. I am beginning to sink. Lord, save me.” The following year she confided in a friend: “I long over him still, miss him and want him and long to be one in affection. The stab is not even beginning to skin over. It’s just red raw.”22
From Stephen’s vantage point the situation was even more upsetting, later alluded to in his autobiography: “During that first year . . . [was] brought into my life such darkness and suffering that it took me many years to recover from the injuries, and the scars are still there.”23 Even on his initial introduction to her, he recognized “an impression of power,” not permitting the “smallest disagreement.” He had desperately wanted it to work out. “I gave my whole soul to Dohnavur,” he claimed, but during that year he experienced things that “were so excessively painful that by January 1926 the darkness was complete.”24 He returned to England a broken man, his troubles still haunting him several years later. From the scanty sources available, this conflict was no doubt exacerbated by Neill’s own hair-trigger temper.
In the years that followed he would serve as an Anglican bishop in India, interestingly in a region that included Dohnavur, a factor that no doubt prompted Amy to finally, once and for all, sever her ties with that church. Stephen went on to write many books and to hold prestigious teaching positions. Amy continued on in the work, seriously debilitated due to a fall. Indeed, she was an invalid during the last two decades before her death at Dohnavur at age eighty-three.
GLADYS AYLWARD
Small Woman with a Big Heart
So compelling was her story that it was fashioned into a Hollywood film in 1958, starring none other than the celebrated Academy Award–winning Ingrid Bergman. But Gladys Aylward, though flattered by the attention, was utterly mortified by how she and her ministry were portrayed. Indeed, how could this gorgeous, leggy blonde, nearly a head taller than she, possibly play her? Gladys, however, was largely unknown, and the viewing public was no doubt much more interested in Ingrid than in her. Though drawn from her biography, The Small Woman by Alan Burgess, the film skipped over her almost absurd determination to serve in China, a story so powerfully portrayed by Burgess.
She was in her late twenties when she set out for China on October 15, 1932, having been turned down as a missionary candidate by the China Inland Mission. That she had grown up in a poor family, had limited formal education, and worked as a house servant would not have disqualified her. Those in charge, however, may have wrongly suspected her IQ was deep in double digits when in fact she may have had a learning disability. The rejection was painful, but she was not going to let it prevent her from serving in China, particularly after she made contact with Jennie Lawson, a missionary who needed her help. She had saved enough money for a train ticket that she was convinced would get her through Europe and on to her destination.
Gladys was not a light traveler. Her luggage, besides a bedroll and clothing and enough food for the lengthy journey, included pots and pans and a small stove. What was she thinking? Did she not know that this would be more than an autumn color tour? Did she not know about lax train schedules, especially beyond Western Europe? Did she not know that Russia was involved in an undeclared border war with China? Did she not know about the bitter Siberian winters? And what about her tickets? Would Russian agents even validate them? Of course not, but for the fact that Gladys absolutely insisted that, come hell or high water, she must get to her destination.
That the trains were filled with Russian troops, to her, seemed beside the point. No soldier was going to push her around. This was precisely how she reacted when they ganged up on her, all speaking and motioning at once that she must exit the train. She refused. And so, along with the soldiers, she was deposited in the war zone, with cracks of gunfire in the distance. Fortunately, the station from which they had departed was within walking distance. Burgess describes the scene:
The Siberian wind blew the powdered snow around her heels, and she carried a suitcase in each hand, one still decorated ludicrously with kettle and saucepan. Around her shoulders she wore the fur rug. And so she trudged off into the night, a slight, lonely figure, dwarfed by the tall, somber trees, the towering mountains, and the black sky, diamond bright with stars. There were wolves near by, but this she did not know. Occasionally in the forest a handful of snow would slither to the ground with a sudden noise, or a branch would crack under the weight of snow, and she would pause and peer uncertainly in that direction. But nothing moved. There was no light, no warmth, nothing but endless loneliness.25
Eventually, after traveling through Manchuria and on to Japan, Gladys, with the help of the British consulate, was able to enter China, cross the mountains, and make her way to the home of the elderly Jennie Lawson. If she had imagined that she would be warmly welcomed, she was wrong. Jennie, entirely on her own since the death of her husband, was operating an inn for mule drivers, their beasts, and baggage. She was brusque and exhausted and wasted no time putting Gladys to work. Feeding mules, cleaning dirty beds, and serving meals to rough men was not the mission work Gladys had envisioned.
In comparison, her work as a live-in “parlor maid” in London certainly had its advantages. But it was too late to take back the insane decision she had made more than a year earlier. The bright side of her situation was that while she served meals, Jennie entertained the men telling Bible stories. And for some inexplicable reason, Gladys was learning by ear a language that she had found impossible to comprehend in written form. And when the words did not come, she supplemented with body language.
With the death of Jennie, however, Gladys was entirely on her own to operate the unprofitable inn. Jennie had received support from the homeland, but now Gladys was without funds, that is, until she became employed as a foot inspector by local Chinese officials. Even before the 1930s, the Chinese government had regulated against foot binding. The painful practice caused deformity and had a crippling effect on the women. But tiny feet were appealing to men. Big feet were simply not cool. So women, especially those in the villages, continued binding the feet of their daughters.
That Gladys would be hired to be a foot inspector might seem odd but for the fact that no Chinese women wanted the job. In this capacity, she could familiarize herself with the countryside and the language at the same time. In every village, despite her communication deficiencies, she told Bible stories as Jennie had done. People congregated around her, drawn to her personality and to her increasing—and amazing—expertise in the various dialects used in the area.
As the years passed, however, she began to hear rumors of war, and by the late 1930s, her little world in Shansi Province had become a military encampment. The mountains she had grown to love were now in the midst of a war zone, and no village was safe from Japanese bombs. She had become a Chinese citizen and had no intention of seeking evacuation. In fact, she wrote to her mother: “Do not wish me out of this or in any way seek to get me out, for I will not be got out while this trial is on. These are my people; God has given them to me; and I will live or die with them for Him and His Glory.”26
During this time, she served as a spy behind enemy lines, gathered orphans under her care—and fell in love. His name was Linnan, a military officer. Considering their cultural differences, their relationship might have gone nowhere in peacetime. But common loyalty and goals and incredible acts of courage in the midst of war have a way of turning things upside down. Burgess writes of this in his biography:
Few love affairs can have flourished in circumstances stranger than that of Gladys and Linnan. They met at odd moments in the mountains, in shattered villages, in bombed towns. They talked at odd moments between battles and births and baptisms, they exchanged scraps of news, had a meal together, talked of the future they would build in the new China. His concern, his gentleness, his tenderness toward her never wavered. They discussed marriage; he was eager that they marry at once. . . . It was Gladys who said, “No.” The war had to be won first.27
After hiding for months in caves with dozens of refugee children including those she had adopted, Gladys determined that with the help of others she would get them out of the war zone to safety. To complicate matters, however, the Japanese had learned of her spying and had put a hefty price on her head, dead or alive. The journey through the mountains to the border was harrowing, and when the children were finally given a safe haven, Gladys herself collapsed from mental and physical exhaustion.
In many ways her collapse symbolized what was happening across a vast region of China. Homes and families and livelihoods had been destroyed—as had a budding love affair. War had taken a terrible toll, and never again would life go on as it had.
Gladys returned across the border into China and for a time worked with other foreign missionaries. But she was not foreign; she was Chinese. So she left to work with a church in Chengtu, where she served as a Bible woman, a role always filled by uneducated Chinese women. She did not see herself above such a dignified, and yet lowly, position.
She most likely would have remained in China the rest of her life but for pleas from her parents, who, though in good health, were getting on in years. Indeed, her mother had gotten a new lease on life since her daughter had become a missionary. Not every British mum has a daughter running a muleteer inn, serving as a foot inspector, then a spy, and finally a heroic guide through the mountains. She arranged for speaking engagements for her daughter, always with the same title: “Our Gladys in China.”
When Gladys arrived home, her mother-agent had paved the way, and she quickly became a celebrity, a role that made her uncomfortable. Yet the invitations came—from the BBC, to appear before Queen Elizabeth, and to travel the world. The Burgess biography and the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness would solidify her fame—when all she had ever wanted was to be a missionary to China.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
The issue that separated Anne-Marie and her bishop was that of authority: Who is ultimately in charge—the founder of the mission or her religious superior? In the end, she outmaneuvered him and won. Google her name. Dozens of sites appear. Where are sites devoted to him? In fairness I wanted to read his side of the story but alas was stymied by online black holes. Dare we conclude that Bishop Bénigne-Urbain-Jean-Marie du Trousset d’Héricourt resides only in the dustbin of history?
The matter of authority also intersected with the ministry of Mary Slessor. Unlike Anne-Marie, she was not hounded by a bishop, but she was hindered by the restraints and societal expectations placed on women. She had no aspirations of leading a mission organization. Rather she set out on her own to evangelize Africans and in the process was appointed a vice-consul. Here she effectively wielded power that she had never sought.
Amy Carmichael was an authority figure to those who worked with her at Dohnavur. She demanded that those under her submit to her rule. Stephen Neill spoke of the “power” she wielded and her demand for obedience. She defended any such power, believing her authority came directly from God.
Although Gladys Aylward was possessed of incredible determination, she did not seek authority in her own right or aspire to a leadership position as did Amy. True, she ran the muleteer inn for a short time, served as an official foot inspector, and led a party of children out of China. But in the end she was content to serve as a lowly Bible woman.
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
Are men more likely than women to seek positions of authority? What insights do Anne-Marie, Mary, Amy, and Gladys offer on issues of power, authority, and leadership? Do these terms fit your personality and aspirations?
Does the Bible teach male headship (or leadership) in ministry? Does the issue of male headship relate to Anne-Marie’s conflict with her bishop or with Amy’s conflict with Stephen Neill?
Which woman would you most want to study further? Which one do you find most interesting? Most heroic?
If you were assigned to work under or alongside one of these four women, which one would you choose?
Do most people who defy odds as Gladys did to become a missionary succeed, or is it typically better to accept the decision of the experts, in her case, the mission board?
Have you or anyone you know struggled with learning disabilities? Does the success of others who have overcome the odds help such individuals cope with life?
For what trait would you most want to be remembered? Would you rather be remembered as being holy or a woman of great accomplishments?