POSTWAR EUROPE AS AN EVANGELICAL MISSION FIELD

In the mid-twentieth century, the global missionary circle closed when American evangelicals added continental Europe as the last region to be reached by the Gospel. A century earlier, both American and European Protestants had established and expanded missionary enterprises on the world's other continents. But with the exception of a handful of American Episcopal churches in European capitals, and a few Methodist and Baptist congregations founded by Anglo-American groups, US evangelicals had no permanent presence on European soil. The thinking was that because Europe was the cradle of Protestantism, there was no need to work there.

World War II created a painful paradox. How could the center of Christendom have turned into a source of destruction and a foe of free religion? More specifically, how could Germany, the cradle of the Reformation, have become a destroyer of the freedom of worship, and why did much of the rest of Europe succumb to its fascist power? Clearly, the original well of renewed faith had become poisoned and was in need of cleansing. American evangelicals who traveled through postwar Europe contrasted the weak Protestant churches there with the religious institutions thriving at home. Concerned, they called for immediate action.

Although American and European Protestantism held many traditions in common, US evangelicals working in Europe or reflecting on the condition of Protestant Christianity there frequently recounted stories of opposition and alienation. In their view, powerful counterforces plagued true religion on the Continent: stagnant state churches, Catholicism, religious liberalism with secularism in its slipstream, occultism, and atheistic Communism. Pathologizing European Protestantism thus, US evangelicals were unable to identify many reliable indigenous allies with whom they could work. They believed that starting again from scratch was their best option. The perception of a religious void in Europe turned the once-dominant and sending continent into a receiving station. Though Europe never became a top priority for American evangelicals, their newly organized ranks now incorporated the Continent into their global mission strategy.Footnote ¹

US evangelical mission work in Europe benefited from significant external support. There was after all, a strong American presence across much of the Continent. Even before the end of the war, Americans of all religious traditions shared in the task of bringing humanitarian relief to the world, but especially to Europe, where the devastated population needed food and clothing. American efforts sought to provide shelter for the Continent's millions of refugees – but also to aid in the rebuilding of Europe's religious institutions: their physical estate, their parochial schools, orphanages, hospitals, and retirement centers.Footnote ² Then, when the most urgent needs had been taken care of and the Marshall Plan had run its course, most American mainline Protestants withdrew. It was the evangelicals, to whom such international applications of the Social Gospel were principally a preparation for the essential task of seeking converts, who stayed and spread out, seeking to establish and reinforce footholds across the Continent.

The US military facilitated the spread of the evangelical message in Europe just as it had elsewhere in the world. Evangelical chaplains and servicemen gathered firsthand information about the religious situation and sent reports home. Their grave concern for Europe's future, combined with a hope that Christian renewal on the Continent would contribute to a full-scale global revival, persuaded American evangelicals to bring Europe into their overseas mission work.Footnote ³

US evangelical outreach in postwar Europe also benefited from its alignment with the aims of America's cultural diplomacy. In religiously mixed countries, rallies organized by US evangelicals were often endorsed by the presence of American government and military representatives. US ambassadors attended Youth for Christ rallies; US army generals offered transportation and made venues available for the evangelists.Footnote ⁴ In exclusively Catholic regions, which in practice limited religious freedom, American diplomats put pressure on their allies to speed up visa processing, and to work toward religious pluralism. American evangelicals, in their efforts to maintain contact with believers behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, sought and received the assistance of US occupation forces and engaged with European authorities to secure permission to enter European colonies in Africa and Asia.Footnote ⁵

The growing realization of Europe's importance compelled American missionary agencies to include European projects in their programs in the 1950s, and some even specialized in European missions. Over the course of the next two decades, investments in staff, money, resources, and organization cemented American evangelical ties to Europe, with the result that by the mid-1970s Europe had once again emerged as a significant, if junior, partner in global evangelical outreach. Through these transatlantic channels flowed people, resources, ideas, and the exemplary products of the American evangelical subculture, such as gospel music, film, drama, and literature. Once these forms arrived in Europe, they were copied and adapted, resulting in a transnational spirituality.Footnote ⁶ And thereafter they flowed outwards again, through the networks of relation that Europe maintained with the broader world. Europe was not just an important mission field in and of itself; it was a critical staging post in the global expansion of American evangelicalism.

GENDER AND MISSION IN POSTWAR EUROPE

This essay explores the postwar American evangelical engagement with Europe, and looks at the role of gender in shaping that encounter. European missionary activity as it developed in the immediate postwar years conformed to a highly masculinized model, and men were firmly in control of the original contacts. Over time the American missions adopted a more inclusive perspective, reflecting not only broad social changes such as second-wave feminism, but also the desire for change growing out of the experience of the male and female evangelicals who worked in the European mission field.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, women greatly contributed to the globalization of American missions, first as loyal and generous supporters, and increasingly as strong, staff-building international civic contacts.Footnote ⁷ In 1900 three million women were engaged in innovative publicity, fundraising, and recruiting for the missions. Their advance to the top of the organizational hierarchy took place when male missionaries realized that only female missionaries could reach the women of Asia. The result was the establishment of exclusively female organizations. At the same time, new religious movements such as Pentecostals allowed women to become preachers. The space in which women could be active narrowed again in the 1920s, however, as a consequence of growing tensions between modernists and fundamentalists, and because men succeeded in integrating women's missionary groups into larger denominational organizations, thus reestablishing male leadership. On both sides of the liberal–traditionalist divide, and both within and outside the church, men reinforced the role of the male minister. The gender hierarchy was restored, and women were left to carry out “crucial” tasks.Footnote ⁸

Thus it was almost exclusively male evangelical chaplains and service personnel who drew the attention of the churches and mission agencies at home to the dispirited state of European Protestantism, and made the case that postwar Europe was a field in need of missionary activity. This was a time, moreover, when the masculine ethos of the evangelical missions was being renewed by the influx of thousands of former GIs into the Christian colleges and Bible schools responsible for training missionary candidates for the global evangelical movement.Footnote ⁹ Stimulated by their wartime experiences in Europe and elsewhere, these men felt a call to redeem a devastated world.Footnote ¹⁰ A Pentecostal minister described the desperation of the old Continent: “Europe appears to me like a giant that has been mortally wounded, and writhing in agony, he is calling for mercy and help.”Footnote ¹¹ A Baptist missionary appeal summarized the Continent's condition as follows: “Europe today is bankrupt in all of her once great proud life.”Footnote ¹² Former American servicemen cast their return to Europe in military and masculine terms; their missions would cover Europe with Bible tracts instead of bombs.Footnote ¹³ American evangelicals characterized Europe as a patient in need of care or as a prodigal son to be returned to the fold. Sometimes a complex engendering was also discernible in their language. They fiercely opposed the efforts of the Federal Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches to build up a new unified global organization for efficient relief. For James DeForest Murch, the editor of United Evangelical Action, this bureaucratic “Super Church,” with its “pink [i.e. socialist] educational and social leaders,” threatened to inculcate Christian youth with the “pattern of world revolution.”Footnote ¹⁴ In Murch's view, the World Council, in combination with religious liberalism, was eroding the vigor and the vitality of the European churches. These allegations echoed the gendered vocabulary of Cold War critics who deplored statist liberalism as an institutional straitjacket suffocating male autonomy, toughness, and action. In speaking of the cultural malaise in the Western world they cast homosexuality as a threat to political effectiveness, saying that it drew men into a double life and left them vulnerable to blackmail.Footnote ¹⁵ The global evangelical family, like the Western alliance, needed robust masculine leadership, they said, not neutered organization men. A film report on the 1950s Billy Graham campaign expressed this forceful agenda in its title: Battleground Europe. It went on to explain the missionary purpose in Cold War terms:

Though individual missionaries did not often use these martial terms, the continued references to war explicitly framed the entire operation in masculine terms.

The most prominent early missionary pioneers to postwar Europe were the American gospel teams who visited in the late 1940s to stage youth rallies and establish chapters of Youth for Christ, the American evangelical group that sought to revive the relevance of religion. The best-known representative of Youth for Christ was Billy Graham, who soon became an institution unto himself. In the mid-1950s Graham crusades in Europe drew hundreds of thousands of spectators. These initial rallies put Europe on the map as a serious destination for American assistance. But they also confirmed that, as with many of America's secular endeavors, leadership in the field of religion was to be a male affair.Footnote ¹⁷

The towering public presence of Graham consolidated the male and one-directional image of the American missionary in Europe.Footnote ¹⁸ His persona combined the playfulness of a sportsman with the responsibility of a father and husband who was not afraid to publicly discuss the basic questions of human existence. Meanwhile, his celebrity status obscured the fact that women, just as much as men, were deeply invested in the work of the missions. Half of the missionary force was female. Many evangelical churches, especially Baptist, imbued teenagers with the missionary impulse, and did so with greater success among girls than boys. In the 1950s, more than two hundred thousand Southern Baptist girls met weekly to hear stories from the mission fields designed to encourage and prepare them to seriously consider becoming missionaries. In these groups they developed their leadership skills. The high point for the program came at summer camp where the girls heard urgent calls to action, and many responded positively.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite restrictions placed upon their ability to take leadership positions, women continued to flock to the mission fields, in part because foreign fields still held the promise of greater opportunity for female involvement in church work, education, and health care than did regular religious activities at home. Moreover, the export of the model of the (American) Christian family gave an overarching symbolic meaning to wives’ day-to-day existence within their own families. Mission allowed married women to be active in the world without transgressing postwar gender norms.Footnote ²⁰

Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that the consistently high number of women in mission work was a result of supply rather than demand. The North American missionary training centers had a large share of women, accounting for 60 percent of their student bodies. This composition was a logical result of the fact that men with missionary ambitions could attend seminaries where evangelical women were not welcome. For women, Bible schools were the only alternative. The 60–40 ratio of women to men in evangelical missions therefore exactly matched the student population at Bible schools. In 1953 for example, forty-five men and sixty-one women from the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago left for service overseas. When the school expanded its curriculum in 1951 in a move toward becoming a full four-year, college-equivalent institution, the proportion of women at MBI began to decline. MBI was anxious to attract male students, and moved to include courses on aviation, repair and maintenance of aircraft, photography, and radio communications, courses they felt were more attractive to men.Footnote ²¹ The gender balance was closer to a 50–50 ratio by 1965.Footnote ²²

A MISSIONARY COUPLE IN POSTWAR PORTUGAL: ALBERT AND MARY LEE BOBBY

In the early postwar period students at the Moody Bible Institute felt the pressure of the times. They were instilled with messages of the needs of the world and constantly reminded to respond to God's call. The student body was given a sense of the acceleration of history and a prospect of quick results. Considering this divine timeline, and having to decide what role to play in it, made the students restless and boosted their motivation. The activity of the school's Missionary Union actively involved half of MBI's students, and yielded a consistently high number of Moody graduates going abroad as missionaries.Footnote ²³ The general message of urgency and expectation was evident in Chicago at Moody Bible Institute's graduation ceremony in 1952, when the crowd sang:

In the audience #sat twenty-seven year-old Albert Bobby. Looking back thirty years later, Bobby recalled the intense atmosphere at MBI and his decision not to continue with advanced education, but to become a missionary instead. “I felt the Lord's Coming was so near that I could not go to college and waste any more time. I had to get out.”Footnote ²⁵ But where would he serve?

The decision was not Albert Bobby's alone. Like many of the earliest missionaries, he was married. His wife, Mary Lee, was the daughter of a minister and a graduate of Wheaton College. As a recently married woman, she had not been permitted to enroll with Albert at MBI. Now they worked together to seek out information from various mission organizations about potential mission fields, and it was Mary Lee who lighted upon Portugal. She reported feeling an emotional response to a brochure about the work of The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) in that country. Albert concurred, having recently attended a presentation on Portugal that he liked. Thus concluded their search for a destination. Both spouses needed to be united on the choice of place, and the flow of information from all corners of the world was an important way to link new missionaries to new places.Footnote ²⁶

Before 1950 Europe had only been an occasional destination for Moody students, and most of them were European nationals who had attended Moody with the aim of returning to serve their native countries.Footnote ²⁷ In 1953, when the Bobbys, along with their first child, left for Portugal, they were two of only six MBI graduate missionaries heading for Europe, and Portugal itself was terra incognita. Despite the fact that the Bobbys were not especially provincial – they had seen other parts of the United States and Albert had served in the navy – they were unprepared for their new destination. Having assumed that Portugal was uncivilized, they were surprised to find houses and telephones. Still there were deprivations that they found difficult.

One significant problem was the ambivalent attitude of the Salazar regime – pro-Western, but also strongly Catholic – towards American Protestant missionaries. Despite the intervention of the US ambassador, the regime was reluctant to issue visas to missionaries. The Bobbys had to move to Spain for half a year as the paperwork was processed. When they finally returned to Portugal, they were forbidden to do religious work. These uncertain conditions prevented them from settling down and limited their ability to develop lasting relations with their Portuguese mission subjects. It was particularly difficult for them to establish churches, which they had considered their principal goal.Footnote ²⁸

Nevertheless, the Bobbys and their TEAM colleagues persevered under these constraints, for example producing radio programs that were shipped out of Portugal and broadcast from Tangiers. They distributed tracts and entered into correspondence with those who responded to their appeal. At six locations they set up evangelism campaigns, food programs, radio broadcasts, children's activity groups, and Bible study groups. Albert Bobby became responsible for printing and distributing religious tracts and cooperated with Word of Life Publications, the World Home Bible League, and the Every Home Crusade, hoping that, as Bobby put it, “if He tarries, to reach every home in this needy land with a tract and a gospel of John.”Footnote ²⁹ From their European base they spread thirty thousand tracts throughout the Portuguese empire. Their TEAM mission also cooperated with other missionary groups such as Youth for Christ and the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society. The latter was a denominational agency that launched a Bible school in Portugal to which TEAM sent its Portuguese recruits. This became a common practice and helped set in motion a network of evangelical Bible schools in Europe as an alternative to academic Protestant seminaries. The schools provided some cohesion for the heavily fragmented missionary scene.Footnote ³⁰

Gender relations – within the TEAM mission itself and in Portugal – became a significant factor in shaping the Bobbys’ experience. Frederik Franson (1852–1908), a Swedish immigrant who became an evangelist missionary recruiter, founded TEAM in 1897. Pressured by his conviction that Christ could return at any moment, he welcomed men and women missionaries as equals, and set up the Scandinavian Evangelical Mission. In 1949 the organization changed its name to The Evangelical Alliance Mission, signaling a broader scope in its recruitment efforts. In the slipstream of the fundamentalism–modernism debate, however, the organization had cut women's autonomy to such a degree that its most prominent missionary, Malla Moe, refused to go on furlough to the United States, fearing the mission would prevent her return to Swaziland. In the 1950s, as the expanding TEAM organization professionalized, a series of male leaders in the American home office strengthened their bureaucratic grip, thinking that this would advance the efficiency of the operation.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, the American leadership feared liberal trends and doctrinal laxity, and explicitly steered a fundamentalist course, which included closely defined gender roles. Decisions growing out of the infallibility debate reinforced the literal interpretation of the Bible and resisted any compromise. Faithful adherence to the submission texts became a crucial indicator of true belief.Footnote ³²

Mary Lee felt herself an integral part of the small TEAM mission in Portugal, which consisted of seven couples and three single women. Men chaired the TEAM meetings, but women led the devotions and voted on policies. Their wishes were taken into consideration and were mostly honored.Footnote ³³ But Mary Lee, as a consequence of her gender, assumed a different role within the mission than that of her husband. Albert focussed on church planting, Mary Lee on building relations with Portuguese women. She organized Bible reading groups for women and activity groups for children.Footnote ³⁴ In 1956 her circle of Portuguese women decided to fill Christmas boxes for the truly poor. All the women, who themselves had only limited means, provided their Catholic neighbors with this offering so that they would understand that the true motive for evangelism was to show God's love. Deeds spoke louder than words and women helped to get the Gospel heard through service and sacrifice. “The unsaved families – utterly poor and destitute – cried when we offered them the packages and listened intently when we opened God's Word.”Footnote ³⁵

Mary Lee's experiences with gender roles and hierarchies within the TEAM mission were structured by a broader perception that her situation was far better than that of the Portuguese women to whom she ministered. Mary Lee's private notes show that a source of satisfaction for her lay in the contrast between her life and her Portuguese environment, which was demoralized by unchallenged male authority in the home, the church, and the state. Portuguese men autocratically ruled all human relationships, whereas she felt that in comparison American youth and women enjoyed an ocean of freedom. Portuguese teenagers were subject to the rituals of the Catholic Church and a rigid school system, without leisure time or television. They could not even choose their own clothes. She concluded that American youth and women should be thankful for the “free American way of life.”Footnote ³⁶

From direct observation Mary Lee concluded that Portuguese gender relations burdened women, but also men and children. Portuguese wives were commanded by their husbands and had to accept the presence of mistresses. This situation was a result of the lack of freedom to choose one's own marriage partner. Arranged marriages forced men to find happiness outside wedlock. Yet, she concluded, “To me the women are more the backbone of this country than the men.”Footnote ³⁷ The lack of personal autonomy pressed even on men, who knew that despite their mistresses, their first obligation was to their legal wives. In contrast to the Portuguese, Mary Lee felt secure and appreciated, and that she was in a much more equal position than the Portuguese women she encountered. She functioned as a counselor for Portuguese women with unfaithful husbands.

Moreover, with official restrictions confining non-Catholic worship to private homes, missionary women like Mary Lee were better able to access that important mission sphere than American men. In 1961, the Bobbys returned to the US, partly to care for Mary Lee's mother, partly to cut off the Bobbys’ dalliance with Pentecostalism, to which the TEAM hierarchy was opposed. For some time thereafter, they maintained the hope of returning, with Albert making some return trips, but he realized that it was much harder for a man to generate the sort of relational ties with the Portuguese that had helped to sustain the TEAM mission. If the technical expertise of the male missionary was more highly prized by the TEAM home office, the unspecified relational expertise of women proved at least as important to success and continuity in the mission field.Footnote ³⁸

The immediate postwar environment in which married women like Mary Lee Bobby found fulfillment in their gendered role within missions did not last forever. In the 1940s Christian norms for marriage were widely held, with the man accepted as the head of the household. Three decades later, resistance to that certainty had set in, which caused heated debates. Indeed, by the 1980s, Mary Lee herself – now living in Washington, DC – was teaching a seminar called “Marriage and the Home,” based on the premise that family relationships had to mirror the church's submission to Christ. She admitted that at first she had resisted this model, but later accepted it because it reduced the level of competition between the sexes, which she saw as both unhealthy and rapidly increasing in the US.Footnote ³⁹

CONTESTING THE GLASS CEILING IN EUROPEAN MISSIONS: THE CASE OF SARAH PAGE

Over the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a younger generation of evangelical women – less likely to be married and more invested in the concept of solidarity with other women in mission circles, and in the broader mission field – had started to confront the hierarchies and role distinctions that persisted within mission organizations. Just as Mary Lee Bobby was moving towards a concept of gender submission, a young TEAM missionary in France, Sarah Page, was moving the other way. In this she was influenced by the broader social critique of gender relations, and also by her own experience with discrimination against single women in missionary service.

Just as had happened in the 1920s, the polarization of the 1960s led conservative American Protestants to tighten control over their mission operations, and to restrict the role of women in an effort to battle a liberal reading of the Bible. Conservative mission societies had established specific gendered training for their staff abroad, and the curriculum for men and women reflected their duties in the mission field. The Conservative Baptist Foreign Missions Society demanded more education from men than from women. Female candidates were required to have thirty hours of Bible-related course work, while men needed a full slate of theological courses. Single women were not given advanced training as they were only assigned to supporting positions. All males, however, whether single or married, had to prepare for all tasks. Wedding engagements and marriages had to be approved by headquarters.

In terms of compensation, though, the agencies gave single men and women equal pay for the same work. The payment criteria were tailored to a model family. Two children were considered ideal, so that the sponsors or churches would not encounter high costs and the spouses would have time for language study. Families with more than four children could not apply for extra money.Footnote ⁴⁰

Since so much of the missionary work was educational, American debates affected missionary practices in Europe. The curtailing of women's participation was strongest in denominational evangelical agencies that primarily concentrated on the male prerogative of church planting. Interdenominational agencies, such as TEAM and Greater Europe Mission, had a broader slate of activities. But when TEAM began to concentrate its activities more exclusively towards churches, their differences with the denominational missions shrank, and so did the space for women in the field. The agency's long-term strategy, however, was aimed at handing over the churches to the “natives,” who were more likely to accept women's involvement. This helped to ease the tensions, but not resolve them entirely.Footnote ⁴¹

The situation was most acute for single women missionaries. Missionary memoirs reveal that married women found compensation in the care of their families, since the missionary family functioned as a missionary instrument. From the point of view of the sending agencies, the success of this familial approach and the growing prominence of middle-class families was more valuable than any contribution made by a single woman.Footnote ⁴² Nevertheless, single women continued to go into missionary work due to the pervasive mission culture in their education and the promise of direct contact and solidarity with other women, both natives and colleagues.

Sarah Page confronted typical limitations on single women when she arrived in France as part of the French TEAM in 1968. This was a period when the improvisation of the early postwar missionaries in Europe had been corralled into an institutional discipline by the steady growth of the US mission presence on the Continent. Page had graduated from the Oak Hills Bible Institute in Bemidji, northern Minnesota. Her father set up churches in Minnesota, and missionaries were a part of her life. She became aware of the importance of gender relations in the 1970s when she observed that the TEAM in France failed to fully utilize the gifts of female coworkers. Her plan to expand her service opportunities was cut short by gendered job distribution; women were steered into “cultural based sex roles or arbitrary assignments.”Footnote ⁴³ While American society as a whole undertook to analyze and developed rights for women in that decade, Page learned to her surprise that TEAM-France had requested the American management discourage single women from applying to France. Several single women had failed to “measure up” to expectations, despite careful screening. Since women's services were deemed expendable, the easy way out was to simply turn away new applicants. This response awakened Page's interest.Footnote ⁴⁴

Page began to investigate the nature and extent of gender discrimination in the French mission field, and to collect instances of best practices.Footnote ⁴⁵ She observed that everything written on modern missionary church-planting methods was addressed to men only, and perhaps their spouses. Church administrators never considered how a single woman could contribute. The historical record on the significant role of single women in mission evangelism and church planting in Third World contexts was forgotten. Page sent questionnaires to one hundred active single women working in missions in France, and received in return fifty files with detailed data. During her second furlough in 1979, she completed a graduate program at Wheaton College that she had begun in 1973. Her analysis of the data from her study was part of her master's project in Christian ministries.Footnote ⁴⁶

Page's survey enabled her to draw a profile of the single female missionary in France. The majority of respondents were between twenty-six and thirty years of age, single, and had finished degrees at Bible schools or Christian liberal-arts colleges. They had been in the field for an average of six years. Their answers showed that they were mostly happy with their lives, but also that they harbored a growing sense of unease. The women did not consider themselves feminists. They identified themselves as conservative, trusting, friendly, organized, and disciplined. But they felt they had to balance the attitudes of submission and dominance, assertiveness and obedience. While they tried to avoid being stubborn or aggressive, they knew they had to act independently in their jobs. Their deep inner motivation for their task helped them forgo the married futures many had once imagined for themselves. Though most of them would not have chosen to be single, they learned to appreciate the freedom it gave them in the ministry. Nevertheless, many respondents voiced their concerns that their capabilities were not being fully utilized. Most organizations that focussed on church planting (like TEAM) did not even have a job description for single women, who subsequently felt that they were simply an “emergency solution” for flaws and gaps in the mission program. The data suggested that if they persisted in their work, they could gradually carve out their own space for direct evangelism and personal discipleship, and they could organize children's clubs, women's Bible discussion groups, and church events. And often they had been allowed to broaden their responsibilities in terms of office work. But the glass ceiling remained. Page observed explicit opposition to women serving in any position of authority over men within many mission organizations.Footnote ⁴⁷ Views regarding gender inequality ranged from seeing it as an effect of the Fall, to seeing it as built into Creation. A bit sardonically, Sarah concluded, “Because Corinthian women talked too much in church, many mission councils still close their doors to women.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Missionary wives in France did not usually experience the gender struggles as keenly as the single women. As spouses they often accepted their role as dedicated, indispensable helpmates in their husbands’ ministries. They raised children, cooked countless meals, and, in the early days of most church plants, hosted the church services in their own homes. Whether married or single, most women missionaries tirelessly attended every church event, taught Sunday School, ran children's clubs, organized potlucks and Christmas programs, led women's Bible studies, and continually built relationships with French people. This meant frequently entertaining in their homes. Many ran a sort of “bed and breakfast” for tourist friends and visiting missionaries in need of accommodation. Some used musical or secretarial talents as well. But single or married, all knew not to even think of leadership roles in any context where men also worked.Footnote ⁴⁹

For Page, not only did these practices offend her notions of fairness and equality of opportunity. She also thought they harmed the purpose of the mission: to bring secular Europeans into contact with Christ. She argued, on the basis of her experience in France, that the restrictions on the role of women were not justified by the exigencies of mission. She knew that most of her French colleagues were open to women teaching mixed classes of men and women, leading music, reading the Bible, or praying in services, and even serving on church boards. She insisted that women were often more resourceful than men in finding creative solutions to organizational dead ends.Footnote ⁵⁰ Page believed that single women missionaries were in fact a distinct asset, for they were more easily invited into French homes than married couples that were busy attending to their own families. This ease of access therefore, she said, gave women more opportunity for personal ministry.Footnote ⁵¹ Gender limitations came mainly from within the organization, from a few American TEAM colleagues and their wives. The receiving country was much more relaxed about gender roles than were the sending agencies.Footnote ⁵²

Page's investigation helped her to sustain her own motivation and it also encouraged her field leadership to lift the ban on single women's applications. By collecting the experiences of her colleagues, she not only exposed the existing tensions, but also made the participants in her survey aware of a common problem. Moreover, by presenting the issue in a master's thesis, and thus raising her own professional and academic status, she fertilized the discussion at home in the United States. Her master's project gave TEAM convincing evidence of the skills of women, and together with her track record, it helped to annul the earlier decision to ban single women.Footnote ⁵³

There were other changes as well. In 1970, three wives of American missionaries serving in TEAM's Greater Europe Mission founded the first European chapter of the Christian Women's Club in Paris.Footnote ⁵⁴ The “club” was launched with much prayer and trepidation. Into the French evangelical context where there had never been the concept of special ministries to reach women, the club introduced the novel idea of ladies-only evangelistic teas, Bible studies, lectures, seminars, and retreats. To everyone's surprise, they flourished. In 1980, Page joined the leadership of the Christian Women's Club in Paris. She served as its president for eighteen years, developing her skills in administration, vision setting, and teaching. Upon reflection, she noted that the creation of this environment helped both French and American missionary women to discover and hone their own talents and abilities for work in their churches, albeit still not in leadership positions if men were present.Footnote ⁵⁵ This model of ministries geared specifically to women, as well as evangelistic outreach to mixed audiences, inspired evangelical churches across France to adopt many of the same methods. The solutions that they took up were similar to those promoted by women's organizations three generations earlier, at the start of the twentieth century, during the heroic era of women's overseas missions work.

GENDER AND AMERICAN MISSIONS SINCE THE 1970S

Page's intervention coincided with other contributions to the gender debate. The 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne ignored the gender issue at the plenary level and featured only one female speaker, the Dutch evangelist and author Corrie ten Boom. Nevertheless a special report on evangelism among women came out of the conference. In response to the wishes of indigenous churches that had their own structures, the report explicitly called for the ordination of women.Footnote ⁵⁶ Evangelical women soon began to actively organize. By late 1978, the World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF) encouraged a women's caucus. Initially it was more a support group than a political lobby, but it did help to expand women's role, resulting in a slow increase in female leadership and opening up committees to women, though still not the executive board.Footnote ⁵⁷ A similar call came from Elizabeth C. Jackson, former missionary to Japan and vice-president of the evangelical Nyack College in New York. She addressed a male audience at the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association in 1979, and called for more effective deployment of women in the field as the only hope for growing evangelical ministries at a rate consistent with the expected doubling of the world's population. She strongly promoted the idea that women's abilities should guide their participation and stressed that their involvement should no longer be bound by traditional roles. James W. Reapsome, the editor of Evangelical Mission Quarterly, published Jackson's lecture and admitted that traditional translations of Scripture tended to privilege male leadership, even as they distorted the true biblical perspective on the contribution that women could make to the church.Footnote ⁵⁸

Elsewhere progress towards gender equality in American overseas missions was more tentative. In 1978, a Consultation on Women in Church-Related Vocations, organized under auspices of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denominational missions organization in the world, recommended the expansion of women's authority as a way to halt the declining numbers of females working in missions. Even as it did this, the convention managed to include a binding resolution saying that women were welcome in missions only if they acted under male leadership. Women could continue their own undertakings, but in fact pastoral tasks and leadership functions needed male ordination. Additionally, the convention blocked American funding for women's missionary organizations abroad. Opponents of this decision feared it would hurt the spread of the gospel because women were a major pillar of the church. According to one historian, the decline in women's participation did accelerate as a result of this decision.Footnote ⁵⁹

For decades evangelical women continued to struggle with their role in the missions. The decline of the family was associated with feminism in the minds of evangelicals, and this association hindered women's advance. In the 1970s, the passing of liberal abortion laws, the lifting of bans on homosexuality, and the failed struggle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment mobilized conservative Christians for political organization under the banner of protecting the family. The domestic ideal of a middle-class family had long been promoted as a civilizing and missionary force, and conservative Christians were afraid that embracing feminism would undermine this supposed status quo. The conservatives felt that in order to secure the home against an invasion from the outside, the hierarchy within the family needed strengthening. The main proponent of this view was James C. Dobson, the director of Focus on the Family, who advocated sexual discipline and obedience as the cornerstone for Christian families and American society. For Dobson, male leadership within the family was crucial for economic stability. This melange of social and economic concerns helped to boost the Moral Majority's appeal.Footnote ⁶⁰

Conservative Christians in America particularly perceived the Equal Rights Amendment as an attack on the family and on order in society. During the mid-1970s the position taken by the progressive Democratic (and Baptist) President Jimmy Carter, who expressed support for strengthening the family as well as for women's rights, failed to convince evangelicals that a compromise over gender issues was possible. His lack of clear direction and poor management of the discussion fanned dissatisfaction among advocates and critics of women's issues. Outspoken conservative opinion leaders in America linked together the battle for gay rights, abortion, and women's equality and saw them all as a blatant attack on the family and on Christian values. This combining of issues shrank the middle ground in gender politics, and pushed those who championed women's participation onto the defensive.Footnote ⁶¹

The same tension was felt in the international evangelical community. In 1994, the Pan-African Christian Women Assembly decided it was time to affirm the equality between the sexes, and for evangelical women to get involved in fighting AIDS, poverty, sexual abuse, and illiteracy. When a Russian Christian woman, who had been denied higher education and instead put to work in a coal mine, was recognized by her church and ordained for leadership, the World Evangelical Fellowship applauded the honor. Even as the fellowship concurred with the ordination, a spokesman explicitly rejected the “Gender Agenda,” saying that it “seeks to bring about a world in which all distinction between men and women, apart from obvious physical characteristics, would be abolished.” This comment was made with an unambiguous reference to the authority of James Dobson.Footnote ⁶²

Women missionaries in both evangelical and mainline mission agencies battled for recognition of the role they played in the field. They asked for separate job descriptions, and for equal training opportunities. Women continued to outnumber men in the mission field, and evangelical women wanted their gifts to be given the same consideration as women in mainstream organizations got for their work. In 1997 the Women of the Harvest organization sought to help women in leadership positions, and in 2010 evangelical women repeated the call for the full inclusion of women in missionary work that Sarah Page had famously made three decades earlier.Footnote ⁶³