In the second half of Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion, Dana Robert highlights crucial themes in mission history. In a section entitled ‘Women as Missionaries’, she notes-
Around the globe, more women than men are practicing Christians. Measured by regular church attendance, pilgrimages, prayers at home, fund-raising, and teaching children about faith, Christianity is a women’s religion. The ratio of female to male Christians is approximately two to one. Within Catholicism, sisters outnumber brothers and priests by more than 50 percent. Yet because the priests, preachers, theologians, public leaders, and famous missionary entrepreneurs are typically male, the crucial roles of women in mission remain buried in the unwritten stories of human relationships. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in both Catholicism and Protestantism, the majority of missionaries were women. However, until recently overview histories of mission have scarcely analyzed women’s roles or acknowledged that women typically make up the majority of active believers (p. 118).
It seems to me that the telling of the worldwide advance of Christianity from the vantage point of relationships and home, hospitality and social change rather than institutional power and privilege may produce a history of the faith in which women are the chief witnesses. And yet, as Robert points out, these stories remain buried within relationships and not in the ecclesiastical records or institutional ruins. There is the history written by those who dominated and won, and there are the stories of the faith winding their way through families and marriages, school rooms and marketplaces. The history of Christianity is woefully incomplete without these women and their unwritten stories.