A couple of men on the campus voiced interested in overseas ministry, but the response from the women was overwhelming. It was the women who asked to meet with me individually to talk about what concrete steps they could take to get to the field. In one conversation, a godly, single young lady asked me about how she, as a woman, could be used on the field. 

Fifteen years ago, at The Master’s University in Southern California, the Lord used a return missionary to challenge me to devote my life to the mission field. I feel indebted to this man and indebted to this institution for putting people like him in front of me to expose me to a world of lostness that I knew nothing about.

Fifteen years later, someone from this same university asked Dave and I to stand in front of the student body and tell them about this same lostness that I had learned about while there. It was their Global Outreach Week and they brought us in to talk about Bible translation. After speaking 6 times and spending time with the student body, Dave and I were on a plane headed back to Dallas. When I asked him what he thought, he said that it was evident that the Lord had us at Master’s…for the women.

Dave was right. A couple of men on the campus voiced interested in overseas ministry, but the response from the women was overwhelming. It was the women who asked to meet with me individually to talk about what concrete steps they could take to get to the field. In one conversation, a godly, single young lady asked me about how she, as a woman, could be used on the field. I tried to explain to her that the work of single women on the field was not an accessory to “real” mission work, but instead was vital to spreading the Gospel overseas.

The Crucial Role of Women

I am currently working towards a Masters degree in Bible translation and, out of the required textbooks for my current classes, half of them were written by women. The content of these texts is dealing with heavy exegetical translation issues, and it is the women who are making major contributions to the field through their writings. In the same way, I just finished an annotated bibliography this weekend where I read multiple theses about literacy work that has been done in Cameroon. Seven out of ten of these works were written by women. And what was striking was that woman after woman gave praise and glory to God for in their dedications. It is the same on the field. Women serve as Bible translators, exegetical consultants, linguistic consultants, doctors, nurses, children’s ministry workers, evangelists, teachers and literacy workers. They saturate the field in every domain.

The founder of Wycliffe Bible Translations, Cameron Townsend, advocated for women to be sent out as Bible translators. There was much controversy surrounding his decision to send out Loretta Anderson and Doris Cox to headhunting tribes of the Peruvian jungle. The chief of the Shapras tribe was known to have killed his predecessor in order to take his position as chief. And it was this very man who started helping these two ladies learn his language. After working with the women for a couple years, he became a believer and repented of his witchcraft and murder. Then, years later he confessed to Townsend,

“If you had sent men, we would have killed them on sight. Or if a couple, I’d have killed the man and taken the woman for myself. But what could a great chief do with two harmless girls who insisted on calling him brother?”*

In some instances it is actually more advantageous to be a woman in kingdom work.

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