Lausanne World Pulse – Women in World Evangelization: More Study Needed
By Sandi Kim
Roberts indicates further that there is no “hard data behind this assertion—because there wasn’t any,” yet we have indicators that “if the fastest growing indigenous groups in Latin American and Africa were predominantly female, and that if in the year 2000 these two continents together contained roughly forty-one percent of the world’s Christians, then one could speak of the typical Christian in 2000 as Latin American or African female.” More concerted efforts must be made to investigate and unveil the data that lies underneath these swells for which we currently only have indicators.
In-depth Study Needed for Women in World Missions
In-depth study focusing on women in global Christianity, and especially those involved in world missions, is required to take world evangelization to the next level of strategic thinking. Although there currently is no such study available, there are some figures to help us in our initial search provided by David Barrett, Todd Johnson and Peter Crossing.5 Although their data gives aggregate figures from 2005, there is not much in the way of gender-based data. According to Johnson, there is insufficient data from around the world to compile such an in-depth gender based studies. Nevertheless, Barrett, Johnson and Crossing do give us a few figures to consider.
The following data is pulled from Barrett, Johnson and Crossing’s Global Table 2 in “Missiometrics 2007.”6 In 2005, there were over 4.4 million women engaged in full-time Christian work around the world, including home pastoral care, home mission and foreign missions. Over half of home pastoral workers (fifty-three percent) were women, and women constituted nearly half of all full-time foreign mission personnel (forty-five percent). Women constituted about forty-five percent of foreign lay personnel, forty percent of foreign lay ministers and about seventy-four percent of lay foreign missionaries. Women also comprised fifty percent of pilgrim evangelizers as well as seventy percent of tourist evangelizers.
In 2005, there were over 4.4 million women engaged in full-time Christian work around the world, including home pastoral care, home mission and foreign missions.
Special consideration must be made for the strategic training of unmarried women on the job, as two-thirds of all women in full-time ministry were unmarried. Over half of the women in full-time missions were unmarried (fifty-two percent), and just under half of the women in home missions were unmarried (49.7%). The overwhelming majority of women in home pastoral staff (77.7%) were unmarried.
Not only do women have a formidable role in world missions today, but also on the homefront as former missionaries and retired personnel. In 2005, women constituted about fifty-seven percent of ex-foreign missionaries (about 120,000 of 210,000), and about fifty percent of retired personnel from foreign missions (about 5,000 of 10,000). For total background supporters, according to Barrett, Johnson and Crossing, women constituted about fifty-six percent of all background supporters in missions, both in home missions (130 million, fifty-nine percent) and foreign missions (258 million, fifty-five percent). Sadly, of those who were retired personnel, only about thirty-six percent of those with pensions were women, and among retired personnel from foreign missions there were twice as many women than men who were unpensioned.
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