Laurie Guy is a retired Carey Baptist College lecturer, pastor and missionary, and is part of Orakei Baptist Church in Auckland.
Beulah Wood is an author and teacher who has served as a missionary in India and Nepal. Beulah was President of the Baptist Union of New Zealand in 2019. She is a member of Mount Albert Baptist Church in Auckland.
Beulah’s book highlights the significance of thirty-six New Zealand Baptist women. Its story format makes it easy to read – even gripping in places.
Women missionaries feature prominently (about a third of the total). The very first missionary sent overseas by the New Zealand Baptist Missionary Society was a woman – Rosalie Macgeorge. Only a woman could have access to the zenanas, where Muslim women lived. And she made the most of her opportunity – visiting thirty zenanas a week to relate and share the gospel. As with many expatriates in the nineteenth-century tropics, she faced major health issues, sadly dying at age thirty-one on her way back to New Zealand after four and a half years’ service.
Apart from the deep ongoing stress of living in a vastly different culture, some of the missionaries experienced a lot of physical hardship. Here’s an example from Beulah’s book: ‘Along with Dr Ivory, and later with Joy Smith and Olwyn Kemp, Hazel [Drew (later Smith)] trekked eight to 30 kilometres a day over rough jungle tracks, crossing rivers, climbing jungle-clad hills and living in primitive bamboo huts. They coped with everything from swarms of mosquitoes to a herd of wild elephants – accepted as everyday life for a missionary.’
How would you like children shouting ‘red monkey’ at you? And how would you like to share a bedroom with a goat? That was the experience of Bangladesh missionary nurse, Olwyn Gaze (later Halder): ‘I did not expect to share my bedroom with a goat, but there it was, sleeping under my bed. Every time the goat turned over, my bed heaved as well.’
Life-giving care and evangelistic opportunity often coincided. Tripura nurse, Olwyn Kemp (later Pound), was approached by three men from the unreached, royal, Kok Borok tribe to teach them English. Eighteen months later the three were baptised as Christians – the early trickle of what became a flood of Kok Borok converts.
Until recent decades, overseas women missionaries sometimes faced less of a ‘glass ceiling’ than their New Zealand counterparts. Claire Gilbert (later Hart) was employed in ministry at the burgeoning Owairaka fellowship in 1952. Regrettably though, ‘the church was run by male deacons who would not have her at their meetings because she was a woman – even though she was their only paid worker’.
Times have changed. Pat Preest was the first woman to train as a recognised pastoral leadership student in the early 1970s. Vivienne Boyd became the first woman president of our Baptist Union in 1984. When a new position at Carey Baptist College, Director of Ministry Training, commenced in 1998, it was a woman, Nancy Squire, who first had that role.
It’s not possible in this review to celebrate all the pioneering women featuring in Beulah’s book. All, however, are heroes, exemplars, a ‘cloud of witnesses’.
One, otherwise unknown to me, whose story impressed me greatly, was Lois Rusbatch, who died last year. She served in Christian publishing and teacher-training in Pakistan with Interserve for forty-seven years. Two of Beulah’s descriptive sentences stood out to me: ‘She was so self-effacing that she wouldn’t lead a staff devotional’. And ‘although single she had many children in the Lord’. An unsung hero.
What to me was the deep current underlying all the stories? Baptist girls can do anything. A message for all us Baptist ‘girls’ and ‘boys’.
How to buy the book
Purchase online through the publisher’s website: Castle Publishing for NZ$36.99 (plus shipping), also available as an eBook.
Image credit: book cover
