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Single Women: Doing the Job in Missions

Many of us never discover our full potential until we're squeezed in the vise of necessity.
Single Women: Doing the Job in Missions
Image: MShep2 / iStock

From Mother Teresa to Ruth Carter Stapleton, from Corrie ten Boom to the legions of faithful local church leaders, models of women in ministry abound in today's Christian church. Tim Stafford, until recently editor of Step Magazine in Kenya, paints a picture of women ministering in a different cultural setting. But the challenge of fulfilling God's call crosses cultural and sexual lines.

I had a mental picture of single women missionaries when I came to Kenya. I knew them as faded women wearing faint mustaches and clothes cut for a sawhorse. They muttered to themselves. Quite obviously they had escaped from a country where no one wanted them, to hide harmlessly in a foreign land. Anyone who has attended a missions conference has seen the type. But I now think a missionary at a missions conference is like a fish on a wall. Out of context, and out of action, they have no juice. Of the missionaries I admire most, a large proportion are single women.

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