The "third sex"
It was probably a woman who made those angel wings I so disliked. I imagine her making those wings with great love, and I wonder who she was and what else she accomplished.

The work of women in the church has often been silent and behind the scenes, yet the quiet work of women has changed the world. Before beginning seminary, I served two years in Cameroon, in western Africa, as an ELCA missionary. Western women in Cameroon are accepted as a "third sex." As outsiders, western women are not entirely subject to the local culture's expectations for women's behavior. Still, we are not men.

I suspect that the "third sex" status of missionary women in the early days of Lutheran mission created an opportunity for women to go beyond the constraints they might have faced in the United States.

	Esther Bacon is pictured second from the left. Photo courtesy of the former Commission for Women Web site, ELCA.

Esther Bacon, R.N., went to Zorzor, Liberia, in 1941, where she delivered more than 20,000 babies. She changed the infant mortality rate from 75 percent to 20 percent before she died in 1972.¹ On the other side of the world, Maud O. Powlas sailed for Japan in 1918, where she developed Jiai-en, the Lutheran Colony of Mercy, in Kumamoto. She left Japan during the war, but Emperor Hirohito honored her work with a visit to the Colony after she returned. By the time of Powlas' death in 1980, the Colony had grown into a network of 21 institutions. ²

These women changed lives, including their own. They developed their capacities in response to the needs of others rather than according to the restrictions imposed on women. Margaret Bessie (Wagnild) Smith, who served in the Central African Republic from 1953 to 1983, later said: "The African women, when we went there, there were maybe one or two who could read. Everything was for the men. I asked one of the men, 'Why didn't you bring your wife with you to class?' He answered, 'our wives are just cattle. You can't teach them anything.' I just thought, boy, I'm going to help these women."

Bold missionaries like Margaret Bessie Smith burst through barriers of inequality and worked with local women to create a more just society.

Underground ministry
Karen Melang is area executive director for Habitat for Humanity in Fremont, Nebraska. She is also a writer and a Lutheran deaconess. "There weren't many opportunities for women in ministry when I was growing up," she said. "I was always a church kid, always attracted to theology and the work of ministry. In those days there were only two church professions open to women: teacher or deaconess."

Melang chose deaconess, but she encountered difficulty in finding acceptance as a minister. "I did implicit ministry, rather than explicit ministry," she said, explaining that she chose to work outside the church. When Melang's husband, a Lutheran pastor, accepted a call in rural Minnesota in 1983, "there were really no jobs at all for a woman in a town of 280, non-profit or otherwise." So she stayed home with their children, and it was then that she began writing. "I knew the power of words, that some can give you goose bumps and make you cry. And I was always attracted to that," said Melang, who has been writing ever since. She is a regular contributor to Lutheran Woman Today magazine. Melang overcame the inequality she experienced, paving the way for a future generation of women in ministry.

^{1, 2} Former Commission for Women, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Web site.

Next page     Share this article