Search Results (4)

This study interrogates the changes in the roles and status of women in the Nigerian Baptist Convention, the largest Baptist denomination in Africa, with over 10,104 churches and about 11 million members. This paper attempts to answer the critical question of how and what processes stimulated and sustained the changes in the role and status of women among Nigerian Baptists from the colonial period to the contemporary era. This paper relied on primary source publications, interviews, and secondary publications, which provided invaluable data in analysing the historical and contemporary issues that have resulted in the changing roles and status of women in the Nigerian Baptist Convention. This study found that against patriarchal traditions that subordinated women to domestic activities in the homes, such factors as access to formal education, the formation of Women’s Missionary Union as an institutional framework to mainstream women’s religious activities, the employment of women with doctoral degrees as theological educators in Baptist seminaries in the 1980s, the ordination of women as Baptist ministers in the late 1990s, and the appointment of women to key positions in the Nigerian Baptist Convention were major factors that moved women from traditional subordinate positions to public leadership in the church. Generally, this has indirectly stirred a process of empowerment for women and agitation for equality with men in the NBC in the past one hundred years. This study concluded that this development has moved women from supportive roles to taking up significant leadership positions within an African patriarchal cultural system. Full article

This article gives a narrative account of the life of Lois Chapple, a Baptist woman, who served as a deaconess, a missionary in China, and as an evangelist and a secretary for the Baptist Women’s League and the Baptist World Alliance. This article offers Chapple as an excellent example of how women within Baptist life found opportunities to serve in the twentieth century. Full article

This paper proposes a new narrative of the life of nineteenth-century American Baptist missionary, activist, and scientist Adele Fielde. In the common historical narrative, her separation from the American Baptist Missionary Union (ABMU) after over twenty years of mission service in Siam and China marks her shift towards careers devoid of religious beliefs, in suffrage, activism, and science. Rather than perpetuating this deconversion narrative, I propose that she demonstrated continuity in her beliefs and interests, exercised through diverse careers and starting as a missionary. By looking to biographical accounts by her friends, colleagues, and later historians alongside her writing and life, I highlight her unorthodox Christian beliefs that motivated not only her missionary life but her later careers in science and activism in the US. Reframing Fielde’s life in this way offers a more realistic model of the intertwined beliefs and motivations of female missionaries, activists, and scientists in the nineteenth century. Full article

The impression is given in studies of theological books published in Scotland in the long twentieth-century that Scottish Baptists produced few significant works of academic scholarship. There is also no indication of any significant contribution made by more popular studies in theology or in church history. There is no doubt that only a very small number of scholars from this constituency have produced notable works in the fields of biblical studies missiology or theology, though a much larger number of works were produced for the benefit of the members of Christian congregations in this country. In the field of church history, very few works were published in the first half of the twentieth century, but by contrast, an increasing number of authors contributed to a flourishing area of studies in more recent decades. However, this study seeks to demonstrate that far more books were published than had been expected, and further studies are likely to increase this total in due course. It will be argued that Scottish Baptists, therefore, made a small but also significant contribution to both academic and more popular publishing in these fields in the long twentieth century. Full article