04 Mar Honoring Our Women

One of the great things I get to do is to honor our women, especially here in Women’s History Month in March.

As co-image bearers of God, it’s an easy thing I get to do. Let me give you one example of why:

Most don’t know her name, but an 18th-century, former slave named Rebecca Protten (1718-1780) is considered the Mother of Modern Missions. Taught the Christian faith as a child, and after being freed from slavery on the island of St. Thomas, Ms. Protten became a minister with the Moravian missionary movement, who had come to St. Thomas to reach the island for Christ.

As Moravians placed a high value on women as Christian leaders, ministers and preachers, Protten soon found her calling, walking miles at the end of each day in the dark to lead meetings in slave housing where she would preach, ultimately leading thousands to Christ.

Her mentor, Friedrich Martin, arrived in Saint Thomas in 1736, when Protten was about eighteen years old. He taught her that the Moravian movement encouraged and empowered women preachers. Deeply struck by all that she was able to do and her boldness for Christ, Martin noted that Protten was “very accomplished in the teaching of God. She has done the work of the Saviour by teaching African women and speaking about that which the Holy Spirit himself has shown her … I have found nothing in her other than a love of God and his servants.”

Protten’s heroic and tireless efforts for Christ helped establish St. Thomas as the center of African Christianity in the Americas, and she bravely and courageously faced down intense persecution from local plantation owners.

Her time in the Americans was not to last, as she was unjustly accused of starting an insurrection, jailed, and deported to Europe upon release.

However, her deportation allowed her to providentially become the first female missionary from the Americas, as upon her arrival in Germany, she connected with the Moravian church, ministered there, reaching people for Christ in Germany and in the Netherlands, eventually founding a Christian school.

Speaking to her legacy, Jon F. Sensbach, author of “Rebecca’s Revival–Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World,” described her as:

“a prophet, [with a] distinctively international persona—obedient to a calling, yet adept at negotiating life’s possibilities, resourceful in any setting or language, [and] determined to take what she regarded as the Bible’s liberating grace to people of African descent … Much that we associate with the black church in subsequent centuries—the anchor of community life, advocate for social justice, midwife to spirituals and gospel music—in some measure derives … from those early origins … Though hardly anyone knows her name today, Rebecca helped ignite fires of a new kind of religion that in subsequent centuries has given spiritual sustenance to millions.”

May we all serve and love Jesus Christ as passionately, effectively, and tirelessly as the Mother of Modern Missions, Rebecca Protten.

Much love,

Morgan