Gender, Mission and Work

Abstract

This article explores the complex relationship between formal gender rights and agency in the gender-conservative Norwegian mission organization, the Norwegian Lutheran China Mission Association (NLCM). The NLCM, currently named the Norwegian Lutheran Mission (Norsk Luthersk Misjonssamband, NLM), is known for promoting women’s subordination under men. In the NLM, women were not granted the right to vote at the General Assembly (GA) until 1997. Even today, only men may have a seat on the NLM’s committee for principal theological deliberations and decisions, because supreme spiritual leadership is reserved exclusively for men. NLM is currently the largest mission organization in the Nordic countries. The NLCM has been understood as an exception among Protestant missions that promoted women’s visibility, formal organizational rights and public role at the turn of the 20th century. Based on original archival research on the NLCM’s first decades in China, this paper analyses to what extent the NLCM was exceptional in its gender ideology and practice compared to other major Norwegian mission societies and Norwegian state Christianity at the turn of the 20th century.