Abstract
Greetings to all of you! I am pleased and humbled to receive this award. I wish to thank all the officers who decided to honor me in this way. My husband Inus Daneel sends his greetings. He is 80 and in poor health, but he is here in spirit. As an expert on African Indigenous Churches in Zimbabwe, Inus has shared with me his life as a missionary and taught me much about service.
I hope you will allow me to say a few words about what this Society means to me. When I walked through the doors for my first APM/ASM meeting in 1984, at age 27, I was welcomed with open arms. I remember how I was greeted. It was Alan Neely, I think, who walked up to me and said “Welcome, finally a woman missiologist. We knew this would happen someday.” Of course I was not the first woman. There were a few Catholic sisters including Janet Carroll and Mary Motte. There were two Protestant women—Pearl McNeil and Lois McKinney. But I was a full ten years younger than the youngest in attendance. The collapse of mission studies in the 1960s-1970s within mainline schools meant that I was the beginning of a new generation—and the only doctoral student of Charles Forman, who had been the successor of Kenneth Scott Latourette at Yale. 1
Despite my inexperience and inadequacies, I was welcomed by the Society. This sense of openness is what, in my experience, characterizes the ASM. The generosity of other missiologists allowed me to grow into my position. This spirit of grace, through the ASM, has made me who I am today. The attractiveness of the American Society of Missiology as a professional society lies also in its holism. Together we pursue excellent scholarship, but we also worship and pray together, eat together, and share resources together. The retreat-like atmosphere, as well as the ecumenical spirit of inclusion, makes our Society stand out from others. The mixture of academics and practitioners also keeps the ASM fresh and relevant to the work we do.
I wish to thank several people who took time to mentor me, when I started my life as a missiologist nearly 35 years ago. First was Gerald H. “Jerry” Anderson, who included me in many important academic discussions, and who even pressured my dean to fund me to attend professional meetings! As an outstanding alumnus of Boston University, Jerry has been gracious and generous to me as professor at his alma mater. Second, I must mention the late Orlando Costas. Orlando went to Andover-Newton the year I went to BU, and we met together monthly in the Mission and Ecumenism Committee of the Boston Theological Institute. He gave me timely and helpful advice, and we sent some of our students back and forth between our respective institutions. I remember one piece of sage advice he gave me is that it is better to be an evangelical teaching at a liberal institution, than an evangelical teaching at an evangelical institution. In this way, he noted, one is dealing with core issues of the gospel rather than minutiae. Third, I must thank Norman Thomas, who for many years was the backbone of United Methodist mission studies. Norm has a way of seeing the bright side of every struggle. Whenever he is knocked down, he stands back up, and with energy and enthusiasm that motivates us all.
And finally I must thank Wilbert Shenk, who as a superb observer of missions, and as a historian, has been a beloved role model in multiple ways. Around 1985, I think, Wilbert decided to organize a book series to commemorate the 200th anniversary of William Carey’s “Enquiry,” to be published by Mercer University Press about different historical aspects of the missionary enterprise. Wilbert asked me to write a volume on church-state relations. I said I would think about it, and I went back to my dorm room and prayed. I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. I realized that here I was a woman historian, and once again a scholarly project on mission would leave out women entirely. I had a sinking feeling, as I had not worked on women’s history in my graduate program. But I felt God telling me that it was my responsibility to write a book on the history of women in mission. The next morning I proposed to Wilbert that I write a book on American Women in Mission. He got permission from the press to add that volume, and I spent the next ten years working on it. It was a lonely enterprise for the most part. The subject of mission history was unpopular during the 1980s and early 1990s. Feminist scholars were critical of the role of evangelistic Christianity in women’s lives. I was starting from scratch. Even figuring out the sources was a big challenge, for mission libraries had not collected the popular literature written by women missionaries. “Woman” was not a category in card catalogues, and in the day before computerization there was no way even to search for the topic. For example, I had to manually go through the card catalogue at the Day Missions Library and copy down every reference with the word “women” and “mission” in the title, in order to make an initial identification of sources. There was no overview history of American missions, no chronology of American Catholic women, and scant serious scholarship on evangelical women. Well, a lot has changed in the twenty years since American Women in Mission came out! 2 Now when I go to academic meetings, there are scholars all over the world interested in mission history, including many who work on women and mission, and who thank me for my book.
Finally, I wish to thank my students, past and present. Twenty-two of them are here tonight, and many others have sent me congratulatory notes. I have been greatly blessed by working in a context where I could relate to these incredible people. Stand up and take a bow! Our speaker last night talked about scholarship as the tuning of guitar strings, in which different approaches are tuned to each other. The relationship between teacher and student is the same. We adjust and tune ourselves in relationship to each other, and our relationship extends over a lifetime. My students have been the source of whatever reputation I enjoy. Thank you!