James Beck tells the profound story of the life of Dorothy Carey, whose difficult journey as a missionary paved the way for women in the field of missions. Using his background in psychology, Beck gives a unique perspective to understanding the sacrifices made by Dorothy in the cause of world evangelism and how she was unjustly treated by history.

The title of this book points to a feature—the missionary family—often considered to be a distinctive of the Protestant missionary movement. Certainly the presence of missionary families in the field has been a central factor in enabling, configuring, and restricting Protestant missionary outreach. What special concerns does sending missionary families raise for the conduct of mission? What means are available for extending care and support to missionary families? These issues are the focus of the chapters in part 1 of this book. In recent years an increasing number of reports have surfaced of sexual abuse in mission settings. Some reports have been based on “recovered memories,” the assessment of which raises difficult questions. Clearly sexual abuse in mission settings and how to understand allegations of abuse based on recovered memories are matters of grave concern to mission agencies and mission supporters as well as to missionary families. Part 2 serves the mission community by scrutinizing such matters, offering legal, historical, and psychological perspectives on the topic. In a new feature, “Forum on Sexual Orientation and Mission: An Evangelical Discussion,” the Evangelical Missiological Society takes up a pressing issue of our day. Fourteen evangelical scholars participate in the discussion found in part 3. Far from being the final word, this forum is presented with the prayer that it will serve as an opening to and basis for ongoing missiological conversation about an urgent and timely topic.

"This fascinating book reveals that the marriages of many Christian leaders were anything but dull. In fact, the dynamic personalities of great leaders, mixed with the difficult circumstances and sacrifices of their vocations, made for many surprises along the marital journey. Writing in an entertaining narrative style, Petersen describes the quiet strength of Polly Newton, Emma Moody, and Susie Spurgeon, long-suffering women who helped refine their "diamond-in-the-rough" husbands. He recounts the "storybook romance" that was William and Mary Bryan's marriage and the mutual admiration society of Billy and Nell Sunday. But Petersen also sheds light on unions that were far from blissful, including those of authors Hannah Whitall Smith and Grace Livingston Hill. Whether the marriages in these pages were solid or shaky, they all hold valuable lessons for dealing with universal issues such as financial worries, temptation, separation, and personality differences."--Provided by publisher.

Lisa Joy Pruitt offers a new look at women's involvement in the mission movement, with a welcome focus on the often overlooked antebellum era. Most scholars have argued that the emergence of women as a dominant force in American Protestant missions in the late nineteenth-century was an outgrowth of nascent feminist activism in the various denominations. This new contribution suggests that the feminization of the later mission movement actually stemmed in large part from images of the "degraded Oriental woman" that popular evangelical literature had been circulating since the 1790s, and that the increasing focus on and involvement of women was supported by male denominational leaders as an important strategy for reaching the world with the Christian gospel. In the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth-centuries, popular evangelical literature began circulating descriptions of women of the "Orient" designed to illustrate the need of those women for the Christian gospel. Such powerful and widely disseminated images demonstrated to young American women their relatively privileged position in society and, throughout the nineteenth-century, led many to support the cause of missions with their money and sometimes their lives. A belief in the desperate need of "Oriental" women for salvation and social uplift was largely responsible for feminizing the American Protestant foreign mission movement. "A Looking-Glass for Ladies": American Protestant Women and the Orient in the Nineteenth Century traces the creation and dissemination of images of women who lived in that part of the world known to nineteenth-century Westerners as the "Orient." It examines the emotional power of those images tocreate sympathy in American women for their "sisters" in Asia. That sympathy catalyzed many evangelical women and men to argue for vocational roles for women, both married and single, in the mission movement. The book demonstrates the ways in which assumptions about the condition and needs of "Oriental" women shaped American evangelical women's self perceptions, as well as the evangelizing strategies of the missionaries and their sending agencies.

This volume reprints essays by seven authors from three continents, including two authors from India, who tell the story of British missionary to India William Carey (1761- 1834), whose famous ‘Enquiry’, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792), changed history and made him not only the ‘Father of Protestant missions’, but also a forerunner of William Wilberforce, fighting against social injustice and preserving historic Indian languages for the people through research and printing. Even though Carey’s story has been told often, this volume concentrates on areas otherwise neglected: Carey’s theology and vision, Carey’s role as a social reformer, and Carey’s role as a leading linguist of Indian languages.

William Carey, often dubbed "The Father of Modern Missions," and Adoniram Judson, America's first intercontinental missionary, were pioneers whose missions overlapped in chronology, geography, and purpose. However, rarely are they both featured in the same volume or compared and contrasted. Here we have unique material by some of the world's leading experts on these two giants of missionary history, with perspectives on these men in ways never seen before. Especially relevant to this current age of World Christianity are the perspectives from India and Burma, the lands which received these men for their missionary enterprise.