From Bible Women to Secretaries of Home-Visits: Uncovering an Invisible History of Laywomen’s Ministry in the Hong Kong Anglican Church (1880s to the Present)

This paper attempts to trace a 140-year history of recruiting Bible women by the Hong Kong (HK) Sheng Kung Hui, previously the South China Mission of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and later the South China Diocese of Chung Hwa Sheng Kung Hui from the 1880s to the present. Based on local parish histories, mission archives and interviews, the paper demonstrates a fragmented history of early recruitment of Bible women in the 1880s, establishing a training school for Bible women in HK at the turn of the century and its relocation to Canton, the two types of Bible women after the 1910s, differentiated by the level of their theological education, and lastly the current employment of home-visits secretaries. As female evangelists are irregular posts for the HK Sheng Kung Hui today, laywomen with non-theological training are recruited as secretaries of home-visits to support some feminine ministerial roles in local parishes. This paper contributes to uncovering the historical particularities of the Hong Kong Anglican Church and how it reflects on the controversy in the Anglican Communion on the status of Christian women.