Some of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s bright minds and missional hearts joined the Great Cloud of Witnesses this year, including Hedy Lodwick, a Christian educator and long-term mission partner in post-war France, Egypt and Switzerland, and Eunice Poethig, pastor-teacher, denominational leader and mission worker in the Philippines. Lodwick and Poethig brought intellectual vigor, biblical grounding and faithful hearts to the work of transforming the church to more closely reflect the mercy, justice and joy of our Lord Jesus Christ.
With others, Lodwick and Poethig championed gender equity for mission partners. For a long time, the UPCUSA provided single female missionaries a lower salary than married couples, while prioritizing appointments for husbands without providing pay or pension benefits to married female missionaries doing important ministry work, often with and for other women. In the early 1970s, the church equalized pay for single women, but ignored the concerns of married women. Both Poethig and Lodwick engaged the issue.
Their efforts led to a 1979 task force report on the Status of Married Women Missionaries. The task force found that married female missionaries – most of whom partnered with their husbands or undertook their own service as teachers, doctors or community workers – felt they had become “non-persons” and their work was no longer valued by the church. The mission agency made changes including the establishment of a retirement escrow account, although it did not address compensation or assignment.
In 1982, working from her base in Geneva, Lodwick undertook a survey of missionary responses to the changes. Lodwick discovered that missionaries appreciated the work of the task force but felt it was “too little, too late.” Lodwick wrote that she felt guilty “making our discomfort known. There is so much injustice and incredible suffering in the world today … yet, if we sometimes feel helpless about bringing change in the enormity of our world’s distress, should we also ignore the aspects of justice that are closest and best known to us?”
With the UPCUSA-PCUS reunion in 1983, saints like Lodwick and Poethig continued to witness for equity for those who worked so hard for justice, compassion and fullness of life around the globe. A new task force in 1991 created an appointment, assignment and compensation plan that recognized the worth of women serving in mission fields regardless of marital status, and enrolled them in the Board of Pensions.
Poethig commented in a lecture at the 1999 Overseas Mission History Conference: “Status in the sight of God nor in the church is not a matter of dollars and cents or assignments. However, as God values each person, we are called upon to do no less with both justice and love.” As exemplified in these women’s lives, the work engaged by this year’s General Assembly commissioners also served to strengthen the PC(USA)’s missional witness. May the work of church continue to reflect this call to lift up all who serve God and strengthen discipleship.
Beth Shalom Hessel is the executive director of the Presbyterian Historical Society, a ministry area of the Office of the General Assembly. For 166 years, PHS has been the national archives of the PC(USA) and its predecessors.
