How have women served as key agents in the disruption and reconfiguration of World Christianity while moving across transnational and diasporic networks? Pushing beyond eurocentric paradigms, the papers in this panel center female initiative and leadership in generating new forms of religious authority, identity, and community. Importantly, migration and displacement are recast as sites of theological creativity and institutional transformation, not merely of loss and displacement. Women’s labor, rooted in everyday practices and relational networks, emerges as the generative space in which theological futures are reshaped and mission itself is reimagined. Spanning various contexts from the Middle East and Asia to the Americas and including indigenous voices, this panel contributes to broader conversations that shift women from the periphery to the center in the making of global Christianities.
What would the study of Middle Eastern Christianity look like if scholars put women at the center of their research? This paper adapts the question that Dana Robert posed two decades ago in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research about the study of women in World Christianity in 2006. It focuses on two issues that are central to the future of Middle Eastern Christianity: 1) the critical contributions that women make to Middle Eastern churches; 2) the growth and development of Middle Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant communities in the diaspora, particularly in North and South America.
This paper examines the phenomenon of "reverse mission" through the ministries of Korean migrant women ministers leading predominantly white Anglo congregations in North America. Drawing on qualitative research with ten first-generation Korean im/migrant ministers, it explores how their leadership reflects broader shifts in global Christianity as missionaries from the global South increasingly minister in the global North, which were historically missionary-sending contexts. The paper first situates these ministers within the historical legacy of American women’s missionary work in Korea, which both expanded and constrained women’s roles in Korean Christianity. I then argue that im/migrant Korean women ministers in white Anglo congregations embody a form of boundary-crossing leadership that reimagines mission, pastoral authority, and preaching. Through postcolonial perspectives, transcontextual preaching strategies, and relational practices rooted in the Korean concept of Jeong, their ministries offer a new vision for the mission of the church that shapes the future witness of increasingly diverse North American churches.
This research addresses a critical gap in the historiography of World Christianity by documenting the overlooked history of South Korean female missionaries. While scholars have extensively analyzed Western women’s roles, non-Western missionary agency remains significantly under-researched. This study uncovers a 1960s "vanguard" of Korean women who pioneered missions in Pakistan—a predominantly Muslim society—a decade before their male counterparts. It explores how these women transitioned from traditional Confucian roles to autonomous transnational agents and contributed to South-South missions. Grounded in archives across Korea and the U.S., this study challenges "West-to-Rest" narratives. It demonstrates that World Christianity in the Global South was not a passive reception of Western ideas, but a dynamic movement led by a non-Western, female-led vanguard that redefined Asian Christian identity.
The future of many Indigenous peoples is increasingly diasporic, shaped by imperial dispossession, militarization, and the threatened loss of land, language, and life. This paper argues that Ryūkyūan Christian women in Hawaiʻi are central architects of Ryūkyūan cultural and theological futures. Although diasporic Uchinānchu comprise only a small portion of Hawaiʻi’s population, they have had an outsized impact on the state’s associational and public life as well as global Uchinānchu networks. Drawing on yuntaku-structured interviews, participant observation, and close reading of community-produced materials, this paper examines how Ryūkyūan Christian women’s everyday labor—care work, ritual organization, intergenerational formation, and public mobilization—constitutes constructive theological work. Situating these practices within longer histories of women-centered religious authority in Ryūkyū, this paper demonstrates how cultural revitalization, identity formation, and sociopolitical commitment become Christian ethical responsibilities. In doing so, this paper offers a distinctly Ryūkyūan addition to global conversations on Indigenous futurities and diasporic theologies.