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Nurses are among the hundreds of Presbyterians who have devoted their lives to sharing the Gospel message of love for others in fields afar.
Providing quality health care is challenging and exhausting work in the best of times. In the first half of the twentieth century, missionary nurses overseas often found themselves working in difficult conditions in remote locations or serving patients during times...
Left: Florence Nightingale, 1860. Courtesy of Wikicommons. Right: Nurses with child patient, Severance Hospital, Seoul, 1958. [Pearl ID: 145957]
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic focused the world’s attention on the sacrifices nurses and other health care workers make every day, the World Health Organization had...
In 1897 the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. sent its first mission workers, Theodore and Julia Pond, to Venezuela. The couple was well-accomplished at the time of their appointment; they had spent over 20 years serving in Syria and had been working in Colombia since 1890. In Venezuela the Ponds encountered resistance from a largely Catholic population, but by 1900 were able to establish The Church of the Redeemer (Iglesia Evangélica Presbiteriana El Redentor) in the capital, Caracas...
I recently visited the Presbyterian Historical Society’s archives in search of Miss Harriet N. Phillips, whom I already knew from other contexts was a single white woman with a great desire to serve God and humankind. At 19th century missions, a woman was definitely in a man’s world, and yet females such as Phillips did a great deal of the mission work. I admire these unsung ladies, one of whose virtue and sacrifice I sing for you today.