Good Grace – Stories of Emotion and Women’s Experience in the Methodist Mission to Papua

AUTHOR(S)
Kerrie Handasyde
Development

While feminist theology seeks to give space to women’s stories, conversion narratives have such authority in evangelical Christianity that they can shape the emotional arc of women’s stories and experience and they have the power to include and exclude. Missionaries brought a script with them to the colonial mission field. It was one that anticipated converts’ awareness of sin, their repentance, acceptance of grace, and life-changing gratitude. In the realities of cross-cultural mission, the script was not always followed, not least because the seemingly universal pattern of human emotion is, like gender, culturally inscribed. This chapter examines how Julia Benjamin, an Australian Methodist missionary woman in Papua in the early 1900s, wrote about Indigenous conversion, tracing not only the fulfilment of the evangelical emotional narrative but also her engagement with issues of authority. It examines how gender intersects with the conversion narrative to shape the telling of women missionaries’ own life stories: in particular, how expectations around grace and gratitude prevent women from appearing to be authors of their own stories (or destinies), instead writing in the third person, or having others write on their behalf. It finds that missionary stories are composed within a community of reception in which both form and content conform to evangelical expectations around women’s faith lives. In this way, the communal act of tending to stories is both liberating and binding.

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Research Type(s)
Book Chapter
January 5, 2026
Published in
2025
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