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The World Day of Prayer: Ecumenical Churchwomen and Christian Cosmopolitanism, 1920–1946

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Gale L. Kenny
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Abstract

Between World War I and World War II, the World Day of Prayer (WDP) expressed Protestant women's Christian cosmopolitanism that combined rituals of prayer with a liberal program of social activism and humanitarianism. The WDP began as a way to unite Protestant women together across organizational denominational lines as women's missionary societies entered a period of decline in the 1920s. The WDP raised awareness of home and foreign missionary work and took up a collection to support designated home and foreign mission projects, but it quickly emerged as a site for ritual creativity. The planning committees and prayer service facilitated Protestant women's efforts to replace a traditional understanding of missionary work with a cosmopolitan Christianity that coupled American women's spirituality with a liberal program supportive of racial diversity and internationalism. The prayer services became sacred spaces to enact “unity in diversity,” even though this was always more an ideal than a reality. Churchwomen used the evident dissonance between a universalist vision of a united Christian world and the realities of racial, religious, and national difference to generate discomfort in the prayer services and to deepen participants' spiritual experiences. While the interwar era is understood as a period of theological schisms and Protestant declension, a gendered analysis of Protestantism through the World Day of Prayer shows that it was also a period of religious transformation as churchwomen formulated a modern social gospel that paired spirituality and action in ways that would shape Protestant churches for the next several decades.

Keywords

Protestantwomenmissionscosmopolitanismpractice
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , Summer 2017 , pp. 129 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2017

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References

Notes

* I would like to thank the members of the Columbia University Seminar onNorth American Religions for their helpful thoughts and suggestions on an early draft of this article. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Castelli, Jack Hawley, Wayne Proudfood, Najam Haider, Judith Weisenfeld, Dana Robert, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

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24. “A High Point in the Assembly,” Church Woman, February 1942, 29.

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31. Handbook: Suggestions for the Leader, February 20, 1942, 5, Missionary Research Library, Union Theological Seminary. Emphasis mine.

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36. Lester Minion, “Protestant Novena,” Church Woman, December 1941, 34–35.

37. Fosdick, Meaning of Prayer, 22, 27. For a comparison of liberal and Fundamentalist practices of prayer, see Rick Ostrander, “Prayer in a Modern Age,” in Schmidt and Promey, American Religious Liberalism, 177–96.

38. Abernethy, Jean Beaven, “How, Not Why, Do I Pray?” Church Woman, April 1939, 9.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original.

39. Baroness Van Boetzelaer van Dubbeldam, Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens, WDP service, March 8, 1935, MRL, UTS.

40. Applegarth, Margaret, “The World Day of Prayer,” Church Woman, May 1946, 17.Google Scholar

41. See, for example, “Report of Findings of the All Day Meeting of Church Women to Consider the Place of Church Women in the Emergency,” October 6, 1941, Box 69, Folder 1, FCC, PHS.

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44. Applegarth, Margaret, “I Was Glad When They Said unto Me: ‘Let Us Go … ,’” Church Woman, March 1943, 10.Google Scholar

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47. Applegarth, Margaret, “Standing in the Need of Prayer,” Radio Review of Women's National Radio Committee, February 1944, 9, 1226-6-1:04Google Scholar, CWU, GCAH.

48. Handbook: Suggestions for the Leader, WDP, March 8, 1946, 17, 1225-6-2:20, CWU, GCAH.

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