Scilla

“Salute Prisca and Aquila my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus, who for my life laid down their own necks; unto whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles” — Romans 16:3-4 (ASV)

Priscilla Livingstone Stewart was born on 28 August 1864, near Belfast; most accounts say in Lisburn. People who knew her described her as warm, quick and full of fun, with a straight-talking Ulster directness. Everyone called her Scilla.

In 1886 Hudson Taylor and his colleagues asked God for a hundred new workers to sail during 1887, without appealing for money. By the end of the year 102 had sailed. Scilla was one of them. Many of the Hundred were young women, and Taylor sent them to live in inland towns, which most missions thought improper and dangerous. He believed Chinese women could best be reached by women, and he trusted them. Scilla was sent with three other young women to a town on the great Poyang Lake. She was a missionary first. She became a wife a year later.

How she and Charlie met isn’t recorded, and later books have decorated the story. He fell deeply in love and pursued her with total conviction. Each of them insisted, with some humour, that the other had proposed. When she fell seriously ill early in 1888, he came to her, though he was getting over a lung illness himself. The Chinese Christians around them thought that settled it: they should marry at once.

They married in the spring of 1888, most accounts say at Tianjin on 7 April. A Chinese pastor performed the ceremony, and they are said to have worn their ordinary Chinese clothes. Some say the pastor was Xi Shengmo, but that can’t be confirmed. An Englishman of his class would normally have married before a consul in English clothes. Their wedding belonged to the Chinese church.

Before the wedding, Charlie gave her the £3,400 he had kept back for her security. She didn’t keep it. She wanted to start married life the way he had, with nothing but God, and she gave the whole sum to the Salvation Army, one of the few Christian movements of the day where women preached and led on equal terms with men. From the start she wasn’t content to be protected. She wanted to share his risks, and she did, for forty years.

They went to Lungan, a city in south-eastern Shanxi now called Changzhi, which didn’t want them. Placards in many places accused missionaries of terrible crimes against children. Some of that came from rumour; some was the resentment of a proud people defeated by foreign powers and forced to accept their merchants, opium and missionaries. The Studds were watched, insulted and threatened. They stayed, lived simply, and saw hostility slowly become tolerance and, here and there, friendship. Their work connected with refuges for opium addicts, very often run by Chinese Christians. Scilla worked among women Charlie could hardly reach. The names of the Chinese believers who worked with them weren’t written down. They still did the riskiest work.

Four daughters were born: Grace in 1889, Dorothy in 1891, Edith in 1892 and Pauline in 1894. Two sons died as babies. The details are uncertain; one record says one lived a day and the other two. Charlie rarely wrote about it, and it would be wrong to invent his feelings. But those small graves were part of the price.

By 1894 both of them had broken health, and Charlie had asthma that never left him. They went home, handing their Lungan property over to the Mission. Six years later, in 1900, the Boxer uprising swept through Shanxi. The China Inland Mission lost fifty-eight missionaries and twenty-one children, and far more Chinese Christians died, many refusing to deny their faith. Missionaries could go home when their health broke. Chinese believers couldn’t.

Paul calls Priscilla and Aquila “fellow-workers.” That’s what Scilla was: not someone’s helper, but a partner with her own call.

One thing to do this week: think of a couple, a pair of friends or a team you know who carry something together. Write them a note naming what each one brings, not just the one people usually notice.