Gladys Aylward — The Unlikely Missionary Who Walked by Faith

Who She Was Gladys May Aylward was born on February 24, 1902, in Edmonton, Middlesex, England, the daughter of a postman. She worked as a parlour maid and felt a persistent call to missionary work in China, but when she applied to the China Inland Mission in 1929 she was rejected on the grounds that she was too old to learn the language and lacked the necessary academic qualifications. Undeterred, she saved her wages and in 1930 traveled alone by the cheapest route available — overland through Siberia by train during the Sino-Soviet conflict — to Yangcheng, Shanxi Province, where an elderly missionary named Jeannie Lawson welcomed her. Over the following years she became an innkeeper, an official government foot inspector for the Chinese authorities, and — most famously — the woman who in 1940 led approximately one hundred orphaned children over the mountains to safety during the Japanese invasion, a journey of twelve days on foot over the Shanxi mountains. She spent the rest of her life caring for Chinese children, eventually from Taiwan, until her death in 1970.

Her Core Teaching on Prayer Gladys Aylward’s prayer life was uncomplicated and total. She prayed with the simplicity of a child and the tenacity of a soldier. She had no formal theological training and no learned vocabulary of intercession. What she had was an absolute, unqualified certainty that God heard her, that He was personally interested in her affairs, and that He would do what He promised.

This certainty was not naive; it was the hard-won product of watching God provide for her, protect her, and direct her through circumstances that should, by any rational calculation, have destroyed her.

From the moment she boarded the train to Siberia against all advice and with almost no money, Gladys was operating on a single verse that she returned to throughout her life: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11, NIV). The China Inland Mission had decided she had no future in China. God had decided otherwise. She prayed with the confidence of someone whose life was inside a plan too large and too purposeful to be derailed by any institution’s rejection or any obstacle’s resistance.

The mountain crossing with the children in 1940 remains one of the most extraordinary acts of faith-in-prayer in twentieth-century mission history. When they arrived at the Yellow River without a boat and without a military escort, Gladys prayed and waited. A Chinese Nationalist officer eventually arrived with his soldiers and transported them across. She had simply prayed and trusted. Her prayer was grounded in the Psalmist’s confidence: “I lift up my eyes to the mountains — where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:1–2, NIV). Her help did come from the Lord. It came in the form of a Chinese officer and his soldiers, but its origin was the God she had been petitioning since long before they reached the river.

Gladys prayed with an expectation of miracle that could have seemed presumptuous in someone with less evidence. But she had evidence. She had seen God provide food, heal the sick, pacify rioting prisoners, and protect her through artillery bombardment. Her prayer was the prayer of someone who had repeatedly proved the promise of Jesus: “Everything is possible for one who believes” (Mark 9:23, NIV). She believed. And she had watched the impossible become possible often enough that her belief was no longer theoretical. She had a track record with the God of the impossible, and she drew on that track record in prayer with the straightforward confidence of a woman who had learned from experience that God could be trusted.

One of the recurring themes of her prayer life was the willingness to be directed by God into circumstances that made no sense from a human perspective. She had not planned to become a foot inspector, or an innkeeper, or the guardian of a hundred orphaned children. But each step had been God’s leading, and she had followed it in prayer. She took to heart the instruction of Proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5–6, NIV). Her path had been anything but straightforward by human logic, yet from God’s perspective it was perfectly straight — directed toward the purposes He had ordained before she was born.

Gladys Aylward’s story is one of the great demonstrations that God does not call the equipped; He equips the called. The parlour maid whom the mission board rejected became one of the most celebrated Christian missionaries of the twentieth century — not because of her qualifications but because of her prayers. She lived out Paul’s declaration: “For we live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7, NIV). She could not see the whole path. She could not understand the whole plan. But she prayed and walked, and the path appeared beneath her feet.

A Prayer: Lord, You do not call the qualified — You qualify the called. Where we feel inadequate, remind us that Your power is not limited by our capabilities. Where the way forward is unclear, give us Gladys’s simple, stubborn faith: to lift our eyes to the mountains and trust that our help comes from You. Give us the courage to walk into the impossible, praying as we go. Amen.