Marginalized Influence of One Woman

I love studying those who have been here and done that!  Those godly and powerful women and men who served the world with great courage.  

In 1911, Lillian Trasher began her ministry in Egypt and her Assiout Orphanage.  I've heard of her work before but never in the context of an article by Beth Baron in an AG Heritage magazine.  She was called, "The Nile Mother".    

Several things about her fascinate and inspire me in my work today.

First, she did not intend to start an Orphanage with far reaching influence.  Rather she followed God and did His work.  

Serving a young mother who was dying, she returned home with the dead woman's baby and rented a home out of faith and began an orphanage.  According to Beth Baron, "during it's first fifty years, roughly eight thousand orphans passed through its doors."  Amazingly and without the church growth classes or email marketing or degrees- she changed a culture.

Baron goes on to state that, "Lillian Trasher chose the most marginal of people for her ministry: orphaned, abandoned, and handicapped children, who lacked family in a society that considered the family its basis and saw family lineage as critical to creating and sustaining social and political bonds."  

 So amazing that the marginalized (pentecostal woman) reached the marginalized.  

"The marginality of the missionary, the location, and the children allowed the orphanage to grow and flourish in unimagined ways.  

The children raised one another, with the first generation of grown girls and boys in turn caring for the next..."  

 I appreciate Beth Baron (PH.D., University of California, Los Angelos and the editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and her article on Lillian Trasher in the perspective of social, political and cultural as well as spiritual transformation!