Our History

When God is leading a committed woman, who can hold her down?  The mission and ministries of women are deeply rooted in the desire to enable those who are hindered from fulfilling God’s call upon their lives by structures or traditions.

The impetus for mission work started in the Maritimes by Hannah Maria Norris, who, while teaching at the Wolfville seminary in 1869, had felt the call of God to go to the mission field in Burma and was turned down.  Women on the mission field was “unheard of”, the Men’s Mission Board said and thought the matter was closed.  Although there was no organization to support her or money to send her, she grew more certain that she must go.  She presented herself to the Mission Board a second time.  When they suggested that she should appeal to her sisters to send her, they had no idea the explosion they had set off that would affect Baptist churches across Canada to this day. Hannah formed a little society in her own church in Canso, NS and drew up a simple constitution to be used by women’s missionary societies. Within 2 months she had organized 33 circles in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and on Sept 21,1870 she left for Burma.

By 1900 there were 125 women in India alone, half of the missionary contingent. And by 1930-1935, 74% of our missionaries were women and the field had grown to include Africa, Bolivia and Indonesia, all sponsored by women’s organizations across Canada.

In 1887, the Baptist Women’s Home and Foreign Society for Manitoba and Northwest was formed.  This women’s organization predates our denomination which was then called The Baptist Union of Western Canada. In 1897, British Columbia formed its own society and in 1907 a joint work for Western Canada was formed as The Baptist Women’s Missionary Society of Western Canada.