Jane Elizabeth "Jennie" Faulding Taylor (6 October 1843 – 31 July 1904), was a British Protestantmissionary to China with the China Inland Mission. She pioneered the work of single women missionaries in China and eventually married the founder of the mission, James Hudson Taylor, after the death of his first wife, Maria Jane Dyer. As Taylor's wife, she assumed many roles within the mission agency when Taylor was overseas - acting at times as a home director for the mission. She encouraged women, both married and unmarried, to participate in the work of the China Inland Mission in ways that had previously only been reserved for male missionaries.
Early life in London
Jennie Faulding in 1866.
Jane Elizabeth Faulding was the daughter of a piano manufacturer in London. She was an 1865 graduate of the Home and Colonial Training College along with her friend, Emily Blatchley. She had met Taylor when she was nine and attended the weekly prayer meeting at the home of Hudson & Maria Taylor in the East End of London in 1865; she helped to proofread the Taylors' book "China's Spiritual Need and Claims",[1] and was influenced by this work which spoke of the desperate need for the Gospel message to be brought to the Chinese before they died "without God and without hope in the world".
The youngest missionary
When the Taylors were recruiting missionaries to go with them back to China, Faulding and Blatchley volunteered to accompany the 14 other candidates who were all as inexperienced as themselves. Faulding was the junior member[2] of the Lammermuir Party, the largest party of Protestant missionaries ever to sail to China in 1866, but she quickly proved herself useful.
Mrs. Jennie Taylor
Pioneering work among women
On the journey, they weathered two typhoons and a near shipwreck.[3] Once in China, they donned Chinese clothes and ventured down the Grand Canal, looking for a place to settle down to mission work. It caused a scandal among the other Westerners in China to see a young single woman like Faulding adopt the Chinese dress,[1] which was considered a compromise with an idolatrous culture. However, Taylor was undeterred in encouraging his missionaries to "adopt all things not sinful that were Chinese in order to save some".
In Hangzhou, Faulding proved the value of being an unmarried female, as her daily walks around the neighborhood gave her opportunities to be invited in by the Chinese women, who did not feel threatened as they might have by a foreign man. She met with many local women and established a school in Hangchow.[3]
During her time in China, she lived and worked with Hudson Taylor's wife, Maria, who taught her the Chinese language.[1] Maria died in 1870.
After she had been in China for five years, Faulding was given a furlough at the request of her parents. Taylor accompanied her home in 1871. She had keenly felt the loss of Maria Taylor, her friend and mentor, the year previously. On the way back to England, Hudson proposed marriage. She accepted on the condition of her parents' approval, which was not easily obtained. In November of the same year they were married.[3] She became the stepmother to Taylor's four surviving children and a successor to Maria as the "Mother of the Mission". Together, they had two children of their own and adopted Millie, an orphaned daughter of a missionary.[1]
Leading from the shadows
The news of the terrible Great North China Famine of 1877–78 in Shanxi Province motivated Faulding to go there with two single women as part of a relief team - when no men could be spared to accompany them on their journey and her husband could not go, himself. She began an orphanage in Taiyuan, and distributed aid to the starving people there. She also worked as assistant editor to the quarterly journal China's Millions.[1]
Faulding worked alongside her husband until the end of her life. They traveled across the globe many times recruiting missionaries and visiting mission stations in China. She died of breast cancer in Les Chevalleyres, Switzerland in 1904.[4] Hudson remained with her at the end of her life.
Phyllis Thompson 1982. Hodder & Stoughton and OMF. Each to Her Post: Six Women of the China Inland Mission. Chapter 2, "Successor to Maria - Jennie Hudson Taylor"
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