Gladys Aylward: A Warrior of the Kingdom

"God is always God, Ai-weh-deh"

Gladys Aylward was certainly not ordinary when one considers her life’s work, but if she was unknown to you, and you passed her in the street, you would have no idea that this Englishwoman of such small stature and plain appearance was used mightily by the Lord for the advancement of the gospel.

1 Corinthians 1:26–28

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are…

I read Gladys Aylward: The Adventure of a Lifetime countless times as a young girl. It has been many years since I had read this book, or even thought about this fearsome woman, so when I sat down to write this post, I was surprised when I realised that the latter portion of her ministry was in the crossfire of both World War 2 and Mao’s rise to power.

As a student of history, I am always blown away by the crossover/converging timelines of various people and periods in humanity’s past. It is so easy to be unaware of what chronologies were occurring at the same time because of how we are taught history in school. In any case, Gladys Aylward had the task of a lifetime, especially when considering the historical context in which she was situated.

The years before China

Gladys Aylward was born on the 24th of February, 1902 in Edmonton, North London, England. She had a working-class background, and her parents led ordinary lives; her father was a postman and vicar’s warden at St. Aldhelm’s church, and her mother was a homemaker who would sometimes speak against alcohol at the mission hall.¹ Though Gladys would regularly attend church, she did not become a Christian until adulthood.

Gladys did not have any remarkable academic prowess, so she dropped out of school at fourteen and worked in the service industry in a variety of ways: grocery clerk, nanny, and parlour maid. She rather enjoyed life in the city, and her desire to be an actress was helped along by taking drama in the evenings.

Yet the Lord had a different, better plan for her:

One night, for some reason I can never explain, I went to a religious meeting. There, for the first time, I realised that God had a claim on my life, and I accepted Jesus Christ as my Saviour… I read an article about China that made a terrific impression on me. To realize that millions of Chinese had never heard of Jesus Christ was to me a staggering thought, and I felt we ought to do something about it.²

Her unremarkable stature (she was a mere 4 foot 10 inches, and her foot was a size 3³), her rather plain appearance, and her lack of academic training or rigour do not paint the picture of one who will fiercely travail the wilds and dangers of a war-ridden China, a nation highly distrusting of foreigners, and one that would eventually be poised for the rise of Mao. But God.