A Woman Of God
August 2023
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Within our ministry complex, we have a building named after Blanche Appleby (1887-1968). She was a tremendous missionary in South China and the Philippines. Whenever I hear people ask whether or not women should be in ministry, preach, or pastor a church (and most who ask are against it), I think of women like Sister Appleby. I’d like to share with you part of her story, told by someone who knew her, missionary Charles Greenaway. The following is retold in part from his recollections of Blanche Appleby, which printed in The Evangelist thirty-seven years ago.
As our caravan rolled toward Senegal, West Africa in 1956, where we would be the first missionaries to enter its hinterland, we knew that a lot of the prayers that brought this opening came from a dear friend of many years, Blanche Appleby. She was a petite, frail lady, but big and mighty in faith. This little woman, after twenty-six years of rugged pioneer work in South China, found time to write us encouraging letters, telling us that God had answered her, and that this land would be opened. What makes this all so remarkable is that after all the years of her missionary endeavor in South China and the Philippines, she was willing to share our burden.
This beautiful lady, who would have been at home in any so-called sophisticated circle, was really a giant of faith and courage who brought Christ to such places as the City of Nine Dragons and established a Pentecostal mission in Pig Alley in the town called Bundle of Reeds.
She prayed. She fought devils of every description because of the intense suffering of her beloved Chinese as their crops failed—because of the merciless taxation, severe war, exploitation by bandits and uncontrolled armies, the locust pests; because of seven plagues that reduced to beggary more than 400 million Chinese; because of girls being sold for prostitution.
Blanche looked deep into the hearts of the Chinese people and found there a desperate desire for eternal life. She saw how the Chinese believed that to merit any attention from God, they must earn it. So they worshipped sacred trees, mountains, idols, and ancestors. They climbed the sacred mountain, Mount Tai. Blanche watched deluded worshipers climb the torturous 6,300 steps that led to the “South Gate of Heaven” with bleeding hands and knees, hoping the gods would take note of their suffering and give merit.
Blanche felt all of this as she traveled the rivers on stinking cattle boats, ate what she could manage to swallow, and slept where there was no bed. She endured hardship almost as a gift from God. This was no Goliath of a man—this was a little, refined lady from southern aristocracy. But in her heart a fire burned more fiercely against the powers of hell than a nuclear meltdown.
Finally, she had to leave China during the communist takeover, but she did not retire. She went on to the Philippines. You would think she had endured enough, but the end was not yet.
On December 27, 1941, Blanche, along with hundreds of other people, was taken prisoner by the Japanese.
I’m going to interrupt Brother Greenaway’s story for a moment to say that according to Sister Appleby’s own account, this would be the first of two prison camps that she would endure in the Philippines. She was released from her first internment on January 30, 1942. But on July 7, 1944, she was arrested again and taken to Los Banos, where she was held for eight months. At a certain point, prisoners were put on starvation rations, part of which was “rice and corn gruel, which was wormy and musty and contained from one-third to two-thirds water.”3
Sister Appleby’s weight dropped from 115 to 79 pounds, and keep in mind, she was, at that time, in her late fifties. She and others did their best to keep from starving by supplementing their diet with certain weeds. She wrote, “I can remember one day I was in a gully picking some weeds and tears were streaming down my face, when suddenly the Spirit of God came upon me, and I began to sing, ‘I know the Lord will make a way for me.’ I went back to camp with my weeds. Before dawn, we were told, ‘You are free.’”4
According to the U.S. Army Airborne & Special Operations Museum, “On February 23, 1945, the U.S. Army Airborne and Filipino guerrilla task force combined their efforts to liberate 2,147 Allied civilian and military internees from Los Banos Internment Camp, a Japanese prison camp.”5
Blanch Appleby was one of those freed. She wrote, “The General in command had counted on only rescuing about eighty percent, but they rescued one hundred percent. General MacArthur’s comment was, ‘Surely God helped us that day.’ It was one of the most marvelous rescues in military history.”6
In 1955, just ten years after this liberation, The Pentecostal Evangel reported on a survey of American Protestant missionaries serving in approximately forty different foreign lands. The survey revealed that 62 percent (about five thousand) of those missionaries were women.7 How many of those, I wonder, were inspired by Blanche Appleby and other women of God to become missionaries themselves?
We owe it to our daughters and granddaughters to make them aware of godly women like Blanche Appleby, especially now, when society is finding it difficult to even define what a woman is, let alone a woman of God. (I’m thinking of the confirmation hearing for then Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, when Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked her to define the word woman, and Jackson replied, “I can’t.”)8
Lord, help us to raise up a new generation of young women who, like Blanche Appleby, can pray, preach, persevere, and, by Your Spirit, prevail for the sake of winning souls to the Lord Jesus Christ both here and abroad.
SOURCES:
1 Charles Greenaway, “A Little Woman, A Big God,” The Evangelist, August 1986, 53.
2 Charles Greenaway, “More About Blanche,” The Evangelist,
September 1986, 31.
3 Blanche Appleby, “Our Remarkable Deliverance From Los Banos Internment Camp,” The Pentecostal Evangel, June 16, 1945.
4 Ibid.
5 https://www.asomf.orglos-banos-internment-camp-the-patty-kelly-stevens-story/
6 Blanche Appleby, “Our Remarkable Deliverance From Los Banos Internment Camp,” The Pentecostal Evangel, June 16, 1945.
7 Women Outnumber Men on Foreign Missions Staffs, The Pentecostal Evangel, June 16, 1955.
8 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/22/
blackburn-jackson-define-the-word-woman-00019543
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