Jennie Faulding Taylor
| Jane Elizabeth Faulding | |
|---|---|
Jennie Taylor
|
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| Born | 6 October 1843 England |
| Died |
31 July 1904 (aged 60) Les Chevalleyres, Switzerland |
Jane Elizabeth "Jennie" Faulding Taylor (6 October 1843 – 31 July 1904), was a British Protestant missionary 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.
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 attended the weekly prayer meeting at the home of Hudson & Maria Taylor in the East End of London in 1865. She was influenced by the Taylors and their book: "China's Spiritual Need and Claims", that 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”.
When the Taylors were recruiting missionaries to go with them back to China, Faulding volunteered to accompany the 15 other candidates who were all as inexperienced as herself. She was the junior member of the Lammermuir Party, the largest party of Protestant missionaries ever to sail to China in 1866, but she quickly proved herself useful.
On the journey, they weathered two typhoons and a near shipwreck. 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, 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”.
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