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It takes one woman

Date Added: Thursday 26th April 2007

The 100th birthday of Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first Anglican woman priest in Hong Kong, is celebrated this month with the re-launch of a charity founded in her memory. Oxford's Canon Christopher Hall takes up the story...

On 5 May 1907 a girl was born in Hong Kong who was to transform the worldwide Church. Her Chinese father called her Tim-Oi, 'Much Beloved', because he welcomed another daughter after his first-born had died, even though most fathers wanted sons.

Li Tim-Oi worked hard and when she was 24, she received a vocation to ministry in the Chinese church. She attended a seminary in Canton, where her New Testament tutor was Geoffrey Allen, later Bishop of Derby before retiring to Deddington. In 1941 after lay ministry in Portuguese Macau, she was ordained Deacon (an inclusive order in China), in charge of the church there. Japanese occupation of Hong Kong stopped visits from priests, so she was licensed to preside at Communion.

To regularise her position on 25 January 1944 she was made 'priest in the Church of God' by my father the Rt Revd Henry Hall, the Bishop of Hong Kong, after a hazardous journey to Zhaoqing in Free China. This church-transforming event paralleled the baptism by Peter of the first Gentile. The Bishop wrote to Ursula Niebuhr that Tim-Oi had shown 'like Cornelius that God has given her the true charisma'. Made by God she was no more 'unclean' than the Gentile Cornelius.

Forty years later, after Li Tim-Oi met Archbishop Robert Runcie at Lambeth Palace, he said to Archbishop Ted Scott: 'Who am I to say whom God could or could not call?'' Under pressure in 1946 from a 'Purple Guard', not the bishop, Tim-Oi resigned her priest's licence but not her Holy Orders. In her next parish she founded a maternity home to stop girl babies like her being smothered.

While Mao ruled China she suffered in obscurity, but released to Canada in 1981 she resumed her ministry in her 70s, harbouring no resentment at what she had undergone. After Li Tim-Oi died in 1992, her sister pump-primed the Li Tim-Oi Foundation to train women with Christian vocations to make a difference in their communities in the Global South - 200 to date.

With a relatively small grant these women use their energy and resources to impact their world in ways we can hardly imagine:

Niceria Nkonge lives in a culture that includes polygamy and female genital mutilation and domestic violence. She works alongside the growing Mothers' Union to educate families about the Christian lifestyle.

Ruth Wakanene is a priest and gifted evangelist serving seven widespread congregations in the Mount Kenya diocese. She is recognised as 'a phenomenon' by her bishop who likens her to Billy Graham.

As with Li Tim-Oi they are proving that ‘It Takes One Woman’ to be an agent of change.