The Remarkable Florence Young

Recently at a gathering of Baptist leaders from around the Pacific, I was privileged to meet Eric Maefonea and Thomas Weape, leaders of the Baptist movement in the Solomon Islands (the South Seas Evangelical Church). They spoke of their movement of over 600 churches, and 100,000 members. One in seven Solomon Islanders is a SSEC member. ‘But did you know how we got started?’ asked Eric.

In 1882, Florence Young was 25 years old and still a relatively new Christian. Invited to visit her brothers, who’d bought a sugarcane plantation in Bundaberg, she was ready to set off from Sydney when a couple of friends offered to pray for her. They all knelt together, and after her friends had prayed, she went to stand up. ‘Why don’t you pray, too?’ they asked.

This was not something she was confident to do. In fact, quite the opposite. She desperately tried to put words together, but nothing would come out, and after a couple of agonisingly awkward minutes, one friend finished for her. She journeyed north feeling acutely embarrassed, but also unable to shake off of one her friend’s prayers – asking God to make her a blessing to everyone she saw on the plantation.

On arriving, she saw a housekeeper with four young children and decided they must be her mission field. She offered to teach them Bible stories – and even managed to pray in front of them! But she realised that she also saw 80 indentured Melanesian labourers, rough, uneducated, without English, and most of all, without the gospel. Should she offer to help them too?

To her surprise, ten showed up to her first lesson, where she used a chrysalis as an object lesson to describe the transformation God brings. It took weeks to get beyond ‘God – so – loved’ in her Bible lesson. But already more and more workers were attending, some returning to learn every evening. Gradually friends and connections joined in the work, which spread to other plantations and towns.

When the Federal Government eventually outlawed such overseas labour schemes, over 2,000 workers had been baptised and taught the Bible essentials! But would they keep their faith upon returning to the Solomons? To find out, she bought a boat, didn’t she? And to her delight she found that the faith was not merely being kept, but shared. Churches and mission stations multiplied – 179 by her last visit – despite the very serious dangers of disease, ship-wreck and cannibalism.

It’s a great story, worth reading in more detail. I’ve not even mentioned Ms Young’s two stints in China and one nervous breakdown. But I love how powerfully God works through even the weak and shy – especially through them – when they pay attention to the sacred agent’s assignment to be a blessing to all they see. And to really seeing!

Who do you see?