BRETHREN? OR BRETHREN AND SISTERS?
This is a difficult, even a painful, problem. Of course there is work for sisters overseas. Many of the married couples who have worked together there would testify how indispensable to each other the partners have been. While the brethren have got on with the public addresses, indoor and outdoor, and all the various administrative duties which fall to them, the sisters have added to their inevitable domestic tasks the care of their fellow-sisters in the emergent meetings, and their own share of the Sunday School and Youth Circle work. Married couples of all ages, from fairly recently married to retired pairs, have done outstanding work together, which their male partners would readily acknowledge they could not have done alone, nor yet with another brother to help them. Aquila and Priscilla11 have their place yet.

But the trouble arises with Priscilla by herself, or even with Tryphena and Tryphosa as a pair. We do not read of missionary journeys by solo sisters in the New Testament, for good and obvious reasons, and Tryphena and Tryphosa were apparently settled in one church in any case, and possibly not getting on too well together either! 12

There are plenty of "civilized" lands nowadays where it has again become inadvisable for women to venture out alone at night time, and many a mission area has the same problem on a larger scale. It would be an irresponsible use of this chapter to encourage our sisters to face such problems without due warning. Besides, an inevitable consequence of the Scriptural teaching about our various duties severely limits the usefulness of a sister in single harness. There have been isolated adventurous souls who have ventured on their own responsibility into foreign fields and made a useful contribution to the witness to the Word, but such people are of the kind who take their own decisions. A body responsible for organizing missionary work has to accept a balanced attitude both to the needs of the work and to the safety and limitations of those concerned, and those sisters who have, through circumstances they did not anticipate, found themselves alone for a while in mission fields, have been the first to warn against this kind of thing being wittingly imposed on others.