[1]NASHVILLE (BP) – Domestic abuse is epidemic [2] among Peruvian women, but International Mission Board (IMB) missionary Amanda Waldraff is there to help. Last Christmas, an abused woman began attending a ministry co-led by Waldraff that provides Gospel witness, job training and trauma healing for women who have suffered intimate partner abuse. This summer she came to faith in Christ.
“She is still in an abusive relationship,” Waldraff said. “There is still a lot of brokenness, but you can see the transformation on her face of just knowing that she has value. You can see the joy in her life after having found Christ.”
Reaching that woman was ministry only a female could do. As Waldraff serves, her three children (3-year-old twin girls and a 5-month-old boy) are at her side helping her build rapport with Peruvian women. She also leads, working with her husband Matthew as area director for the Americas with Send Relief, Southern Baptists’ worldwide compassion ministry.
Waldraff is among the more than 1,800 women serving as IMB missionaries, 55 percent of the total IMB missionary force. Many of those women, like Waldraff, fill roles uniquely suited for females. This summer IMB President Paul Chitwood noted the contributions of female missionaries in his report at the SBC Annual Meeting in Orlando.
“No organization or institution in Southern Baptist life employs more females in vocational ministry than IMB,” he said, adding that “not one of them is in a pastor/elder role or carries the function of pastor/elder.”
IMB women “have left their country, their culture, their church, their American comforts and, for some, their adult kids and grandkids to answer God’s call upon their lives to take Christ to the nations,” Chitwood said. “Southern Baptists, could we express today our unwavering love and support for those missionaries?”
Following sustained applause, Chitwood added, “That standing ovation will echo in 155 countries around the world, where your female IMB missionaries are sharing the Gospel.”
Yet in addition to the strong female missionary force in Peru, Waldraff notices something else: a lack of single men. “The city that l live in specifically has a lot of single female missionaries,” she said.
Her experience reflects broader realities. The issue of gender on the mission field is a two-sided coin. On one side, women serving with the IMB comprise one of the largest female ministry forces in the world, and they are beating back lostness. On the other hand, the lack of males serving overseas may hinder facets of the missionary task.
Coming ‘surge’ of Gen Z men?
[3]For at least a century, women have outnumbered men on the international mission field. Missiologist Gina Zurlo estimated [4] that 60 percent of all international missionaries were female at the turn of the 20th century. Today women comprise a majority of the mission force across a variety of sending organizations, including the IMB, SIM International (56 percent) and the Roman Catholic Church (54 percent). All Nations reported an even split between male and female “missionary field workers,” Zurlo stated.
Just under two-thirds of all missionaries are women, according to Missio Nexus, an association of Great Commission-focused organizations and churches. Seventy-six percent of single missionaries are female, according to Missio Nexus’s 2025 member data report.
Why the gender disparity? Entertainment culture among men and the expectations of their parents both play a role, said Scott Ray, the IMB’s senior director of global deployment.
Pornography is “sapping the spiritual vitality of our young men,” Ray said. Additionally, parents of potential male missionaries worry they “will be delaying the start of their career” and “waste the opportunity to get into the workforce.”
Male recruiters and programs that challenge young men “to do something hard for the Kingdom” are among IMB efforts to even the numbers of male and female missionaries, Ray said. Project 3000, an IMB initiative to gather information on the world’s 3,000 unengaged, unreached people groups, has garnered an applicant pool that is nearly three-quarters male.
Such initiatives are important, Ray said, because the Great Commission demands labor by both males and females.
“There are some contexts where a man is not going to be able to share the Gospel with a woman,” Ray said, including red light districts where “it is not appropriate to send guys.” Similarly, “in lots of places in the world, a man is not going to hear the Gospel from a woman. It has to come from another man.” Developing and training pastors also requires men.
But there is hope of closing the gender gap. Dave Jacob, chief servant officer with Gospel Mobilization, a ministry that trains and resources mission leaders, said he sees hints of change. He cited a 2020 Barna Group finding [5] that 58 percent of young adult Christian men were open to missionary service. Only 45 percent of young adult Christian women said they were willing to consider overseas missionary service.
“I’m very hopeful for the future that we will soon see a surge of young Gen Z men,” Jacob said. “Historically, men were less likely to practice Christianity. The studies coming out now are telling us, if they’re true, that Gen Z men are more likely to attend church than Gen Z women. That is the pipeline for missionary service.”
‘Empower women’ for missions
As sending agencies wait for the volume of males to increase in the missionary pipeline, the IMB continues to celebrate women’s service. Shanee Snodgrass, an IMB affinity group leader for work among European peoples, supervises 530 missionary adults along with her husband Jesse. She said the women among those missionaries are uniquely equipped for “heart-level conversations” with other women about the Gospel.
“A woman can hear a sermon from a man preacher and get saved,” Snodgrass said. “That happens a lot – praise God. But in terms of being able to get into heart issues, to be more vulnerable, being able to walk alongside women and disciple people, there is something special about woman to woman and man to man.”
While Southern Baptists must follow biblical teaching on gender roles, she said, hyperfocus on restrictions for women could downplay the priesthood of all believers and harm women’s ability to minister.
In the New Testament, “women served in the church and in the mission in various ways,” Snodgrass said, including hosting churches in their homes, being imprisoned with Paul for their ministry work and discipling their families. “We want to empower women. If that’s how they did it with Paul in his teaming and his coworkers, then that’s the pattern we want to follow.”
IMB women – who serve as physicians, workers in high-security regions, compassion ministry leaders, ministry supervisors and more – received gratefully the SBC’s standing ovation in Orlando.
As one IMB worker serving in North Africa and the Middle East put it, “With all the bad press on SBC and women, I’d be happy to speak some positivity into how the Lord is using women to reach women in hard places.”
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