The words weren’t brand new to her — Kathleen Mallory had looked over the letter before she stepped into the pulpit to read it. It was from Anna Hartwell, a missionary to China.
Mallory’s father — who was on the program of the Alabama Baptist State Convention that year — had asked her to read it aloud during the convention meeting.
And as Mallory did, the words leapt off the page.
“Something happened to her when she read that letter to the state convention,” said Rosalie Hunt, an author and retired career missionary. “She said it was as if God spoke directly to her. It was a life-changing event.”
That was in 1908. It fanned the flame of her passion for missions, and the following year, she was asked to be the leader of Alabama Woman’s Missionary Union.
‘Opened her eyes’
“She felt that she had asked God what He wanted her to do,” Hunt said. “That letter opened her eyes to the world, and she said yes.”
It started a legacy that Alabama Baptists need to remember, Hunt said — that’s why she wrote Mallory’s story in the book, “Guided by Grace: The Kathleen Mallory Story.”
“The new generation needs to know her as well because we are still being influenced by what she did years ago,” Hunt said.
At age 33 — after three years at the helm of Alabama WMU — she was tapped to lead national WMU. She encouraged others to give sacrificially, but more than that, she led — she lived humbly so that she could give as much as she could to missions, Hunt said.
‘We owe her’
“During her tenure, she saved the Foreign Mission Board (now the International Mission Board) and the Home Mission Board from bankruptcy,” Hunt said. “She kept WMU and basically the Southern Baptist Convention solvent through the Great Depression, World War I and World War II.
“We owe her a great debt of gratitude, and so much of what we do now is on the foundation which she laid for us all those years ago.”
The men in the SBC called Mallory the “tiny dynamo,” Hunt said.
“I’m hoping people will get a glimpse of this woman and what kind of a legacy she left for all of Alabama,” she said.
For years, Mallory was the namesake of the annual offering for Alabama WMU.
Then in 2016, Alabama started its first statewide missions offering and named it in Mallory’s honor, along with Martha Myers, a missionary who lost her life to an extremist in Yemen in 2002.
Leaving her mark
Hunt said Mallory definitely left her mark.
“It requires a pantheon of adjectives to describe Kathleen Mallory, the gifted woman who led Woman’s Missionary Union for a remarkable 36 years,” she wrote in the preface of “Guided by Grace.” “Lovely, graceful, charming, the epitome of Southern graciousness, yet it was the depth of her spiritual gifts that influenced a generation of women and indeed, the entire Southern Baptist Convention.”
Mallory’s story is not the first story of a female missionary or missions leader Hunt has penned. She also has written books on Ann Judson, Hephzibah Jenkins Townsend and Fannie Heck, and in 2013, she published a book on national WMU’s 125th anniversary, “We’ve a Story to Tell: 125 Years of WMU.”
Order online
To learn more about Hunt’s story or to order one of her books, visit rosaliehallhunt.com. All proceeds from book sales go to further missions endeavors.
EDITOR’S NOTE – Reviews of films, books, music or other media that appear in TAB are intended to help readers evaluate current media for themselves, their children and grandchildren in order to decide whether to watch, read or listen. Reviews are not an endorsement by the writer or TAB Media.
Share with others: