A Practical Woman: The Purpose-Filled (and Adventurous) Life of Nina Eleanor (Gemmell) Vleck

June 12, 2026June 12, 2026 / Emily Banas / Leave a comment

The Evangelism & Missions Archives includes the records of dozens of Christian organizations and each of these has reports, letters, photos, scrapbooks and audio and video records that tell the stories of hundreds of people who spent their lives ministering and sharing the Gospel. From all this multitude, this month we highlight the remarkable life and ministry of one – Nina Eleanor Gemmell van Vleck.

*Nina Gemmell as a young woman, ca. 1915. PF: Gemmell, Nina*.

At 24 years old, Nina Gemmell sailed to China in 1919 to work with China Inland Mission (later the Overseas Missionary Fellowship), just a few weeks after the end of the First World War. Born in 1895, she had grown up in Kansas and been educated as a teacher at Washington State Normal School. She then taught for a few years in rural schools in the state. Years later she remembered, “On September 14, 1914, the first day of the first World War, was also the first day of my teaching in the white schoolhouse. I was escorted by the three Batie children, over two board fences and two barbed wire fences and through a lot where there were horses and a field of cattle. The school children, of which there were about 38, stood around the door eyeing the new teacher, who arrived on foot dressed in a shirtwaist and hobble skirt.”[1]

After landing in China and spending time acquiring the Chinese language, she was sent to teach at a girls’ school in Yuanchow (Yuanzou) in the province of Kiangsi (Jiangxi). She found her work there immensely rewarding, as illustrated by this excerpt from a 1922 letter to her supporters, “Two weeks ago we were glad and thankful to see four profess a faith in the gospel. After a quiet afternoon I noticed a serious look on their faces as they finished their evening work…. Toward evening I noticed a group at my door waiting for an interview…. Seeing their patient waiting and with a prayer for wisdom and understanding as to how to deal with their calamity or whatever it might be, [I approached them.] One searching look at their faces drove away all fear and immediately four of them stepped forward and handed me four small pieces of paper. This is a sample of what they contained: “From this day and henceforth until the coming of the Lord, I want to believe on and follow the Lord Jesus Christ and worship the true God. I want to be very good. Signed, Golden Lily.”[2]

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“The Truth Needs to Be Illustrated”: Gospel Posters in China

August 1, 2024May 5, 2026 / Emily Banas / Leave a comment

In the early 1920s, the first commercial four-color offset lithograph machines arrived in China. While Chinese Christian posters, tracts, and books had circulated from various presses for a century, these machines allowed for quick, inexpensive, and large-scale print production. Christian mission organizations like the Religious Tract Society and Christian Witness Press quickly capitalized on the new technology. In 1929 alone, the Religious Tract Society printed 150,000 posters in China. Joining and in some ways anticipating China’s vibrant political and commercial print culture, these colorful posters became a prevalent tool for Christian evangelization in China through the 1930s and 1940s.

*Chinese Christians, possibly an itinerate preaching band, with evangelism posters, ca. 1930-1940. Collection 215, Lantern Slide Box 11.*

Wheaton Archives & Special Collections holds more than fifty of these posters throughout several collections, including Collection 215: Records of Overseas Missionary Fellowship, Collection 231: Papers of Ian and Helen Anderson and Collection 706: Evangelism Posters Ephemera.

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Leafing through the Pages of China Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship

November 1, 2022January 23, 2024 / Emily Banas / 1 Comment

*Mr. Chang & David Adeney, Shanghai, 1950. (Photo File: OMF-China II*)

An archivist never knows what they will find as they begin opening boxes and folders in donated materials to arrange and describe a collection. And they don’t know what threads might appear that lead to other collections or lines of inquiry, or what gaps the new material might fill. For all they can’t anticipate, archivists can expect that there will be materials that will uncover or add to areas of interest for researchers. Sometimes new materials become their own puzzle to figure out — like who is the unidentified Western female in several of the photographs below? — while other times they provide the missing piece to a partially completed puzzle. A recent example of this is the photo album that Ruth Adeney donated to the Archives in 1997 along with the rest of the papers of her husband, David Adeney (CN 393), soon to be opened for researcher use.

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A Legacy of Women’s Healthcare in China

July 15, 2022October 17, 2024 / Emily Banas / Leave a comment

Across the history of global missions, evangelistic work has often been closely tied with practical or humanitarian outreach, especially care for the sick and hurting. The Wheaton College Billy Graham Center Archives holds the records of many such missionary doctors, nurses, and mission hospitals. One of the oldest mission hospitals represented in our collections is the Margaret Williamson Hospital, opened in 1885 in Shanghai, China under the Woman’s Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands (commonly referred to as Woman’s Union Missionary Society or WUMS).

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“Stam Baby Safe”: Remembering John and Betty Stam

December 3, 2019October 23, 2023 / kjgraber / 21 Comments

The telegram contained only a single sentence: “Cablegram from mission headquarters Shanghai reports Stam baby safe Wuhu.”

Viewed today, the fragile, yellowing Western Union message is unremarkable, but to Peter Stam, its original recipient in Paterson, New Jersey, the telegram furnished yet another detail in a still-unfolding tragedy on the other side of the world. But this time it was good news. Signed by Robert Glover, longtime North America Home Director for China Inland Mission, the telegram announced to desperate, waiting relatives that their granddaughter was alive and safe at Wuhu General Hospital in Anhui Province, China, the same institution where she had been born three months earlier. Only now she was an orphan.

The deaths of John and Betty Stam at the hands of communist soldiers and the “miraculous” survival of their daughter, Helen Priscilla, have been documented in multiple books, articles, blogs, and testimonies over the decades, becoming something of twentieth-century American evangelical missionary lore. Much like Jim Elliot and the “Auca Incident” twenty years later, the Stams’ deaths shocked American Fundamentalists, heightening anxiety over the spread of global communism and inspiring a new generation of missions efforts.

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