Evangelical Inheritance and the Infrastructure of Crisis: Korean Women Missionaries Reconsidered

precis: This essay examines Korean women missionaries within global evangelical mission infrastructure using a critical-disaster-studies framework. It interrogates what missionaries seek to "save," how disasters are defined, and how these definitions justify missionary presence. Moving beyond genealogical narratives that cast Korean women as heirs to Anglo-American foremothers, the analysis situates their work within Cold-War-era U.S.-South Korean evangelical alliances, neoliberal Christian expansion, and a shared soft-power project. Using the 2024 Lausanne Congress in Seoul as a representative case, the essay argues that Lausanne functions as a masculinist infrastructure that frames catastrophe as a moral summons, mobilizing visible crises to consolidate authority, while leaving chronic inequities intact. Korean women missionaries are central to field operations yet excluded from theological authorship and decision-making