Lilias Trotter and the Missionary Imagination

When you think of the tools a missionary needs — language skills, cultural sensitivity, biblical knowledge, perseverance — is “imagination” the first thing that comes to mind? Or even the second or third?

Probably not. But for the 19th-century missionary-artist Lilias Trotter, it was absolutely central.

Though not widely known today, Trotter (1853–1928) was one of the most beloved missionaries of her generation — so much so that one obituary called her “a worldwide spiritual force.” She was the first Protestant woman to found and lead her own mission organization (the Algiers Mission Band, later part of Arab World Ministries) and spent forty years in North Africa, leaving behind beautifully illustrated journals, nature parables, and a legacy of lavish generosity and friendship. When John Mott wrote about the kind of faithful Christian leadership needed for world evangelization, he named Lilias Trotter in the same breath as Hudson Taylor.

A gifted painter, Lily (as her friends knew her) had turned away from a promising art career under the mentorship of the famous English critic John Ruskin. Yet her artist’s ability to see beauty, to notice detail, to imagine how the world looked through someone else’s eyes was foundational to her approach to ministry. According to her colleague Constance Padwick, Lily zealously taught her little band “the Christian use of imagination, whether in the writing and illustrating of a story for children or in plans for the future of their work. Miss Trotter held that the dreaming of dreams and the seeing of visions was a part of the Spirit-filled life. The imagination is so often the last power that a man surrenders to God, and fed and illuminated by prayer might bring (to use a favourite quotation of hers), ‘news from the inner courts of things . . . and hear the bubbling of the springs that feed the world.'”

So what did this look like in practice?

Here are just a few of the lessons we can learn from Lilias Trotter about how imagination serves a missionary calling:

1. Imagination helps us see people.

Instinctively drawn to the rainbow of colors in even the poorest village robes, Lily saw and loved the faces of those who wore them. The spectrum of humanity was beautiful to her, painted by the same Artist who painted the mountains and sunsets. But she didn’t stay on the outside of the frame admiring the surface; she wanted to climb into the frame with the people, to sleep under their patterned arches and eat the food in their clay pots, to hold their babies and hear about their fears and loves and dreams, and then, to look beneath the surface: What is their underlying character? What are the hidden possibilities inside them—what are they becoming? Seeing them closely, with empathetic imagination, stirred Lily’s longing to tell them how deeply they were seen, sought, and cherished by Jesus.

“I felt this time we have done little more than see them,” Lily wrote to supporters after a brief visit to a new village, “and that the next thing to do is to make you see them too if possible.” The missionary’s first task was the same as an artist’s (as she’d learned long ago from Ruskin): learning to see clearly — and the second task was helping others to see. So whenever she communicated with Christians back home in England, Lily used all the artistry she possessed — in vivid descriptions, sketches, paintings, photographs  —  to show them North Africa and the people she loved there, hoping to draw others to this work. “I believe the sight of the very places and the faces of their people is fuel for prayer,” she wrote. “Pray and see — send and see — maybe someday you will come and see!”

2. Imagination bridges cultural divides.

Unlike most Europeans of her day who assumed Christianity abroad would look the same as Christianity at home, Lily believed that part of the missionary’s job was to strip away Western cultural trappings and allow room for a truly indigenous Algerian church to emerge (and ultimately, to make her own job obsolete). She was delighted to come across an essay by English pastor Edward Shillito showing, as she put it, “the direful effects of the want of imagination in missionary life, in its tendency to ride roughshod over their sensibilities with a crude idea that ‘our way is the best’!” Imagination, Shillito argued, is essential to ministry because it enables us to see life from the perspective of someone outside our own little world — and missionaries, of all people, should be models of this imaginative work of empathy because the gospel has torn down the barriers between nations and races.

So Lily watched the ways Algerians themselves connected — native cafes where men discussed books, the rhythmic stories of street musicians, pilgrimages to holy shrines that gave women rare time outdoors — and advocated for culturally appropriate ways of engaging people that had never been tried in mission circles before. She looked, she listened, she learned, she adapted. Can we do it a different way? Can we imagine beyond the horizon of what we think is possible? What if?

3. Imagination speaks in parables, as Jesus did.

Lily, her imagination soaked in both Scripture and the beauty of creation, rarely wrote or spoke without leading her audience through metaphor. She had learned from Jesus’ own way of teaching how to make spiritual truths graspable by moving from the seen to the unseen. Whether she was talking to women at their looms or laborers gathering stones, Christians or Muslims, she used the concrete imagery of everyday life as a bridge of understanding that transcended cultural differences. She became widely known for her nature parables, published in both England and America and read by those as far off as Amy Carmichael in India. She also wrote and illustrated many parables for Arab readers, conveying the gospel in stories and pictures she knew would resonate with them.

The Way of the Sevenfold Secret, her last piece of writing and the fruit of years of friendship with Sufi brotherhoods, was a remarkable early attempt at Christian-Muslim dialogue — evangelistic in purpose, but starting from common ground. Structured around the seven “I am” sayings of Christ in John’s gospel, it related them to things familiar to her readers, such as stories from the Torah, spiritual concepts central to their tradition, or quotations from their own poets. She even drew them a parable “from your own science of Algebra, that you, the Arabs, discovered many centuries ago.” Her way of connecting with those desert mystics — putting herself in their shoes and using metaphor to reach them imaginatively — was unique and far ahead of her time.

4. Imagination looks beyond current circumstances and visible results.

After forty years in Algeria, Lily’s band could point to little outward “success.” No permanent church or lasting institutions. A small circle of converts, many of them secret believers within Muslim households. What sustained her — and what she labored to instill in the younger missionaries she led — was an imagination shaped by eternity. “We have to do with a God to whom time is as boundless as space in its elasticity!” she wrote. “The harvest of the trivial and the monotonous may lie out beyond the stars.” She was indomitably optimistic because she trusted that the horizon of God’s purposes was wider than she could see.

During times of communal prayer, Lily modeled her own practice of imagining in God’s presence — listening, waiting, dreaming, testing, seeking. As she neared the end of her life, she became convinced that the next generation of leaders had to be empowered to envision on their own. She taught them to imagine, and they did: they dreamed up a hostel for English workers, a home for divorced Arab women, a native cafe, bookshops, Arabic hymn books. “I am full of hope,” she counseled when results didn’t come quickly, “that when God delays in fulfilling our little thoughts, it is to leave Himself room to work out His great ones.”

5. Imagination nourishes the missionary’s soul.

Zealous people on a single-minded mission can sometimes lead lives that feel cramped and overly serious. Lilias Trotter’s was not such a life. There was a childlike delight that never left her, and it was infectious. “Miss Trotter always seemed so young,” one colleague wrote. “She never lost her enthusiasm or her capacity for wonder, or her sense of humor.” The motherhouse of the Algiers Mission Band was brimming with color and beauty — God’s artistry without and human artistry within. There was poetry, storytelling, singing, and a joyful reverence for the natural world. Even in her final years when she was bedridden, Lily sent friends out to find “beholdings” and bring back vivid descriptions of sunsets and wildflowers.

Such gifts of the imagination were not optional luxuries for Lily; they were food and oxygen for the soul, daily sustenance from “the springs that feed the world.” For those preparing to carry the gospel across cultures, learning to drink deeply from those springs may be the work of a lifetime.

Jennifer Trafton is the author of If Only We Could See: Reimagining Creativity, Compassion, and Calling through the Extraordinary Life of Lilias Trotter (B&H Publishing, 2025).