Eleven years ago, I woke with the sunrise in the Sahara, a few miles south of Tozeur, Tunisia. As I traveled by camel and camped in the desert, I got a taste of how Lilias Trotter traveled throughout North Africa, itinerating by camel to remote towns that had no gospel access.
Lilias was an artist and a missionary. Her legacy includes innovative missionary methods, many beautiful paintings, and dozens of written works, including 40 years of daily journals rich with details of daily life, mission struggles, and her inner life with God. My camel ride, following Lilias’s path decades later, convinced me of the courage and endurance she showed through her life and work as a missionary.
In If Only We Could See: Reimagining Creativity, Compassion, and Calling Through the Extraordinary Life of Lilias Trotter, Jennifer Trafton—an author, illustrator, and former managing editor of Christian History & Biography magazine—goes beyond biography to extend readers an invitation to meet a new friend. Trafton’s goal in writing this missionary biography is “not, ultimately, that we would love Lilias, but that we would love what she loved” (12). It was Lilias’s love of God that drew her to take the gospel to those who hadn’t heard it before.
Pioneering Missionary Work
In 1907, Lilias was one of the founding members of an independent missions organization, the Algiers Mission Band. This left her free to forge new paths in international missions and to innovate new strategies. For example, during her 40 years in North Africa, she pioneered concepts like contextualization and using short-term workers, which are now standard tools for missionaries.
Samuel Zwemer, a renowned missionary to Muslims, called Lilias the pioneer of Christian literature for North Africa. She translated English works into Arabic and created new, engaging literature for Muslims that was both beautiful and theologically sound.
What Lilias accomplished as a missionary is impressive. But If Only We Could See helps us appreciate who she was as a person and how that identity bled like watercolor into everything she did. For Lilias, being a missionary wasn’t about achieving conversion goals or establishing a replicable program. Instead, “being a missionary was about bearing joy; she looked out upon a world that had not yet heard the news and couldn’t wait to tell it to them” (175). Her work in North Africa was an outpouring of the love and joy she herself experienced in God.
Lilias saw people primarily as being beloved by God:
This was the starting point of their identity in her eyes, the fundamental fact of their existence. They were already loved, already known, already cherished. The beauty of their faces, their colorful garments, their tents and houses, were one with the beauty of the landscape around them because all of that beauty had the same Source. (175)
For Lilias, being a missionary wasn’t about achieving conversion goals or establishing a replicable program. Instead, ‘being a missionary was about bearing joy; she looked out upon a world that had not yet heard the news and couldn’t wait to tell it to them.’
Her anthropology shaped her missiology. Rather than seeking personal acclaim or numerical results, Lilias approached missions in a way that was “relational, rippling outward quietly through her friendships, her writings, and all the seeds she scattered with such lavish love” (258).
We see this not only in the lives of the countless North African people she loved, ministered to, and shared Christ with, but also in the many fellow workers she counted as friends. At the end of her life, Lilias “lay surrounded by those who loved her, who had been taught by her and mentored by her and encouraged by her, the fruit of a long, rich life of loving others” (266). Many of these would remain in North Africa for decades to carry on the work that Lilias began.
Surrendering in Vocation
There’s a common myth that Lilias “gave up” art to become a missionary. Trafton rightly dismantles that idea as she explores the doctrine of vocation. For Lilias, love of art, love of God, and surrender to him were all intertwined.
Before her time in North Africa, Lilias was shaped by numerous intellectual and spiritual currents of her day. Trafton does a superior job of showing how the renowned art critic John Ruskin, the writer George MacDonald, and the early Keswick Holiness movement were interconnected and theologically significant influences in Lilias’s life.
But Trafton doesn’t neglect Lilias’s core evangelical beliefs, which were heavily influenced by her participation in D. L. Moody’s evangelistic campaigns in London in her younger years. Lilias Trotter believed that a person’s greatest need is the gospel of Christ, and this drove everything she did, from her initial calling to North Africa to her methods there and the heart behind her lifetime of ministry.
Ruskin offered Lilias what he believed was her path to a happy and fulfilling life of worshiping God through becoming an artist. Yet for Lilias, it was never about “which kind of work was more important or more holy.” Trafton writes, “It all came down to this: Was she willing to lay down all of her life, her talents, her time, in service to God to use in whatever way He wanted?” (148). She was.
Beholding Christ
Trafton holds up Lilias as a gift to us, an example of a person so enthralled by God that she saw him everywhere, and every decision was made out of surrender to him. There was no room for anything but freedom, joy, and peace in her heart because she never stopped beholding Christ.
Lilias Trotter believed that a person’s greatest need is the gospel of Christ, and this drove everything she did.
In the same vein, she saw everyone around her as the beloved creations of God that they were, a perspective that allowed her to see beyond many of the cultural prejudices of her time to go above and beyond to faithfully communicate the gospel to North Africans in ways they would find beautiful.
For some, Lilias Trotter was an artistic prodigy who forsook her potential in order to become a missionary. For those who knew her, she was a revered matriarch, even a saint. Those who have studied her missionary work see Lilias as a pioneer, decades ahead of her time in mission methods and mindset. If Only We Could See gets to the heart of Lilias in a way that other works haven’t, by moving beyond single-faceted portraits of Lilias to show her as a whole person.
The Gospel Coalition