Florence Li Tim-Oi was a Hong Kong born Anglican Priest, and the first woman in the Anglican communion ever to be ordained (1944, by Bishop Ronald Hall).
She was born in Shek Pai Wan, Aberdeen, Hong Kong, to parents who saw to her education. (Her father was principal of a government school). While at school she came to faith and was baptised in the Anglican church, taking the name Florence after Florence Nightingale.
After graduating from Belilios Public School in 1934, Li became head of Li Shing School in Ap Lei Chau, Hong Kong, and while there she was encouraged to undergo theological training.
She trained at Canton Union Theological College and returned to Hong Kong in 1938. After working for two years at All Saints Church, Kowloon, helping refugees from China, she was sent by Bishop Hall to the Protestant Morrison Chapel in Macau to help with the refugee work there. She led youth group, taught Bible classes, organized confirmation classes, and made home visitations. During that time she was ordained as a deaconess by Bishop Hall.
When the Japanese occupied Hong Kong in 1941, it became impossible for Anglican priests to visit neutral Macau, so Bishop Hall gave Li permission to administer the sacraments there. It was more important for Hall to have the sacraments administered to the faithful than that it was a woman performing the rite.
As well as administering Communion and preaching, Li baptized, buried, and fed her parishioners (both physically and spiritually). She administered medical care, taught in a girl’s school, and baptized hundreds of people in her parish. In January 1944 she and Hall managed to meet up in Shaoqing, where Hall ordained her as a priest. She was doing everything he would expect a priest to do. This caused much controversy as it was to be another 50 years before the Anglican church formally authorised the ordination of women.
In Li’s congregation in Macau at that time was Joyce Symons with her mother and brother, who attended the weekly communion services. Wrote Symons in her memoirs, 'She really was a tower of strength to the refugees in our church.' Joyce was to be another Hong Kong luminary.
In 1946, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Geoffrey Fisher) challenged Hall’s decision to ordain Li, offering two options: either Hall should resign or Li should renounce her priesthood. Faced with this choice, Li chose to resign her licence and went to China to work in a maternity home.
In 1951 she engaged in further studies at the theological Benching University in Beijing and then returned to Union Theological College in Canton to teach English and Theology. She suffered criticism and ridicule through antagonistic attitudes in the People’s Republic for adhering to a foreign religion.
When the Communist government closed all churches in the 1950s and 60s, Li was compelled to work on a farm and then in a factory. She then underwent political re-education as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ and came close to suicide due to that and other persecution that she suffered.
In the 1980s it became possible for Li to leave China and she chose to move to Canada, where she was appointed assistant priest to a Chinese congregation in Toronto. She was fully reinstated as a priest in 1984 and that year she celebrated at Westminster Abbey in the UK 40 years since her ordination. She was an invitee to the Lambeth Conference there.
In Canada she was awarded honorary doctorates.
She died in 1992 in Toronto.
Anglican communities in the West regard her highly, and some regions have established commemorative days and special gatherings to honour her memory. The Li Tim-Oi Foundation, founded in 1994, aims to support missionary and pastoral work in the Global South.
A Hong Kong heroine. Had she been male, she would surely have had a street named after her.
Sources:
Wikipedia, with picture here.
