One hundred years ago, a young 12-year-old girl by the name of Ida was confirmed by her German immigrant father, Pastor Carsjen Voss, at Salem Lutheran Church near Parkersburg, Iowa. It was 1911 and the family had suffered a deep loss a few years earlier when her mother died.

When Ida turned 13, she heard German missionary Johannes Flierl speak about mission work in New Guinea, an island located in the Southwest Pacific Ocean, half-way around the world.

Flierl had been a pioneer Lutheran missionary to New Guinea in 1886, sent from the German school Missionsanstalt. Founded in Neuendettelsau, Germany, by Wilhelm Loehe, the school produced many pastors that served in the United States. Followers of Wilhelm Loehe’s mission tradition founded several teaching institutions in the United States, including Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa.

The preparation

Ida Voss resolved to become a missionary, and at 19, she traveled to Milwaukee, Wis., and entered the deaconess motherhouse to train as a nurse.

For a time Ida served at an orphanage in Zelienople, Pa., before returning to Milwaukee to complete her nurse’s training.

Ida’s sister, Luthilde, also decided to become a missionary, and after training as a teacher, she taught in Boyden, Iowa. On August 28, 1921, with the blessings of their family, both Ida and Luthilde were commissioned for missionary work while in Palmer, Iowa, for a synod convention.

The journey

By September 1921, the two young women were on their way to New Guinea. On September 5, they departed Parkersburg by train and crossed the country. On September 9 they boarded a ship in Vancouver for the long journey across the Pacific. And on October 28, they arrived in Finschhafen, New Guinea—eight weeks after their commissioning service.

Ida and Luthilde Voss, two young lay women—one a medical deaconess and the other a teacher— were the first Lutheran missionaries to go to New Guinea from the United States! They were young women, bold women, answering God’s call.

Two missionary couples Friedrich and Emma Knautz and the Rev. Edwin and Luella Pietz (also from Iowa) traveled on the same ship as the Voss sisters. The Knautzes went on to New Guinea with them. The Pietzes first spent a year of service in Australia before heading to New Guinea.

At the time, the involvement of American missionaries in New Guinea was sorely needed. In the aftermath of the First World War, German missionaries (who had served in New Guinea since 1886), were not allowed to return there until 1927.

Amazing adaptability

Ida’s many experiences are recorded in the book To the Ends of the Earth written by her grandson Paul Knie and his wife, Eleanor. The couple used Ida’s photos and her diary entries to write the carefully researched narrative.

For two years, until a doctor arrived, Ida was the only medical staff on coastal Finschhafen. Illnesses included malaria, tuberculosis, black water fever, devastating tropical ulcers, and dysentery. With her paltry supply of medicines, Ida did her best to help the hundreds of patients who came to her for help.

Ida met a young Australian lay missionary, Victor Koschade, and in 1924 they married at the mountain station of Sattelberg where Luthilde taught the children of missionaries. Luthilde married Emil Hannemann in 1926, and they had a baby daughter.

Sadly, Luthilde died in 1929 from an attack of black water fever, leaving behind a grieving husband, a small daughter, and her sister in New Guinea as well as parents and siblings back in the United States.

Over several decades, Ida and Victor served in many places. Victor built roads, hospitals, and schools. Ida tended to the sick. And, they raised two children, Alfred and Gladys. Missionaries needed to be amazingly adaptable. During one two-year interval of service, the family moved seven times.

Ida and Victor took their first leave in 1930, spending several months in Australia visiting Victor’s family and the congregations there. On their way to the United States, they suffered a frightening shipwreck. Miraculously, they survived and arrived home in Iowa in September. They resumed their work in New Guinea in 1931.

Australia

Following a 1936 furlough, both Victor and Alfred suffered from many illnesses. The mission authorities advised the family to settle in Australia. Five years later in December 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States entered World War II. Authorities ordered the evacuation of missionaries and their families from New Guinea for the duration of the war.

Meanwhile, Ida and Victor became missionaries among the aboriginal people of Central Australia, again ministering among the people by providing vital medical service, maintenance work, and house and road construction—in a place where temperatures soared to 115 degrees.

In 1949, their daughter, Gladys, went to New Guinea to work as a missionary nurse. Her brother, Alfred, followed her from Australia a year later and he and his wife Beatrice also served as missionaries. In New Guinea, Gladys met Robert Knie, and married him in 1953. Ida and Victor traveled to New Guinea for the wedding and decided to stay on to help out as caretakers at a school for missionary children.

Despite many health setbacks during their years of service, Ida and Victor continued to spread the gospel wherever they lived, retiring in 1957. Ida died in 1972 at age 78.

Papua New Guinea Today

The eastern half of the island where Ida served as missionary celebrated its peaceful independence from Australia in 1975 and took on the name Papua New Guinea.

Today the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea has more than 1 million members who worship in hundreds of different languages and share the gospel from lush tropical shores to remote mountain villages. The members celebrate their 90-year-old partnership with us, their Lutheran sisters and brothers in the United States.

The story of a young 13-yearold American girl and her sister, who felt stirred by the stories of a visiting German missionary to Iowa and pursued their dream, touches our hearts. With God’s help, the sisters left everything and followed God’s call.

What must their folks have thought when the sisters announced that they planned to cross Pacific Ocean to become missionaries?

What would you and I have said if these had been our daughters or neighbors? And how must the family have felt not seeing their daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren for many years? What is the cost of such discipleship?

We thank God for Ida and Luthilde and their courage to listen to the Spirit’s calling a century ago. Let us celebrate the bold women today in our communities—women who are beacons for us to follow. God’s call to us may not be the same as the call to Ida and Luthilde, but God still calls us to go.

Else Schardt, who served with her husband as missionaries to Papua New Guinea 1965 to 1991, returned there briefly as volunteer teachers in 2009. They live in Dubuque, Iowa. Their books, Surprises at the Table, and Mission in Motion: Walking Together with God’s People in Papua New Guinea, can be ordered through schardtsville@q.com.