Cathy Ross

Cathy Ross (born 1961) is a New Zealand-born academic and scholar of missiology. She leads the Pioneer Mission Leadership Training centre of the Church Mission Society, in Oxford, England. She is also canon theologian at Leicester Cathedral. She is the author of Women with a Mission: Rediscovering Missionary Wives in Early New Zealand.

Biography Born in New Zealand, Ross graduated from the University of Auckland in 1983. She worked for a time as a teacher of French and German. In 1991, she went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire), as a mission partner with the New Zealand Church Mission Society. She also served in Uganda and Rwanda. She taught at the Bible College of New Zealand, now Laidlaw College. She led the organisation for eight years, stepping down in 2016. In May 2019, Ross was selected to lead Church Mission Society's Pioneer Mission Leadership Training programme in Oxford.

Works Ross has written on pioneer women's mission work. She authored a book examining the lives of four women who engaged in mission with their husbands in New Zealand in the 1800s. The book, entitled Women with a Mission: Rediscovering Missionary Wives in Early New Zealand, was published in 2006. The women featured in the book are Charlotte Brown, Elizabeth Colenso, Kate Hadfield, and Anne Wilson.

In 2008, Ross co-edited, with Andrew Walls, a collection of essays on missiology, entitled Mission in the Twenty-First Century: Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission.

She also edited a collection of essays by Anglicans involved in mission who had attended the centenary celebration of the 1910 World Missionary Conference, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in June 2010. The publication was entitled Life-Widening Mission: Global Anglican Perspectives. The book was published as part of a series by Regnum Press, about the Edinburgh 2010 gathering. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote the foreword to the collection. In the preface, Ross noted that her mother died in New Zealand, while she was attending a workshop for the project in Toronto, in August 2011.

Ross has collaborated on several books with Jonny Baker, the director of mission education at Church Mission Society. They co-edited The Pioneer Gift, published in 2014, and Pioneering Spirituality, published in 2015. In 2018, Ross co-edited Missional Conversations: A Dialogue between Theory and Praxis in World Mission, with Colin Smith.

In 2020, Ross and Baker published Imagining Mission with John V. Taylor, about the missiology of Taylor, who was general secretary of the Church Mission Society and the former Bishop of Winchester.