Lillian Dickson

Lillian Dickson

Lillian Dickson was an independent missionary, author, and public speaker who spent most of her adult life in Taiwan. She was born Lillian Ruth LeVesconte on January 29, 1901, in Prior Lake, Minnesota, to John LeVesconte, a flour-and-feed-mill operator, and Lillie Belle LeVesconte. After earning a Bachelor of Arts from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, she attended a Biblical Seminary in New York City for two years. At Macalester she met James Ira Dickson, and they married on May 16, 1927. Both were members of the Canadian Presbyterian Church, and that same year they answered the church’s urgent call for pastoral and medical care in northern Taiwan.

Dickson arrived in Taiwan in 1927, during the Japanese colonial period, and later lived through the Chinese nationalist era there. For the first thirteen years, she worked within the expected role of a missionary’s wife while James served as deputy principal of Tamsui Middle School and then president of Taipei Theological School. She hosted guests and helped maintain the hospitable life of the mission household. Rising tensions and war between Japan and the United States forced the Dicksons to leave Taiwan between 1940 and 1947, when they were transferred to British Guiana in South America. After World War II, they returned to Formosa, now known as Taiwan, where Lillian’s own work widened.

With her children older, Dickson had fewer obligations as a missionary’s wife and became a more public advocate. She wrote letters to family, friends, and churches in the United States, using information and images to show the needs of Taiwanese people and encourage donations. Christian Herald and World Vision were among the organizations that helped her work. In 1954, after repeated encouragement from friends, she established the nonprofit Mustard Seed, Inc., so donors could apply for tax deductions. In 1962, she founded The Mustard Seed Mission in Taiwan, and she is also associated with Mustard Seed International.

Although she was not a licensed medical professional, much of Dickson’s work was medical in practice. Her organization supported mountain clinics, built a church in a leper colony, and established a blackfoot disease clinic. She focused early on people affected by leprosy and their children, creating An-Lok Babies’ Home so newborns with parents who had leprosy could be separated at birth and grow healthy. She also helped develop larger leprosy colonies and clinics for other diseases affecting aboriginal people of Formosa. In mountain clinics, she brought medicine, treated sores, infections, pneumonia, bronchitis, scabies, and other ailments, and taught nurses specific treatments.

Dickson’s thinking was shaped by faith, family life, and the hard lessons of work far from the classrooms that had prepared her. She once reflected that nothing she had studied in college was of any use there, and that what she needed to know came through painful mistakes. Her mission also reached beyond medicine. She developed a boys’ home for young boys caught committing petty crimes, and helped parents whose children born out of wedlock were marked on identification certificates, which created barriers to school and work. Her words still carry weight because they came from a life spent making hard choices. As one of her best-known lines puts it, “Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once.”