Mildred Cable
That Taylor sought to reach all of China with the gospel was certainly a lofty ambition, but that very goal may have been the decisive weakness of the CIM. In its effort to reach all of China, the policy of diffusion (as opposed to concentration) was implemented. According to the great missions historian Kenneth Scott Latourette, “The main purpose of the China Inland Mission was not to win converts or to build a Chinese church, but to spread a knowledge of the Christian Gospel throughout the empire as quickly as might be…. Nor, although Chinese assistants were employed, did it stress the recruiting and training of a Chinese ministry.”41 Such a policy led to problems. The hostility toward foreigners unleashed in the Boxer Rebellion and the Communist takeover some decades later illustrate the inherent weakness of a plan that did not make church planting an important goal.
The dark days were not long in coming for the CIM. The closing years of the nineteenth century were years of tension and unrest. The forces of modernization (and westernization) were clashing with the forces of tradition and nationalism. With imperial power moving to the side of the conservatives, the position of Westerners became more precarious. Then, in June 1900, an imperial decree from Peking ordered the death of all foreigners and the extermination of Christianity. The greatest disaster in the history of Protestant missions followed. One hundred and thirty-five missionaries and fifty-three missionary children were killed.
For Taylor, who was isolated in Switzerland, recuperating from severe mental and physical exhaustion, the news from China, though muted by those caring for him, was almost too much to bear, and he never fully recovered from the trauma. In 1902 he resigned his position as general director of the mission, and he and Jennie stayed on in Switzerland until 1904 when Jennie died. The following year Taylor returned to China, where he peacefully died the month after his arrival. In the years that followed, the CIM continued to grow. By 1914 it had become the largest foreign mission organization in the world, reaching its peak in 1934 with 1,368 missionaries. After the Communist takeover in 1950, the CIM, along with the other mission societies, was expelled from China. In 1964, after one hundred years of ministry, the CIM changed its name to the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, a name that was more indicative of its expanding missionary outreach in East Asia.
The contribution Hudson Taylor made to Christian missions was enormous. It is difficult to imagine where missions would be today without his vision and foresight. In the words of Ralph Winter, he was a “young upstart,” whose impact on Christian missions rivaled or surpassed that of William Carey’s—an impact that Winter goes on to perceptively summarize in light of later developments:
With only trade school medicine, without any university experience much less missiological training, and a checkered past in regard to his own individualistic behavior while he was on the field, he was merely one more of the weak things that God uses to confound the wise. Even his early anti-church-planting missionary strategy was breathtakingly erroneous by today’s church-planting standards. Yet God strangely honored him because his gaze was fixed upon the world’s least-reached peoples. Hudson Taylor had a divine wind behind him. The Holy Spirit spared him from many pitfalls, and it was his organization, the China Inland Mission—the most cooperative servant organization yet to appear—that eventually served in one way or another over 6,000 missionaries, predominantly in the interior of China. It took 20 years for other missions to begin to join Taylor in his special emphasis—the unreached, inland frontiers.42
Taylor’s greatest influence was with the thousands of like-minded missionaries of the CIM and later faith missions who sought to evangelize the “unreached inland frontiers.” But there were others inspired by Taylor who went in entirely different directions. Timothy Richard (1845–1919) was one—a name revered today among many Chinese Christians as the greatest of all missionaries to China. His early years of missionary work convinced him that there were more effective ways of bringing Christianity to China. Itinerant evangelism, he argued, should be carried out by native evangelists, and the missionary should reach out to influential leaders. He also organized humanitarian endeavors and insisted that Western science and technology was an important means of bringing the faith to China.
Of all the missionaries who served in East Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps no one witnessed greater immediate response than did Jonathan Goforth, who, according to J. Herbert Kane, was China’s most outstanding evangelist. China was Goforth’s base, but he also ministered in Korea and Manchuria, and wherever he went, revival followed.
Goforth, the seventh of eleven children, was born in western Ontario in 1859. He dedicated himself to ministry after reading the Memoirs of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, but his call to missions did not come until later when he heard a traveling missionary give a powerful appeal for workers in China: “As I listened to these words, I was overwhelmed with shame…. From that hour I became a foreign missionary.”43
After graduating from Knox College, Goforth conducted city mission work in Toronto, where he met Rosalind Smith, a talented and sophisticated art student—an unlikely prospect for a missionary wife. But she looked beyond “the shabbiness of his clothes.” For her, it was love at first sight: “It all happened within a few moments, but as I sat there, I said to myself, ‘That is the man I would like to marry!’”44 Later that year they became engaged, and at that time Rosalind got her first taste of the sacrifice she would encounter the rest of her life. Her dreams of an engagement ring were dashed when he told her that the money he would have spent for a ring must instead go for Christian literature.
Goforth initially applied to the China Inland Mission because his own church, the Presbyterian Church of Canada, had no missionary work in China. But before he received a response from the CIM, Presbyterian students from Knox College rallied to his cause and vowed to raise the money themselves to send him to China. Prior to his sailing, he traveled through Canada, speaking out for missions. His messages were powerful, as the report from a student illustrates:
I was going up to the Alumni meeting in Knox College, Toronto, determined to do everything in my power to frustrate the crazy scheme which the students of the college were talking about, i.e., starting a mission field of their own in Central China. I also felt that I needed a new overcoat; my old one was looking rather shabby. So I thought I would go to Toronto to kill two birds with one stone. I would help sidetrack the scheme and buy an overcoat. But this fellow here upset my plans completely. He swept me off my feet with an enthusiasm for missions which I had never experienced before, and my precious overcoat money went into the fund!45
Jonathan Goforth, missionary evangelist to China, Manchuria, and Korea.
In 1888 the Goforths sailed for China to serve in Honan province, where they began a life of hardships and lonely separations. They both suffered frequent illnesses, and five of their eleven children died. They endured fire and flood and barely escaped with their lives in a harrowing thousand-mile flight to safety during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.
The Goforths’ efforts to reach the Chinese were unconventional by most missionary standards, particularly their “open-house” evangelism. Their home, with its European interior design, and their furnishings (including a kitchen stove, a sewing machine, and an organ), were objects of curiosity to the Chinese, and they decided to relinquish their privacy in order to make contacts with the people of the province. Visitors came from miles around, once more than two thousand in one day, to tour the house. Before each tour began, Goforth gave a gospel message. He preached an average of eight hours a day, and during a five-month period some twenty-five thousand people came to visit. Rosalind ministered to the women, speaking to as many as fifty at a time who were gathered in their yard.
Rosalind Goforth, wife of Jonathan Goforth.
This type of evangelism paved the way for his future ministry of traveling from town to town conducting revivals, but not all of his colleagues approved: “Some may think that receiving visitors is not real mission work, but I think it is. I put myself out to make friends with the people and I reap the results when I go to their villages to preach. Often the people of a village will gather around me and say,‘We were at your place and you showed us through your house, treating us like friends.’ Then they almost always bring me a chair to sit on, a table to lay my Bible on, and some tea.”46
The Boxer Rebellion in 1900 interrupted their mission work, and after they returned to China their family life changed to accommodate his new plan for a broad itinerant ministry. Goforth had developed his idea before Rosalind returned, and soon after her arrival he confronted her with the scheme: “My plan is to have one of my helpers rent a suitable place in a large center for us to live in, and that we, as a family, stay a month in the center, during which time we will carry on intensive evangelism. I will go with my men to villages or on the street in the daytime, while you receive and preach to the women in the courtyard. The evenings will be given to a joint meeting with you at the organ and with plenty of gospel hymns. Then at the end of a month, we will leave an evangelist behind to teach the new believers while we go on to another place to open it in the same way. When a number of places are opened, we will return once or twice a year.” As Rosalind listened, her “heart went like lead.” It was not suited to a family. Exposing their little ones to the infectious diseases that were so prevalent out in the villages was too risky, and she could not forget the “four little graves” they had already left behind on Chinese soil.47 Although she objected, he went ahead with his plan, convinced it was God’s will.
Boxer poster showing Chinese attitude toward foreigners.
Rosalind frequently had reservations about her husband’s dedication to the family. As a wife she felt less than fully secure in her position. Before she and the children returned to Canada alone in 1908, she probed him concerning his commitment to her: “Suppose I were stricken with an incurable disease in the homeland and had but a few months to live. If we cabled you to come, would you come?” Goforth obviously did not want to answer the question. An outright “no” would have been too harsh, but Rosalind persisted until he gave his answer—in the form of a question to her: “Suppose our country were at war with another nation and I, a British officer in command of an important unit. Much depended upon me as commander as to whether it was to be victory or defeat. Would I, in that event, be permitted to forsake my post in response to a call from my family in the homeland, even if it were what you suggest?” What could she say? She had no choice but to sadly reply, “No.”48
The itinerant ministry that Goforth began in the early years of the twentieth century was a stepping stone that led to the great revivals he conducted in the years that followed. This ministry began in 1907 when he and another missionary toured Korea and initiated a revival movement that swept through the churches there, resulting in an “amazing increase of converts.” From there they ministered in Manchuria with similar results.
As he traveled through China and Manchuria in the years that followed, the revival ministry grew. Some within the mission were wary of what they deemed to be “fanaticism” and “Pentecostalism,” but Goforth disregarded the criticism. In 1918 he conducted a two-week campaign with Chinese soldiers under the command of General Feng Yu-Hsiang, himself a Christian. At the end of the campaign nearly five thousand soldiers and officers took part in a communion service.
An issue that Goforth continually faced with his own mission board related to authority. He regarded the “Holy Spirit’s leading” above the “hard-and-fast rules” of the presbytery under which he served. Thus, according to his wife, “with his convictions concerning Divine guidance of himself, he naturally came often into conflict with other members of the Honan Presbytery,” making him “not easy to get along with.” He insisted that each missionary should have “freedom to carry on his or her work as each one felt led.” It was a difficult issue, and he often “found himself hampered and held back from following fully what he deemed was the Holy Spirit’s leading.”49
In the years that followed the problems did not diminish. Confrontations continued and friction increased, particularly in the 1920s when the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy found its way to China. New missionaries, steeped in higher criticism, were arriving on the field, and Goforth “felt powerless to stem the tide.” His only recourse was to “preach, as never before, salvation through the cross of Calvary and demonstrate its power.”50
Goforth’s ministry continued on into his seventies—even after the onset of blindness. At the age of seventy-four he returned to Canada, where he spent the last eighteen months of his life traveling and speaking at nearly five hundred meetings. He carried on to the very end, speaking four times on the Sunday before he died.
There are thousands of interesting missionary stories related to China—and to the China Inland Mission alone—but few exceed the enigma and intrigue of Mildred Cable and her two partners, Evangeline and Francesca French, known together as simply “the Trio.” Born in England in 1877, Cable had served in China with the French sisters, teaching and conducting itinerant evangelism for some twenty years. Their work with the CIM could be considered routine—until they sensed the calling of God to China’s great northwest, the “great cities where the name of Christ was not even known.”51
They initially kept their calling to themselves. But word that these middle-aged women were requesting relocation leaked out. “Some wrote, saying in more or less parliamentary language, that there were no fools like old fools.” It would be a drastic change for them, and many wondered aloud if they had misinterpreted what they perceived to be a call from God.
To a good many people it had seemed just plain foolishness. Why leave this important and successful school work to go off on some harebrained scheme of roaming over vast deserts looking for a few isolated tent dwellers and remote villages, where there were literally tens of thousands of people near at hand all needing to hear the Gospel?52
With permission granted from the board, the trio began the long and arduous journey north, traveling for months by oxcart, which “rumbled and jolted over the uneven muddy mountain roads.” On one occasion in particular, when they were waist deep in three feet of mud, “the call of the great Northwest was very faint.” Their destination was the City of the Prodigals, the last border town before crossing into the vast Gobi desert—the town where criminals hid with a ready escape across the border. But it was also a city of traders and merchants.
Little by little the Trio came to realize the tremendous importance of this network of trade routes, by means of which the cities of Central Asia are kept in vital contact with each other. The native news-distributing system whose speed, accuracy and simplicity baffles Western understanding might surely be made a means of spreading the knowledge of the Gospel, so that men in the marketplaces should hear, not only the political happenings of Europe or Afghanistan, but also that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”53
As time passed, the Trio developed a routine of spending their winters in the City of Prodigals, where they settled into teaching and preaching and church planting, and the remaining eight months of the year conducting itinerant evangelism in the vast desert beyond. Here there were scattered settlements in arable areas—their visits timed to correspond with fairs and festivals. Such gatherings gave them opportunities for street preaching and literature distribution. They kept records of their work, and one year they reported visiting nearly three thousand homes, conducting six hundred and fifty-six meetings, and selling some forty thousand portions of Scripture.
Long-term results were difficult to calculate, but when they visited the City of Sands after a five-year absence due to warfare in the region, they were pleasantly surprised by their welcome on a Sunday morning. “It was hoped that a few people would meet for public worship, but to everyone’s amazement the inn room was crowded to the doors, and after the service was over, one and another stood and asked to have his name on a list of inquirers.”54
Mildred Cable had begun her mission service in 1901, the year after the devastation of the Boxer uprising. Her work with the French sisters ended in 1936, when all foreigners were ordered out of the region. But tiny churches had been planted, and literature had found its way along the trade routes of the Gobi Desert and beyond. They had carried on the strategy of Hudson Taylor and the CIM well into the twentieth century.
There were others who went beyond the borders of China proper to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth. Among them was James O. Fraser (1886–1938), also serving with the CIM. He worked among the Lisu living in the mountains along the Tibetan-Burmese border. He encouraged indigenous family evangelism, and through that means some sixty thousand were baptized. Yet the work was difficult, and there were many disappointing setbacks. As he reflected on the work among the Lisu, he could have been speaking for the work throughout China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:
I am not painting a dark picture; I only wish to tell you the real position of things as candidly as possible. In some ways they are ahead of ordinary churchgoers at home…. But with the exception of a few, very few, bright earnest young people, there are not many who wish to make any progress or are really alive spiritually.55
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barr, Pat. To China with Love: The Lives and Times of Protestant Missionaries in China 1860–1900. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.
Broomhall, A. J. Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century. Book One: Barbarians at the Gates. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981.
Broomhall, Marshall. Robert Morrison: A Master-builder. New York: Doran, 1924. Cable, Mildred, and Francesca French. Something Happened. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1934.
Crossman, Eileen. Mountain Rain: A New Biography of James O. Fraser. Southampton, UK: Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1982.
Goforth, Rosalind. Goforth of China. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1937.
Latourette, Kenneth Scott. A History of Christian Missions in China. New York: Macmillan, 1929.
Pollock, J. C. Hudson Taylor and Maria: Pioneers in China. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976.
Taylor, Dr. and Mrs. Howard. J. Hudson Taylor: God’s Man in China. Chicago: Moody Press, 1978.
Thompson, Phyllis. Desert Pilgrim. Lincoln, NE: Back to the Bible, 1957.