More Essentials!

More Essentials!

Chapter 2

Alvyn Austin

Seven young aristocrats—two of them famous athletes, and another two, military officers—forsaking the comforts of England to work with a relatively unknown missionary society in the back country of China—this was a story the press could not pass up, and these young men immediately became religious celebrities.

Known as the Cambridge Seven, they were one of the grand gestures of nineteenth-century missions. Their story, published as The Evangelization of the World, was distributed free to every YMCA and YWCA throughout the British Empire and United States.

Though their time together was brief, they helped catapult the CIM from obscurity to “almost embarrassing prominence,” and inspired hundreds of recruits for the CIM and other mission societies. In 1885, when the Seven arrived in China, the CIM had 163 missionaries; that number doubled by 1890 and reached 800 by 1900, composing one-third of the entire Protestant missionary force.

Their story—especially their brief encounter with the infamous Pastor Hsi of Shansi (Shanxi)—has another dimension: it gives a glimpse into the unbounded enthusiasm of early Protestant missions and late-1800s Chinese Christianity.

The Seven

Though they are remembered together, each of the Seven made commitments of faith and to the CIM separately, and each had a unique ministry in China.

Stanley Peregrine Smith was the orator: scintillating, introspective, bookish, a real “percussion cap!” (as D. E. Hoste called him, for “the gun was already loaded” and Smith was the charge that set off the explosion). Son of a London surgeon, he was captain of the Cambridge rowing team and thus one of the most famous men in England. He was born again in one of D. L. Moody’s revivals and helped found the Cambridge Christian Union, forerunner of many student Christian organizations. Smith had a soapbox in Hyde Park, where he preached “not the milk and water of religion but the cream of the gospel.”

The second was Charlie Studd—“a Roman candle.” He was even more famous as captain of the Cambridge cricket team. Inarticulate but charismatic, Studd could impress hostile audiences. Many students came to heckle, expecting one, as a professor put it, “wanting in manliness, unfit for the river or the cricket field, and only good for psalm-singing and pulling a long face. But the big, muscular hands and long arms of the ex-captain of the Cambridge Eight cricket team, stretched out in entreaty, while he eloquently told the old story of Redeeming Love, capsized their theory.”

Shortly after he arrived in China, Studd came into an inheritance of Ł25,000 (several million dollars today), which he invested in “the Bank of Heaven.” He gave Ł5,000 to D. L. Moody to build Moody Bible Institute, and Ł5,000 to General William Booth to send 50 Salvation Army missionaries to India.

William Wharton Cassels, “Will the Silent,” was an ordained Anglican clergyman, curate of a poor parish in south London. He was, according to his biographer, inordinately reserved, with “something more than introspection,” and was “a fervent lover of order. . . . To him obedience to marching orders was fundamental. And so were unity, order, and authority.”

Dixon E. Hoste also loved order. His father, Major-General Hoste, was an “uncompromising Christian” who ran his family with “military precision.” Young Dick joined the Royal Artillery, where he was converted during a Moody revival and gave himself to Christ “as completely as he had given himself to soldiering,” according to Hoste’s biographer.

The Polhill-Turners came next. Cecil was a lieutenant in the Royal Dragoons in Ireland, and brother Arthur was studying to become a priest.

The final member was Montague Beauchamp, a “rich young man” from an old evangelical family who became a generous benefactor of the CIM.

No gift of Pentecost

After a tour of the British Isles, the “sporting hearties” (as the newspapers dubbed them) sailed with much fanfare. Each spoke at a highly publicized evangelistic rally the day before their departure, in February 1885. They arrived in Shanghai six weeks later. Shanghai was a brawling, racially divided city, a cancer on the coast of China. The Seven stayed long enough to be outfitted in Chinese clothes before they were sent “inland” to Shansi province, far off in the northwest.

In Shanghai the Seven divided. Hudson Taylor took the Polhill-Turners, Beauchamp, and Studd to go on a round-about tour up the Yangtze (Yangzi) River, and then overland into Shansi from the south. They were to speak before English-speaking consuls, merchants, and customs officials. On the river, it was as if they were “on a continuous picnic.” They refused to study and prayed to receive the Chinese language supernaturally. They had been so divinely blessed in England that they expected to receive the gift of language miraculously as a mark of God’s approval. Taylor warned them that this was one of the “devices of Satan to keep the Chinese ignorant of the gospel,” and when Chinese didn’t divinely descend upon them, they “knuckled down to study.”

The other three, Smith, Cassels and Hoste, went up the coast and held “spiritual life” meetings in Chefoo (now Yantai) and Peking (Beijing). Smith rhapsodized about the road ahead: “Oh, when He steps on the scene, how the hills melt before Him!”

Escorted by a “genial” agent of the American Bible Society, they left Peking to walk to Shansi, 30 days inland. Eventually they reached Pingyang [now Linfen], where they joined the other four. By July Cassels was able to write, “We are a very happy party, enjoying our work, enjoying our walks on the city walls.”

In Pingyang the Seven’s story entered another story, remarkable in its own right.

Remarkable “native” work

Pingyang was the most ancient city in China, the cradle of Chinese civilization, where humans learned agriculture at the dawn of time. It was a cosmopolitan city, sitting on the Big Road from Peking to Sian (Xi’an). For years rumors had been circulating of a remarkable “work of God” there entirely under “native leadership.”

A few years earlier, veteran English Methodist David Hill had held a contest with cash prizes for “first-class literary essays upon Christian themes,” such as “The Source of True Doctrine” and “Regulation of the Heart.” The author of the winning essay was reluctant to claim his prize. No wonder. He was a broken-down scholar, a “native doctor,” a “fixer” at the magistrate’s yamen (court), an opium sot given to hallucinations, far from the “first-class” scholar Hill had hoped for.

Hsi Liao-chih (Xi Liaochi) had started smoking opium for some illness. Opium is the best pain-killer known to humankind, but like many of his day, Hsi was quickly addicted. He lay on his bed for a year and a half hallucinating that he had descended into hell.

After the contest, Hsi started working with Hill translating tracts. As a result, he was converted and, through prayer and “the usual medicines,” was cured of his drug addiction. He had more visions, of ascending into heaven, where the Holy Spirit sent him back to earth to save suffering humanity. On his baptism, Hsi took a new name: Hsi Sheng-mo, “the Overcomer of Demons.”

When Hill left the Shansi district, Hsi took charge of the few Christians. He returned to his village, where, according to his biographer, he learned “all he could from occasional intercourse with the missionaries, and [was] taught of God, often in quaint surprising ways.”

These included Hsi’s reliance on visions and dreams, and his gifts of healing and exorcism. For the missionaries, exorcism, the casting out of devils, was something to be spoken of in whispers. To Chinese Christians, though, the story of Jesus’ curing “the demoniac among the tombs” (Mark 5:1–20) seemed very contemporary.

Hsi did not have to look far for his first evil spirit. His wife was a sullen and suspicious peasant woman, and when he was cured of opium, she thought he had been “bewitched” by the foreign medicine. Whenever he prayed, she would fall into “paroxysms of ungovernable rage.” Hsi called for the entire household to fast, laid his hands on her head, and commanded the spirit to depart “in the name of Jesus of Nazareth.” She was permanently cured and joined her husband’s ministry as his full partner, responsible for the growing household of Christians and evangelizing the women.

Opium ministry

About two years after his conversion, Hsi found a new ministry: curing opium addicts. After the recent famine, many peasants turned to opium as a new cash crop, and soon the dusty fields were red and white with poppies. Shansi was one of the largest producers of domestic opium in China, and by the 1880s, it was reported in some villages that “eleven out of every ten people smoked opium!” First you consume opium, the saying went, and then opium consumes you. In the last stages of addiction, many sots sold everything to satisfy their craving: their wives and children, furniture, roof tiles, agricultural tools.

The first opium refuges experimented with a combination of Chinese folk medicine and “stimulants and tonics” to alleviate the “cold-turkey” symptoms of withdrawal. The stimulants included quinine, belladonna, sulfate of strychnine—and coffee. By 1880 morphine had been introduced and was nothing short of a miracle drug: it could be administered in decreasing doses (gradual reduction, not cold turkey). But morphine pills slipped out of the missionaries’ hands into the black market as a cheap substitute for opium. In late-1800s China, morphine was known as “Jesus opium.”

Hsi, however, had a dream in which the Holy Spirit revealed the recipe for “life-establishing pills.” This was not just hocus-pocus, for Hsi came from a long line of Chinese doctors who handed down secret recipes. The pills he concocted were cheap and could be made from native drugs. Within a few years, Hsi opened 14 opium refuges where addicts would come for three- to six-week stays. As he travelled tirelessly through the countryside, he rode a cart emblazoned with a scarlet banner that read “the Holy Religion of Jesus.”

As the missionaries encroached on his “turf,” they became divided about his ministry. Some announced that the kingdom of God was about to be established in south Shansi. Others felt that although Hsi was “full of life and fire,” he brought in “superstition and fanaticism.”

The first foreigners to enter Hsi’s hermetic Christian sect were the Cambridge Seven, who came by Taylor’s orders to learn Chinese and work with Hsi. It was, according to A. J. Broomhall’s massive history of Hudson Taylor, “an admirable combination: Hsi, plus young, devoted, foreign workers.”

Reacting to Hsi

What did these naive, young aristocrats know about the subtle snares of the narcotic mind? Nothing, except compassion and what Pastor Hsi taught them. Since Hsi was established and they were illiterate, they made an extraordinary decision—virtually unprecedented in missionary history—to work under Hsi as his “helpers.” They would not assert “the divine right of missionaries” (as Smith called it) to “correct” Hsi. Their excessive zeal worried Hudson Taylor, who felt that they might drag the mission down with them.

Each of the Seven reacted differently to working with Hsi, revealing something about each. William Cassels, the ordained clergyman who loved order, was “hopelessly at sea.” Appalled by the lack of church rules, he stayed a year before he took Arthur Polhill-Turner and Montague Beauchamp to Szechwan (Sichuan), where they established a proper Church of England diocese. Cassels was eventually consecrated Bishop of East Szechwan in Westminster Abbey, with a gothic cathedral at Baoning (now Langzhang).

Stanley Smith and Charlie Studd were soon casting out devils themselves. But they offended Hsi by supporting one of his rivals and had to be sent away within a few months. They both married and took their brides to an isolated mountain town called Luan for “a honeymoon with Jesus.”

Abandoning the unobtrusive style of CIM evangelism, they started parading through the villages with banners and gongs like a Salvation Army band. “We thought the Lord would bless our efforts,” Smith wrote. “I am not aware that the Lord did bless them particularly, but the Lord blessed us in our souls very much.”

It was easy for Smith to get lost out there in the ancient mountains, always walking (except on the Sabbath), with his Greek New Testament. He eventually came to a quasi-Buddhist idea he called the “larger hope,” that all humanity will be saved, “some in this life, and the others, as a result of adequate punishment and suffering, in the life to come.” He went too far, and in 1904, after 20 years in the CIM, Smith was forced to resign. He remained in the Luan area as an independent until his death in 1926.

The Studds remained in Luan until 1894 and did not return after furlough. After a term in South India in a nondenominational church, he founded the Heart of Africa Mission at the age of 50, and later went to the Belgian Congo, where he died in 1931.

Cecil Polhill-Turner was also a wanderer who stayed in Shansi with Hsi for a year. His goal was to be the first missionary in Tibet. He spent a few years in Sinkiang (Xinjiang), then in northern India, and in 1909 founded the Tibetan Border Mission, under the English Pentecostals.

Only Dixon Hoste maintained a long-term relationship with Hsi. In a rowing image, he said that Hsi was the “stroke,” the pace-setter in rowing, while he was the coxswain. “It was a cox that was wanted, because Pastor Hsi was perfectly well able to stroke the boat. . . . What you wanted was a little man to sort of steer.” Hoste proved to be a wise and patient advisor, Hsi’s best friend who “sort of steered” until Hsi’s death in 1896. “We just grew together,” he remembered, with no distinction of Chinese and foreign.

Typical exceptions

The pilgrimage of the Cambridge Seven was exceptional only because it was larger than life. Their swings from enthusiasm to despair, from visions and supernatural gifts to “delusions and snares” was typical of missionaries of their generation. As John W. Stevenson, the Deputy China Director, said, “We all had visions at that time.”

Chapter 3

Ruth A. Tucker

“Hudson Taylor makes extraordinarily ample use of the services of unmarried ladies,” wrote a German missionary in 1898, adding that he thought the idea “unbecoming and repellent.”

He was not alone—many missionary societies severely criticized the idea of sending single females to the mission field. But by 1898, the tidal wave of evangelical missions was sweeping away strict gender roles. The Women’s Missionary Movement, begun in America in the early 1860s, had already given birth to 40 “female agencies”—mission societies that sponsored only single women. Barred from ordained ministry in their homeland, hundreds of women eagerly volunteered to serve abroad.

A large measure of this change can be attributed to the policy of Hudson Taylor. Women were vital to the China Inland Mission from its inception. In 1878, he took a much criticized step in permitting single female missionaries to work in teams in the interior of China. By 1882, less than 20 years after its founding, the CIM already listed 56 wives and 95 single women engaged in ministry.

Women labored sacrificially and with distinction in virtually every capacity of Taylor’s mission. The following stories represent the thousands of women who volunteered for missionary service in China.

Lone wolf

Most of the single women missionaries in the CIM worked with a female partner or on teams that included married couples. But some struck out independently.

Annie Royle Taylor (no relation to Hudson), who arrived in China in 1884, was described as “the lone wolf” and an “individualist, so bad at harmonious relationships with colleagues that she would have to be returned to Britain or stretched to her own limits.” She chose the latter option and set her sights on bringing the gospel to the forbidden city of Lhasa in the heart of Tibet.

She faced many obstacles and setbacks, and Taylor wrote in 1890 of “dear Annie Taylor [having] a very hard time of it.” But she did not give up easily. By 1892, she was ready to make the thousand-mile journey into Tibet with her Tibetan convert, Pontso, a Chinese man and his Tibetan wife, and two other men to help with her 16 saddle and pack horses. She adopted native Tibetan dress and shaved her head in the fashion of a Tibetan nun.

Taylor’s party faced one obstacle after another. Bandits stole their tent and clothing and killed most of their animals. One of the workmen died, another turned back. The Chinese man demanded money, and when that was refused, he brought accusations against her to Tibetan authorities that led to her arrest. Yet, according to A. J. Broomhall, “She kept a daily diary, never complained in it, and gamely made a Christmas pudding with the currants and black sugar, flour and suet she had brought with her.”

Taylor met face to face with the government officials who arrested her, and the confrontation ended with an escort, horses, and provisions for her to continue her journey. After more setbacks, Taylor finally established her own agency, the Tibetan Pioneer Mission, and 14 candidates from London arrived to help her in 1894.

In less than a year, however, the infant mission was in shambles. The new missionaries repudiated her leadership and called on the CIM for assistance. Taylor would not be deterred. She wrote back to London asking for female recruits, because “the Tibetans respect women and do not even in time of war attack them.”

Taylor continued for more than 20 years, working mostly alone—except for her faithful convert Pontso.

Desert ministry

“The Trio,” as they became known, began their work in China around the turn of the century. After more than 20 years of doing routine missionary work in China, Mildred Cable and Eva and Francesca French were convinced God was calling them to China’s great Northwest—to the Gobi Desert and beyond. Many of their colleagues were shocked. In the words of Cable, “Some wrote, saying in more or less parliamentary language, that there were no fools like old fools.”

The Trio would not be deterred. They traveled for months by ox cart before arriving at the City of the Prodigals—the last city inside the Great Wall, named for its reputation for attracting criminals. Here they set up a base where they spent winters. The remaining eight months of the year they evangelized, traveling the vast trade routes of the Gobi Desert. They stopped at every settlement, timing their visits with festivals and fairs, where they preached the gospel and passed out tracts.

More than once, they were assailed by bandits and caught up in local wars, but their most persistent enemy was the weather. Once they were on the Gobi Desert during Easter week when the warm spring breezes suddenly turned into a blinding blizzard. They struggled to set up their tent and start a dung fire amidst the blowing snow and sand. That accomplished, they boiled water for the hot-water bottle, but as it was handed to Eva, it burst open, scalding her shivering body. The other two tended her burns, but the incident was ever a reminder of the cost of frontier evangelism.

Broken hearts

Using single women in ministry, however, was not without its complications. Early on Hudson Taylor was publicly criticized for his close relationship with two single missionaries, Jennie Faulding and Emily Blatchley, after which he kept his distance—to Blatchley’s regret:

“I am so lonely, so utterly alone,” she wrote in her journal. “But why should I cling so? Oh, Christ, take hold of my hands. . . . I find such joy in being with the Taylors, but I must not let it intoxicate me.”

Not long after she penned these lines, Blatchley volunteered to accompany the Taylor children, who were returning to England for schooling. Soon after they left, Maria, Taylor’s first wife, died in childbirth. The next year, Taylor set sail for England to visit his children—and, Blatchley hoped, to marry her. But it was not to be. Jennie accompanied Taylor on the voyage, and when they arrived in England, they were engaged.

Blatchley was devastated. “I feel sure from what I know of my own nature that I should, if I had had the chance, have been Mrs.,” she painfully wrote in her journal. “And so it is in love and mercy my God cut off my flowing stream at which He perhaps saw I should drink too deeply. Such a sweet, sweet stream, such a painful weaning! Therefore such a great blessing must await me for Jesus to bear to see me have so much pain.” She died of tuberculosis not long after the wedding.

Marital clashes

Hudson Taylor did not make a distinction between married and single women. He expected married women to focus primarily on ministry, even as their single sisters did. To a male recruit he wrote, “Unless you intend your wife to be a true missionary, not merely a wife, homemaker, and friend, do not join us.”

Maria set the pace for other married women in the mission. Despite caring for five children, she was active in the ministry—reaching out to Chinese women and serving as first lady of the China Inland Mission. Souls were dying without the gospel, and no one in the mission was exempt from active duty.

Jennie was also active, balancing ministry with the care of Taylor’s growing children (from his marriage with Maria) and more children of their own. Once, when Taylor was ill while they were in England, she returned to China alone to carry out needed refugee work, leaving the children behind in his care.

Yet besides his own wives’ examples, there were others, like that of Isobel Kuhn. Kuhn’s appointment as a missionary had initially been delayed because she was described by one person as “proud, disobedient, and likely to be a troublemaker.” But after two years on probationary status, she sailed for China in 1928 as a single woman. As soon as her language study was completed, she married fellow missionary John Kuhn, whom she had known as a student at Moody Bible Institute.

They were both strong willed and endured many difficulties and personality clashes early in their marriage. More than once, Isobel stormed out of their house in anger. One of Kuhn’s many contributions to missionary literature was her openness about the marital struggles she and her husband John faced when living alone in a remote area.

For 20 years, Isobel and John worked among the Lisu, a minority people in the far western province of Yunnan. When they were forced to leave the area due to violent guerrilla warfare in 1950, they relocated in Thailand. After barely two years of ministry in Thailand, Isobel was diagnosed with breast cancer. She wrote three more books before she died in 1957, leaving behind a husband, a daughter, and a son—and eight books and many articles that depicted missionary work and life in an honest and refreshing light.

No more quivering lips

Mrs. Arthur Smith, another China missionary, censured any work of single women that involved them in “lawless prancing all over the mission lot.” Her target was Lottie Moon, whose work in China would become legendary. The proper role of a female missionary, Smith argued, was to attend “with a quivering lip” to her own children.

Not so, said Taylor and the “unbecoming” women of the China Inland Mission, both single and married. And missions in China never looked the same after they said it.

Chapter 4

Mark Galli

On the last day of 1899, Chinese reactionaries abducted Sidney Brooks, a 24-year-old missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. They tortured him for hours and then murdered him. British authorities acted swiftly; two culprits were executed and an indemnity was demanded. But if the British thought this would quell the rising Chinese resentment, they were wrong.

Within six months, thousands of angry Chinese came screaming out of the villages of North China, twirling swords and chanting, “Burn, burn, burn! Kill, kill, kill!” They tore down chapels, cathedrals, orphanages, hospitals, and schools, and murdered missionaries and Chinese Christians. The uprising is called the Boxer Rebellion, and it dealt the modern Protestant missionary movement its most severe blow ever.

Shanghai mentality

The causes of the uprising were many and complex, but the arrogance of foreigners is as good a summation as any.

Since the 1840s, foreigners had forced China’s hand in treaty after treaty, gaining control of large parts of the country. The English, Americans, French, Dutch, Spanish, German, and the largest group, the Japanese, had divided up the country as if they were playing the board game Risk. Foreigners sometimes owned whole cities.

Worse, they swaggered through China knowing they could not be arrested for any crime. If a drunken sailor killed a prostitute or his captain set fire to a trading junk, they were protected by the extraterritoriality that is granted high-ranking diplomats.

Too many missionaries (though hardly Hudson Taylor) adopted a “Shanghai mentality,” which regarded the world beyond their enclave as a “heathen colossus.” In some places, missionaries were more intimate with British authorities, more interested in playing soccer at the consulate with sailors.

Many foreigners despised the Chinese. One Canadian reported that a “gentle-spirited Norwegian” told him “that after being out here for a few years, he got into such a dulled spiritual condition that he would, on occasions, knock down or beat a Chinese.”

Missionary pride and Chinese anger shot up in 1899 when the Chinese government conferred official status on missionaries, making a bishop or superintendent the equal of a provincial governor, and ordinary foreigners the equivalent of district magistrates. Wrote one missionary, “What other government has bestowed such privileges upon ministers of the gospel?”

Many missionaries who did venture forth into the “heathen colossus” did so insensitively. Many publicly ridiculed sacred Chinese beliefs—ancestor worship and Confucian precepts. Some charged into temples while Chinese were worshiping and denounced them for bowing to idols.

One American writer spoke for most foreigners and too many missionaries when he wrote in early 1900, “The day is not distant when China will be delivered from its effete civilization and will come under the power of those motives which have their source in the vital truths of the Christian revelation.”

Harmonious fists

By the late 1890s, more and more Chinese decided they had had enough. The Society of Harmonious Fists, or Boxers, led the way.

Their origin is unknown, but by the late 1890s, they had a mystical aura about them. They wore red ribbons around their wrists, yellow sashes, and yellow talismans. They believed they were invulnerable to foreign weapons. Their shamans conducted demonstrations in which a musket (loaded with a blank cartridge) was fired at a follower, “proving” the point. They murmured incantations that induced a trance-like state, and they had secret signals and passwords.

Boxer propagandists stirred up hatred of foreigners. Foreigners were “first-class devils,” Chinese converts to Christianity, “second-class devils,” and those who worked for or collaborated with foreigners, “third-class devils.” They claimed that Chinese children were mutilated in Christian orphanages and that Chinese women were lured into Christian churches to be raped.

They circulated thousands of handbills and proclamations. One, referring to the current drought that was causing great suffering, said, “[Because] the Catholic and Protestant religions are insolent to the gods, extinguishing sanctity, rendering no obedience to Buddha, and enraging Heaven and Earth, the rain clouds no longer visit us. But 8 million Spirit Soldiers will descend from Heaven and sweep the Empire clean of all foreigners!”

Sweeping violence

In January 1900, events accelerated. At Peking (Beijing), reactionary forces were gaining influence with the emperor and the power behind the throne, the empress dowager, Tz’u Hsi (Ci Xi). Authorities issued an edict that encouraged the Boxers. Throughout late winter and spring, the Boxers increased their attacks. Villages were looted, and the first reports of Chinese Christian killings were heard.

The fury broke loose in June. Buildings of the Presbyterian mission in Shantung (Shandong) were destroyed by a mob. Two English missionaries were killed a few miles northeast of Paotingfu. The plant of the American Board Mission just outside of Peking was burned and many Christians killed.

In mid-June, violence swept into Peking, and international troops were summoned from the coast to protect foreigners. The troops were rebuffed on their way but managed to capture some Chinese forts. The empress dowager regarded the capture as a declaration of war. On June 24, an imperial decree ordered the killing of foreigners throughout China.

In Peking the foreign community hunkered down in a small section of the city for a protracted siege. For missionaries out in the interior, there was nowhere to go. The uprising was not primarily anti-Christian, but missionaries and their converts were the chief sufferers.

At Paotingfu, on June 30 and July 1, 15 missionaries with a number of Chinese Christians were killed.

On July 12, two men, five women, and five children, all foreigners, with five Chinese Christians, were killed at Tat’ung.

At T’aiku six missionaries and eight Chinese were executed on July 31 and their heads taken to the governor.

In the province of Shansi, the governor, Yu Hsien, stage-managed the bloodiest massacre. On the morning of July 9, in Taiyuan, the capital, all Protestant missionaries and their families, Catholic priests and nuns, and several converts were rounded up. They were handcuffed and marched before the governor, who stood surrounded by an armed bodyguard. A convert who survived the ordeal described what happened:

Thirty-three Protestants and 12 Catholics were killed in like manner, together with a number of Chinese Christians. The heads of some were placed in cages on the city gates.

As news of such massacres spread, missionary families and loyal converts gathered their belongings in bundles, and by foot, mule cart, or donkey tried to escape. Many made for remote rural areas where they lived for days or weeks a nerve-racked, threadbare existence of hunted fugitives. Some were spared or evaded discovery; some were caught and hacked to death.

On August 14, international troops relieved Peking. Peking was looted and punitive expeditions were sent into the surrounding country, which led to more atrocities, this time by the victors. According to one British captain, “Casual exploitation by arrogant detachments of foreign soldiers moving about a prostrate countryside” led to “robbery, assassinations, and nameless outrages . . . numbers of innocent and peaceful non-combatants were slaughtered . . . whole districts were ruthlessly and needlessly laid waste.”

Some missionaries exploited the situation. Though some prevented looting, others looted freely. One even wrote an article, “The Ethics of Looting.” Many mission societies demanded reparations for damages and lives lost. (Hudson Taylor was one missionary who refused indemnities even when offered.)

Rising indignation

Tertullian’s comment, “The blood of Christians is seed,” proved accurate in China. The courage of the martyrs, both Chinese and missionary, inspired three-fold church growth in the next decade.

Unfortunately, Chinese indignation would continue to build for another fifty years—until the communists successfully expelled all “foreign devils.”

Chapter 5

Kevin D. Miller

A number of men and women played key roles in the evangelization of China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Besides the figures already mentioned in this eBook, a few others deserve mention.

Robert Morrison

(1782-1834)

“Failed” first Protestant missionary

As he sailed into the port of Canton in 1807, 25-year-old Robert Morrison was filled with a driving passion to see the Chinese people come to know Christ. By the time he died in China 27 years later, however, he had baptized only ten Chinese. But if Morrison died discouraged, his pioneering work, which included a six-volume Chinese dictionary and a translation of the Bible, opened the door for other missionaries and thus for the millions of conversions he had only dreamed of.

Morrison was raised in a stern Scotch-Presbyterian home where reading missionary stories in a church magazine whetted his interest in foreign missions. His mother, however, made him promise not to go abroad while she was alive. Only after his mother died, during Morrison’s early twenties, did he take up ministerial training in London. After two years of study, he was accepted into the London Missionary Society. While waiting to find a male colleague to go with him to China, he studied language for one year with a Chinese scholar living in England. When no partner was forthcoming, Morrison left for China alone. He was forced to go via the United States, since the East India Company, which owned most of the English ships going to China, refused him passage.

Morrison’s lifelong relationship with the East India Company was one of mutual need and mutual distrust. The company guarded its commercial interests in China by strictly refusing to let Westerners such as Morrison evangelize. They feared missionaries would offend their Chinese trade partners. But after Morrison’s arrival in China, company officials learned of his language skills and hired him as a translator. They gave Morrison a salary but also attempted to restrict his missions activities. In 1815, for example, the company threatened to deport him when it learned that Morrison had completed, in secret, a translation of the New Testament.

In 1809, Morrison married Mary Morton. After six years and two children, a seriously ill Mary returned to England with their children. It was six years before they returned to Canton to see their father and husband. When Mary died, Morrison sent the children back to England, and three years later traveled there himself for his first and only furlough. When he returned to Canton, he brought with him the children and a new wife, Elizabeth, with whom he had four more children and a happy marriage.

In 1834, two months after pioneer missionary William Carey’s death in India, Morrison died. When as a young man Morrison had first sailed to China, he was asked, “Do you really expect to make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese empire?” In reply, Morrison spoke more prophetically than he knew: “No, sir, but I expect God will.”

Karl F.A. Gützlaff

(1803-51)

Disgraced idealist

One historian described him as, variously, “a saint, a crank, a visionary, a true pioneer, and a deluded fanatic.” Karl Gützlaff provides a poignant example of how Christ is preached even through those with many shortcomings.

In the waning years of Robert Morrison’s life, a younger, equally zealous Gützlaff was skirting the coast of China in his boat, delivering Chinese tracts translated by Morrison. The free-lance missionary had recently lost his wife and daughter after several years of mission work in Indonesia and Thailand.

By the late 1840s, the reports from Gützlaff’s work in China were glowing: the 300 Chinese Gützlaff had trained to evangelize China in one generation had distributed thousands of New Testaments and counted no fewer than 2,871 baptized converts. Supporters back home were enthusiastic—until the hoax was discovered in 1850.

Gützlaff was in Europe promoting his mission work at the time, but evidence suggests he already knew he had been deceived by his Chinese workers. They had concocted the conversion numbers and had secretly sold back to the printer New Testaments Gützlaff had paid to have printed in the first place. The printer would sell them again to an unsuspecting Gützlaff.

More serious still: for fear of losing financial support, Gützlaff chose to gloss over the growing discrepancies. When this all came to light, he was disgraced. A disheartened Gützlaff returned to China to try and pick up the pieces. One year later he died.

If history judges Gützlaff as a “deluded fanatic,” it must add that he was a fool and a fanatic for Christ. In Indonesia and Thailand (where he and his wife translated the complete Bible into Siamese), and in China, he was foolish enough to dress, eat, and live like those he sought to evangelize—a radical step in his day. He deftly blended evangelism with social concern, as when he helped to negotiate the end to the First Opium War, in 1842.

And though the mission organization he founded, Chinese Union, died with him, out of its soil grew the Chinese Evangelization Society, which sent Hudson Taylor to China in 1853, only two years after Gützlaff’s death. Taylor himself remembered and honored Gützlaff by calling him “the grandfather of the China Inland Mission.”

Jonathan Goforth

(1859-1936)

Greatest evangelist to China

Jonathan Goforth lay bleeding after having been hacked in the back, neck, and head with a sword. He thought surely he would be the next of the dozens of China missionaries to be killed during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. But miraculously he survived, and with his wife, Rosalind, fled south to safety—to continue a missionary life that would earn him one historian’s accolade as “China’s most outstanding evangelist.”

His strategy (which Rosalind at first objected to for the sake of their children’s health), was to spend one month evangelizing in one region or city, leaving behind a native evangelist to nurture the new believers. Once or twice a year, they returned to these sites to encourage the fledgling congregations.

Jonathan was known for his ceaseless energy. Often he preached eight hours a day, on several occasions to crowds of 25,000 people. The Goforths’ itinerant work took them for a time to Manchuria and Korea, but their most lasting impact was in China, where more than 13,000 Chinese became Christians between 1908 and 1913.

In 1918 he led a Pentecostal-type revival attended by a number of Chinese soldiers, including the Christian General Feng Yu-hsiang. After two weeks of preaching, a Communion service was held for nearly 5,000 officers and soldiers.

The Goforths endured their share of controversy and heartache. During the 1920s, when the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy reached a crescendo, Goforth battled younger Presbyterian missionaries whom he said preached a watered-down gospel. They also buried five of their eleven children on Chinese soil.

The Goforths finally retired to Canada in 1934, after 74-year-old Jonathan had already lost his eyesight. Less than two years later, Jonathan died.

Lottie Moon

(1840-1912)

Patron saint of Southern Baptist Missions

“The best man among our missionaries.” That’s how the Southern Baptist Missions’ journal hailed Lottie Moon, 72, when she died on Christmas Eve, 1912, after a lifetime of work in China. Moon had bucked the chauvinist limitations placed on missionary women. She also succeeded in rooting the gospel among the Chinese in ways unprecedented in Baptist missions.

Reared in an aristocratic Virginian family during the Civil War, this highly cultured and educated Southern belle made an unlikely missionary candidate: she viewed Christianity with skepticism during her college years. But her family influenced her even more. She had an uncle, James Barclay, who was the first Christian Church missionary to Jerusalem, a devout mother, who prayed for her salvation, and a younger sister, who preceded Moon to China (by several years) and would eventually invite Moon to join her. Moon experienced a crisis conversion during her graduate studies, then taught school for several years while she prepared to follow her sister to China. She refused a marriage proposal from C. H. Toy, a man with missionary plans of his own and a future Harvard professor: though she loved him, she didn’t think his acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution made them a good match.

In China she served as a school teacher but soon felt this traditional woman’s role limited her evangelistic gifts. “Can we wonder at the mortal weariness and disgust,” she wrote in the Baptist missions periodical, “the sense of wasted powers and the conviction that her life is a failure that comes over a woman when, instead of the ever broadening activities she had planned, she finds herself tied down to the petty work of teaching a few girls.” She added, “What women want who come to China is free opportunity to do the largest possible work. . . . What women have a right to demand is perfect equality.”

Differing philosophically with her male field director in China, Moon, now a seasoned missionary and 44 years old, moved to P’ing-tu, where she attempted to begin a church. Initially the work was difficult and discouraging, but soon Moon reported she had found “something I had never seen before in China. Such eagerness to learn! Such spiritual desires!” And, she added, “Surely there can be no deeper joy than that of saving souls.”

One such soul was Li Shou Ting, who became pastor of the church and, in the two decades that followed, baptized more than a thousand converts.

This joy, however, turned to despair during a severe famine in Henchow. She spent her last years pleading for funds and food for the starving thousands. With little help forthcoming from the United States, she emptied her own bank account, but still there was so much need. She lapsed into depression and quit eating. Her health declined, and finally she died.

Nonetheless, her legacy lives on. Eighty five years after her death, the Southern Baptists annually raise millions of mission dollars through the “Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.”

John and Betty Stam

(1906/07-34)

Martyrs who inspired a generation of missionaries

As John and Betty Stam were led to certain execution by their communist captors, someone asked, “Where are you going?”

After saying he didn’t know where the guards were going, John added, “But we’re going to heaven.”

John and Betty Stam met at Moody Bible Institute, where both felt God calling them to missions in China. A year after Betty returned to China, where her parents were veteran missionaries, John followed but was stationed in a different region. A year later, on October 25, 1933, the two married, and in September 1934, they became the proud parents of Helen Priscilla.

Three months later, when 2,000 communists mounted a surprise attack on Tsingteh (Ching-te), where the Stams lived, John, Betty and the baby were taken into custody. For several days, they were watched closely, but John was allowed to send letters to CIM headquarters. In one letter, he relayed their captors’ demand for a $20,000 ransom and then closed with, “The Lord bless you and guide you, and as for us, may God be glorified whether by life or by death.”

They were aware of the strong anti-Western, anti-Christian sentiments of the Red Army, but they were nevertheless shocked when they overheard the soldiers discussing how to dispose of their baby. On the morning of December 8, as the solders prepared to kill Helen Priscilla, a farmer who had heard about their situation stepped forward and pleaded for the baby’s life. The farmer was told it would be his life for hers, and he agreed. He was killed on the spot.

The next morning, as Betty was bathing Helen, they were suddenly forced to leave the house—without the baby. Stripped to their undergarments, the two were paraded down the street, and a crowd gathered as they were sentenced to death. A Chinese doctor, a Christian, made a last-minute plea for their lives; without hesitation the communists condemned him to death. In turn, John begged for mercy for the doctor, to no avail. Then John and Betty were ordered to their knees, and in quick succession, both were beheaded.

Christians around the world learned of the young missionaries’ deaths as well as of a daring rescue by Chinese Christians of baby Helen—which included a hundred-mile trek with Helen hidden in a rice basket to deliver her to her grandparents.

Despite serving only three years, John and Betty Stam inspired a generation through their courageous martyrdom. Hundreds volunteered for missionary service following the publication of the Stams’ biography.

Other Pioneers of Note



Lemuel Nelson Bell

(1894-1973)

L. Nelson Bell and his wife Virginia were medical missionaries for the Southern Presbyterian Church. They served at the Love and Mercy Hospital in Qingjiangpu, in the province of Jiangsu, for 25 years before finally returning the U.S. in 1941 during the Japanese occupation. Their daughter Ruth, the future Mrs. Billy Graham, was born in China. In 1956, Bell and Graham co-founded Christianity Today magazine.

Minnie Vautrin

(1886-1941)

As a teacher at the Ginling (Jinling) College in Nanjing, American missionary Wilhelmina (Minnie) Vautrin was in the city when the Japanese army invaded and the horrific “Rape of Nanking” occurred. Rather than fleeing, Minnie stayed and turned the college into an asylum for thousands of women and children, saving many lives. But the memory of the looting, burning, raping, and killing she had witnessed haunted her. She later had a nervous breakdown, was hospitalized in the U.S., and took her own life.

Frédéric-Vincent Lebbe

(1877-1940)

Born in Belgium, Catholic missionary Vincent Lebbe became a Chinese citizen because he believed that missionaries should identify as closely as possible with the Chinese people. He strongly advocated the consecration of Chinese bishops, and his influence eventually led to this ideal becoming a reality. He was taken captive by the Communists in 1940 and died soon thereafter.

Eric Liddell

(1902-45)

Olympic-gold-medal winner Eric Liddell, celebrated in the movie Chariots of Fire, ran a much harder race than most people know about. After the Olympics, he moved to China, where his family were missionaries. During the Japanese invasion, all foreigners were interned in prison camps. Eric was a beloved spiritual leader and friend in his camp, showing special concern for the young people. He died of a brain tumor only months before the camp was liberated.

Part 2

Chapter 6

Daniel H. Bays

In the first half of the 20th century, the foreign missionary movement in China matured, flourished, and then died. In these same decades, a Chinese church was born—a church that is today growing incredibly rapidly. From 1900 to 1950, Christianity in China forsook its foreign origins and put on Chinese dress. The turbulent forces of history, which shaped all aspects of China’s politics, economy, and culture, also burst upon foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians.

If we take a historical telescope and focus just on two years, 1932–34, we can see the transformation of Christianity in China in mid-stream. And it began with a transformation of the missionary endeavor itself.

On an autumn day in 1932, Pearl Buck, born in China of missionary parents and herself a famous missionary there, strode to the podium in the ballroom of New York City’s Hotel Astor to address 2,000 Presbyterian women. Buck had just received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth. Now she addressed the topic “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” Her answer was technically “yes,” but it was so qualified and unenthusiastic, and her criticisms of missionaries for being arrogant, ignorant, and narrow-minded were so trenchant, that she left her audience stunned. This event ignited a firestorm of agitated comment by both critics and defenders of foreign missions in almost all quarters of American Protestantism. It was a sign of the times.

Another sign of the times was the publication of Rethinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry After One Hundred Years, commissioned by John D. Rockefeller Jr., the foremost individual financial supporter of missions in the U.S. Widely circulated and read, the book advocated an overhaul of missionary thinking, especially on such questions as the exclusivity of Christianity.

Also in 1932–33, Robert Service, the former UC Berkeley track star who had pioneered the establishment of YMCAs in western China, was unexpectedly sacked. In the midst of the Great Depression and dwindling contributions, the YMCA and other well-established missions in China had a massive financial crunch in the early 1930s. Their expensive institution-heavy facilities, especially hospitals, schools, and colleges, swamped the mission budgets. Many missionaries headed home.

The missions movement was clearly on the defensive.

Hopeful signs

Despite these negative portents, however, there were still enthusiastic young people answering the “call” to China. The China Inland Mission (CIM), that remarkable multinational creation of J. Hudson Taylor’s, continued the dramatic growth it had enjoyed since the late 1800s. Its “faith mission” principles (no denominational or other regular financial support) managed to adapt to the new climate of scarcity.

Even as other missions were shrinking because of discouragement or shrinking budgets, the CIM launched a successful campaign to add 200 missionaries. David Adeney, a young Cambridge University student, learned of this campaign for “the 200” and felt a strong call to China. He came to north central China in 1934 and found his niche working with students, which he did until he left in 1950. He established ties which remained intact though dormant for more than 30 years, and which were renewed in heartwarming fashion when Adeney returned to China in the 1980s.

In addition to signs of life in theologically conservative missions like CIM, a wave of Pentecostal revivalism was sweeping through some parts of China. A traveling Norwegian evangelist, Marie Monsen, was the catalyst for the famous “Shantung Revival.” Participants saw tongues of fire and heard roaring winds, and some even fell to the ground half-conscious. Pentecostalism, with its stress on the “gifts of the spirit,” including prophecy, divine healing, and speaking in tongues, also fed the growth of most of the independent churches that had begun organizing by the 1920s.

In these years it could be dangerous to be a Christian in China, whether foreign or Chinese. A few months after David Adeney’s arrival in 1934, one of the most dramatic incidents of martyrdom in China missions history occurred. John and Betty Stam, an attractive young couple who were products of Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and had come to China with the CIM a couple of years before, were stationed in a small city in Anhui province (central China). When Communist troops captured the city in late 1934, they beheaded the Stams and killed some local Christians who pleaded for the foreigners’ lives, but the Stams’ three-month-old child was taken to safety. This story gained much publicity and motivated many young people to go to the mission field.

The effect was much the same as what happened after the death of Yale graduate Horace Pitkin in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Pitkin died along with more than 10 other foreign missionaries—Presbyterian, Congregational, and CIM—in Baoding, not far from Beijing. His death spurred a surge in mission applicants, many from East Coast colleges, and the establishment of the Yale China Mission in the early 1900s.

The end of the golden age

The Boxer Rebellion had begun as a peasant rebellion against the increasing commercial, political, and religious encroachment on Chinese culture by Western nations. The Boxers killed hundreds of foreigners, including about 250 missionaries and missionary children, as well as 20,000 or more Chinese Christians (who were considered traitors). In retribution, the occupying troops of eight nations killed at least that many other Chinese in 1900–02. It was a disaster for China. Yet paradoxically, this national trauma triggered a national reform movement. For a short time, the xenophobia of the past was discredited and China was more open to the West. (Later, the Communists would praise the Boxers as patriots.)

This gave Christian missions in China the largest opportunity they had ever had—truly a “golden age.” Mission schools suddenly had high prestige and waiting lists. Members of the elite class became Christians. Rates of growth skyrocketed, especially for Protestants. After the revolution which overthrew the feeble Manchu dynasty in 1911–12, the provisional president of the young republic was Sun Yat-sen, a baptized Christian. In 1913, the republic’s second president asked the foreign missionary community in China to pray for the nation. Protestant missionary numbers soared from 1,300 in 1905 to 8,000 in 1925. Many Christians were confident that events were moving inexorably toward the “Christianization” of China.

It was not to be. The golden age lasted less than two decades, until the mid-1920s. What went wrong? During that time, practically all missions in China failed to sufficiently cultivate a Chinese leadership in their mission structures and to permit that leadership to shepherd the flock into independent and self-supporting local churches. The rhetoric of moving from (foreign) mission to (Chinese) church was always present, but it was mainly hollow. At times it appeared that the foreign mission establishment had given way to Chinese leadership. The national missionary conference of 1907 had only half a dozen Chinese delegates out of more than a thousand; the next major conference in 1924 was called the “Christian” (not “missionary”) conference, and more than half the delegates were Chinese.

But looks were misleading. It was at best a partnership, and an imbalanced one at that. In almost all cases, missionaries still controlled the purse strings. The result was that the best Chinese leaders nurtured by the Protestants—such as Cheng Jingyi, respected head of the Church of Christ in China, and Yu Richang (David Z. T. Yui), gifted national secretary of the YMCA—never shed the image of being subordinate to foreign missionaries.

The Protestants put Chinese in leadership roles where they at least had the appearance of responsibility and power, even if that power was limited by close association with foreign missions. The Roman Catholic Church in China suffered even more from tokenism. The Catholic hierarchies in China had for decades permitted (and closely supervised) the training of Chinese priests, who were given mundane tasks and little responsibility. But no Chinese bishops were consecrated until 1926, after a couple of maverick European missionary priests, in particular Fr. Vincent Lebbe, convinced the pope to break the stranglehold that the European hierarchy had over the Chinese clergy. Even so, Chinese priests still continued to be largely relegated to secondary roles in the local parishes, and the new Chinese bishops were shunted into subsidiary functions.

Tainted by association

There was almost certainly no conscious conspiracy among foreign missionaries to deprive Chinese leaders of the means of emerging and flourishing. There was often respect, genuine friendship, and collegial cooperation between missionaries and Chinese priests and pastors. But in the new political atmosphere that was brewing after 1920 in China, such ties were fatally compromising to the Chinese involved.

In the 1920s, popular resentment against foreigners’ legal privileges in China, which dated back to treaties signed by the Manchu government in the mid-1800s, boiled over. This popular nationalism fueled the rapid rise of two major political parties that have dominated Chinese politics from the 1920s to the present: the Kuomintang (the Nationalists) and the Communists, which became bitter rivals and then mortal enemies. The leader of the Nationalists was Chiang Kai-shek, himself a Christian convert and married to Soong Mei-ling, the daughter of one of China’s most prominent Christian families. Under Chiang, there were several other Christians in government positions and polite, even cordial relations with the foreign mission establishment. But even Chiang agreed that foreign privileges should be eliminated as soon as possible, especially immunity from Chinese laws.

Missionaries were among those who enjoyed these privileges. There had been the occasional missionary prophet (for example, Frank Rawlinson, editor of the Shanghai missionary journal The Chinese Recorder) who warned that the seeds of the “treaty system,” as it was called, might bring a harvest of wrath someday. That day arrived in the mid 1920s, and the most radical elements of Chinese opinion considered missionaries, and for that matter Chinese Christians as well, lackeys of foreign governments and of “world capitalist exploitation.”

These attitudes, which pervaded the Communist Party, continued strong until the last foreign missionaries were expelled from China in 1951–52 by the new government. The missionary community, and the mission project as a whole, paid a high price for its failure to distance itself from at least some aspects of Western political, military, and economic power in China.

This portrayal of the missionary record may seem unfair to some. Missions had brought many blessings to China. Chinese Christian schools had been the first places where Chinese could receive a modern education, and the first to permit enrollment of girls and to employ women teachers. Missionary hospitals and clinics had saved tens of thousands of lives, and missionary-coordinated famine relief saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Missionaries had been leaders in the movements to abolish the opium trade and to end the custom of binding and crippling the feet of young girls as a means of increasing their desirability for marriage.

All in all, the missionaries’ contribution to the making of modern China was considerable. Though they were reviled and demonized by the new regime after 1949, they are quietly given credit for their accomplishments and warmly welcomed back to visit China today.

Homegrown faith

If missions were anathema to many Chinese, and many Chinese Christians were tainted by their identification with foreign missionaries, how did Christianity enter the Communist period with enough resilience to survive the dark valley of 30 years and to flourish since 1980?

After Japan went to war with China in 1937, most missionaries left, but hundreds stayed in “Free China,” beyond Japanese reach, and ministered during the Pacific War. About 1,000 others were interned in camps by the Japanese, where many died, including Eric Liddell of Chariots of Fire fame. Chinese Christians who remained under Japanese rule now suddenly had full responsibility for their churches and fellowships, and many rose to the challenge, developing leadership skills that were later useful under Communism.

In the brief period between the Japanese surrender in August 1945 and the Communist victory in 1949, a few thousand missionaries returned (including David Adeney). By this time the hated treaties were gone, and foreigners were under Chinese law. But after the Communists took the upper hand in the civil war and established their new government, they decided in 1951, in the context of the Korean War, to expel all foreign missionaries. Dramatic stories abound about the extrication of the last missionaries from the remote hinterlands of China.

Thus ended the foreign missions movement in China, but not the Christian movement. From the 1920s on, there had been another, very healthy development: the growth of independent, wholly Chinese-led movements that had roots deep enough for believers to hold fast when the storms came. It is likely that 25 percent of Chinese Protestants were in these independent churches by 1949. They constitute a surprisingly little-known story, with some fascinating personalities.

The fiery evangelist John Sung traveled the country and drew huge crowds. Fundamentalist pastor Wang Mingdao (who would have a fateful clash with the new regime in the 1950s) built his own “tabernacle” for services in Beijing in addition to speaking all over China. Watchman Nee was working out his Holy Spirit–centered theology. Paul Wei, a Beijing cloth dealer, founded the True Jesus Church, which grew explosively. Jing Dianying developed and ruled rural Christian communities of the “Jesus Family,” based on the principles of common ownership and group-directed life. There were important female leaders as well, including Mary Stone. Her Bethel Seminary in Shanghai produced the “Bethel Band” of zealous young musician-evangelists, who spread revival all over China.

Resilient groups of believers carried on, in both the missionary-related and the independent churches. The missionaries were flawed but sincere sowers of the seed; it was left to the Chinese Christians to take their faith into the last half of the 20th century and reap a bountiful harvest in the 1980s and beyond.

John Sung

(1901-44)

The Billy Graham of China

Though his ministry lasted only a dozen years, John Sung blazed a flaming trail of revival across China and most of Southeast Asia. Born the son of a pastor in southern China in 1901, he was sent by his family to the United States for theological study. Instead, he enrolled in a university and went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. A guilty conscience then led him to Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he was converted after hearing a young evangelist whom his fellow students mocked as too simplistic.

As a fresh convert, Sung was so zealous that the seminary president had him committed to an insane asylum. During the next 193 days, he read the Bible 40 times. On his way back to China, he threw almost all his diplomas overboard (except the Ph.D. to show his father) and dedicated himself to full-time evangelistic work.

From 1928 to 1940, Sung traveled all over China and also Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand. He preached to large crowds, some of whom walked long distances in bad weather to hear him. A painful physical ailment sometimes forced him to preach sitting or even lying down. Tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands were converted through his ministry. He never emphasized miracles, but countless people were healed through his prayers after he had preached.

Despite multiple threats on his life, narrow escapes from death, and repeated warnings from powerful people, Sung fearlessly denounced sin and called for total faith in Christ and radical obedience to the Great Commission. Especially in his early years, he often exposed the faults of church leaders publicly; some hated him for it, but many more humbled themselves and changed their lives.

He organized evangelistic teams wherever he went. Those who were moved by his example and teaching formed several Bible schools. He knew that he must strengthen the Chinese church: “One day the Western funds will stop coming, then the churches will be in a dilemma. But only then will the churches in China have revival.”

His recently discovered and translated diaries reveal John Sung to be a man of tender conscience, constant self-examination, daily repentance, and unremitting pursuit of holiness. In the end, his constant travel and preaching took its toll, and he was forced to rest for the last three years of his short life. But during that time he became even more convinced of certain spiritual truths: “For a servant of God to have authority in every sentence he utters, he must first suffer for the message he is to deliver. Without great tribulation, there is no great illumination.”

—G. Wright Doyle, director of the Global China Center and the China Institute

Watchman Nee

(1901-72)

Everything for the Lord

“I want nothing for myself,” said Watchman Nee, “I want everything for the Lord.” These words summed up the life of one of the most important Chinese church leaders, evangelists, writers, and martyrs of the last century.

Nee’s grandfather was a Congregational minister. His mother had been brought up Methodist. He received a Western education in missionary schools and was converted by the powerful preaching of evangelist Dora Yo. Although he was grateful to the missionaries for bringing the gospel to China, Nee was also critical of them and of the state of the Chinese church. He spoke against the church’s superficiality and the inability of some ministers to lead their converts on to spiritual maturity.

Nee formed an independent Christian assembly in Fuzhou in 1922. It practiced believer’s baptism and a weekly Lord’s Supper, and was governed by elders rather than by a single pastor. Nee believed from his reading of the Book of Acts that such an assembly should be the only church in a particular locality. In 1928, he moved his base from Fuzhou to Shanghai, where outsiders nicknamed his group the “Little Flock Church.” His followers formed new evangelistic groups, launching a nationwide movement.

The revival sparked by the Little Flock helped rouse the denominational churches from their complacency and energize them to meet the deeper spiritual needs of the people. Nee emphasized “the priesthood of all believers” and urged the Chinese churches to train their own leadership, develop their own forms of ministry, stop being dependent on foreign financial support, and spread the gospel. These principles prepared Chinese Christians for the terrible conditions they would face under Communism. By 1950, the Little Flock had 70,000 members in 700 assemblies.

Nee became an eloquent, widely-known evangelist and writer who had a gift for calling people to a deeper spiritual life. He believed that a human being is composed of a body, a soul (intellect and emotions), and a spirit (which communes with God), and his teaching stressed the need for spiritual regeneration and sanctification in order to understand Scripture rightly and live in step with the Holy Spirit. His sermons and books—the best known of which is The Normal Christian Life—continue to be published in a number of languages and are read all over the world.

In 1956, Nee was publicly tried, condemned as the head of a “counter-revolutionary clique,” and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He died in May 1972 at a labor camp in the Anhui province. Today, the Little Flock is the largest Christian group in China and has an international following.

—Yading Li, senior associate of the Global China Center

Chapter 7

Ryan Dunch

The former Anglican cathedral in a provincial capital is jammed to the rafters. Dressed in a simple black robe and white surplice, the old deacon leads the congregation through the hymns, liturgy, and announcements that take up the first hour of the service. A thousand voices echo from the unadorned brick walls as they recite the Apostles’ Creed, and the elderly, blind pianist, raised in a Christian orphanage until the Communist victory in 1949, leads her small choir through a lovely rendition of “Alas, and did my Savior bleed?” The young pastor Lin [a pseudonym] is preaching today, and the congregation knows his worth—he would have been ordained two years earlier but for objecting to government interference in a church election. The young family struggled financially as a result, but the damage to his standing with the Religious Affairs officials also raised his credibility with the believers.

Lin’s sermon is short today, by Chinese standards: an exposition of Deuteronomy 33:27, “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms,” truncated to a mere 30 minutes to leave time for baptisms. The candidates for baptism are called forward—nearly 40 of them, from college students and cell-phone-toting entrepreneurs to middle-aged laborers, white-collar workers, and elderly matrons. One by one, they repeat their baptismal vows before the font and are signed with the sign of the cross. Then the pastor presents them to the joyous applause and welcome of the assembly. As always, the sung Doxology—so much more emphatic in Chinese than in English—concludes the liturgy, followed by “Lord, dismiss us with thy blessing” as the pastors and choir recess from the sanctuary.

Pastor Lin and his congregation are but one face of the open churches in the People’s Republic of China, often called the “official” or “TSPM” churches due to their affiliation with the state-sanctioned organizations for Protestant Christians, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the China Christian Council.

For the most part, these churches began as the hard-won fruits of missionary efforts in the century before 1949. Conceived and nurtured through the political breakdown of the ancient Chinese empire, the failure of the first Chinese republic, and the pressures of imperialism, war, and revolution, these churches inherited a rich but ambiguous legacy. On the one hand, they benefited from the commitment and sacrifice of many of the missionaries, and from the institutional riches that mission generosity had made possible: schools and universities, hospitals, publishing houses, and ministries that brought tangible as well as spiritual benefits to Chinese society. But they were also plagued by the question that faces so many of the newer churches around the world: how to honor the work of the missions without remaining beholden to them, to establish their independence from missionary control, and in so doing to reclaim their credibility in the eyes of their countrymen.

An opportunity to reform?

Efforts to forge unity across denominational lines and cultivate Chinese leaders for the churches became especially urgent in the 1930s, as the Great Depression and the outbreak of war wreaked havoc on missionary funding and personnel. The great colleges and hospitals began to seem more like expensive millstones around the slender neck of the young Chinese church than visible symbols of Christian altruism. Similarly, divisions based on European and American denominationalism looked increasingly wasteful in the new climate of scarcity and weakness, as the new independent Chinese churches, such as Watchman Nee’s Little Flock, were apt to point out.

Independence, patriotism, unity, and sustainability were thus already major issues for the Protestant churches well before the Communist revolution of 1949. Following the revolution, many Chinese Christian leaders saw the new political reality as an opportunity to address them.

In April 1950, six months into the new regime, a delegation of prominent Protestant educators, editors, and denominational leaders traveled to Beijing to meet with the country’s new masters. It was already clear by this time that schools, hospitals, and other church-run social enterprises would be taken over by the socialist state, but the future of the churches as religious entities was more hopeful. With the subtlety and diplomacy for which he would become famous, the Premier, Zhou Enlai, reassured them of the new government’s good intentions toward Christians—and also spelled out the government’s expectations that the churches would free themselves from imperialist influences and embrace the new political order.

The Protestant leader who embraced this call for internal reform most enthusiastically was Y. T. Wu (Wu Yao-tsung or Wu Yaozong, 1893–1979), who became the dominant figure in the Three-Self Patriotic Movement until the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966. Wu was a YMCA secretary, author, and Christian magazine editor who had converted to Christianity in his youth. He was a man of strong convictions, influenced by the social gospel and the ethical teachings of Jesus, and impatient with the caution and the more conservative, supernaturally-oriented theology of the churches. For Wu, the new era offered the prospect of purging the Chinese church of its links with American and European imperialism and making it truly independent, under the slogan of the “three selves”: self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating.

In consultation with Premier Zhou, Wu and his colleagues published the “Christian Manifesto,” which argued that Christianity in China had been used as a tool of imperialism and called on Protestants to renounce foreign missionary ties and to support the new government. The nationwide signature campaign that followed gathered 400,000 signatures for the manifesto, and in effect marked the beginning of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement.

Taking shape in the tense political atmosphere after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, the movement was an association of individual Protestants dedicated to the internal reform of the church, but it quickly came to be regarded by the government as the body responsible for keeping the Protestant churches patriotic and independent of foreign control. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it oversaw the denunciation of missionaries, the weakening of denominational structures in favor of the TSPM, and the closure of first rural and then “surplus” urban churches in the name of consolidation.

These developments closely mirrored broader political pressures in the nation, as China’s Communist leaders struggled to define the correct Marxist direction for the country. Profound fissures opened up within the leadership over many issues, including the place of religion in a socialist society. Tensions came to a head in 1966, when Chairman Mao Zedong launched the unprecedented social upheaval known as the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” The Cultural Revolution was simultaneously Mao’s way of toppling his opponents within the party leadership and a mass outpouring of revolutionary enthusiasm, particularly among the young. Mao believed that 17 years of socialism had not succeeded in purifying China of the evils of class society, and he incited the revolutionary masses to attack his political enemies and eliminate all cultural vestiges of the old society from the Communist utopia.

Open religious life of all sorts was suppressed entirely during the following 10 years, all churches were closed, and church leaders were attacked, criticized, and sent to the countryside to reform themselves through productive labor. The long history of Christianity in China had ended in the final extinction of the church, it seemed.

A new national church

After Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, the Communist Party retreated from Mao’s radical vision of complete socialist purity and embarked on a course of economic reforms and limited political liberalization. Toleration for religious worship was reinstated from 1978, in order to accommodate the small remnant of elderly religious believers that Communist Party leaders thought remained. That expectation was soon confounded as religious activities of all sorts gathered influence and adherents, including among the young. Thirty years later, the Chinese government continues to struggle with how to manage this new reality.

Among Protestant Christians, the change in policy was both a source of rejoicing and an opportunity to move forward more positively than had been the case before 1966. Party policy still insisted that Protestants must be loyal to the Communist state and independent of foreign control and funding. It also insisted that all church affairs should be supervised by a nationwide “patriotic religious organization” answerable to the Party. For many Protestants, however, the TSPM savored of political extremism due to the role it had played in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, it had always been an association of individuals rather than churches. Many of the more radical leaders of that period had passed from the scene (Y. T. Wu died in late 1979). Accordingly, in 1980 the new Protestant leadership founded the China Christian Council to serve as the national ecclesiastical expression of the Protestant churches in China. In practice, the two organizations have overlapped considerably in personnel and responsibilities, and they are often referred to together as the TSPM/CCC. Local differences in worship style persisted, but denominational structures were not restored, and the Chinese church became officially “post-denominational.”

The new church leaders faced immense challenges. They had to locate the deeds of church properties that had been expropriated during the Cultural Revolution and persuade the local authorities to return these premises to the Protestants for worship. They had to restore regular worship across China’s vast territory, both in areas where the officials were relatively cooperative and in the many regions where Party leaders still thought of religious believers as retrograde blemishes on socialist society. They had to persuade the people of a poor country to begin financially supporting church work again. They had to renew contacts between the Chinese churches and Christians abroad, yet without compromising the independence of the Chinese church. Most pressing of all, they had to train a new generation of Christian workers after 30 years of limited and then zero theological education.

It was fitting, then, that the man who emerged as the key leader of the TSPM/CCC in post-Mao China was a theological educator, Bishop K. H. Ting (Ding Guangxun, born 1915), president of the Jinling Union Seminary in Nanjing. An Anglican bishop with graduate degrees from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in New York, Ting was a different sort of leader than Y. T. Wu. His intelligence and tact made him able to gain the respect of Communists, Christians of different stripes, and leaders of other religions. Ting’s Christian faith was also more spiritual in orientation than Wu’s, and he was able to work with evangelicals as well as more liberal elements within the church.

Over the 1980s, Ting became increasingly vocal in advocating for the interests of the church and against some of the more clumsy efforts by government and Party authorities to control church affairs—including early efforts to create a registration system for churches. He also came to acknowledge frankly the existence of Protestants in China outside of the TSPM/CCC aegis. Ting retired in 1997 at age 82. Christians both inside and outside of China will debate his legacy for a long time to come, but the importance of his leadership cannot be denied.

Imperfect, vital ministry

Comprising at least 32,000 churches, 16,000 meeting points, and 18 million worshippers (according to 2004 figures), the TSPM/CCC is larger and more diverse than any single denomination in the U.S.A. With only 2,600 ordained ministers (one per twenty congregations), the shortage of trained pastoral leadership remains dire. Yet the growth of the church has been remarkable by any standards, and does not appear to be abating. The Amity Foundation, the social service arm of the TSPM/CCC churches, has published over 50 million Bibles in Chinese since the mid-1980s.

The current Chinese Constitution (adopted in 1982) grants “freedom of religious belief,” but only specifies that right as belonging to the individual citizen. It refers to, but does not define, “normal religious activities.” These two items have been pressure points in religious policy and law ever since. Article 36 reads as follows:

Independence, patriotism, unity, and sustainability persist as perennial issues for the Chinese church. The relationship between the church and China’s authoritarian state is likewise a major challenge for church leaders, whether in the open churches or the unregistered ones. So also is discerning the line between unregistered Protestants and the quasi-Christian new religious movements that have been proliferating in China over the last 20 years. For all these challenges, the churches affiliated with the TSPM/CCC occupy an essential place as the main publicly-visible expression of Protestant Christianity in Chinese society. Like all churches, the TSPM/CCC church reflects the Christian gospel imperfectly, but it is vital for China’s Christians and for Christian witness within Chinese society.

Marcus Cheng (Chen Chonggui)

(1884-1963)

An evangelical patriot and critic

The ideals of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement appealed to evangelicals as well as to mainline Protestants in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. The life of Marcus Cheng exemplifies this. Cheng, the son of a poor artisan, grew up as a Christian in the small independent Swedish Covenant Church mission. He earned his B.A. at Wheaton College in Illinois, then returned to China and went on to become a leading evangelical educator and evangelist. In 1943, Cheng founded a seminary in the wartime capital, Chongqing (Chungking), and as its president was one of the most respected national figures among conservative Protestants when the Communists came to power.

Cheng was also a patriot. He agreed that China’s churches needed to purge themselves of their imperialist and bourgeois ties, and he denounced the “imperialist distortion of Christianity” which had kept Christians aloof from the revolution. He became one of the founding members of the TSPM. “Formerly I was ‘above politics,’ [but] I now have a real concern for politics and the economic reconstruction of our country,” he wrote in 1952.

As a high-profile evangelical, Cheng also became a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a non-Communist advisory organ of the government. In 1957, the Communist Party called for people to offer their criticisms and suggestions on the work of the government, under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend.” In March of that year, Cheng made a strong speech on the floor of the CPPCC in which he complained of the haughty and blasphemous attitude taken toward Christians by some government workers. Contention between theism and atheism was to be expected, he argued, but should be carried out “without abuse or name-calling.” The speech received national media coverage.

But the Pandora’s box of criticism opened up by the “Hundred Flowers” movement quickly exceeded the comfort level of Party leaders, and a purge of “rightist” elements followed. Many prominent intellectuals and social leaders fell from grace. Cheng came under attack as a leading rightist in Protestant circles. He lost his leadership positions in the church and the CPPCC from that time until his death in Beijing in 1963.

Chapter 8

Tony Lambert

On the eve of the Communist victory in 1949, there were around one million Protestants (of all denominations) in China. In 2007, even the most conservative official polls reported 40 million, and these do not take into account the millions of secret Christians in the Communist Party and the government. What accounts for this astounding growth? Many observers point to the role of Chinese house churches.

The house-church movement began in the pre-1949 missionary era. New converts—especially in evangelical missions like the China Inland Mission and the Christian & Missionary Alliance—would often meet in homes. Also, the rapidly growing independent churches, such as the True Jesus Church, the Little Flock, and the Jesus Family, stressed lay ministry and evangelism. The Little Flock had no pastors, relying on every “brother” to lead ministry, and attracted many educated city people and students who were dissatisfied with the traditional foreign missions and denominations. The Jesus Family practiced communal living and attracted the rural poor. These independent churches were uniquely placed to survive, and eventually flourish, in the new, strictly-controlled environment.

In the early 1950s, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement eliminated denominations and created a stifling political control over the dwindling churches. Many believers quietly began to pull out of this system. They chose to meet in homes, although such activity was highly dangerous. According to a Communist source, by the mid-1950s these groups had grown to be “more numerous than all the other Protestant churches combined.”

In 1953, the chairman of the Communist-controlled Religious Affairs Bureau attacked the “rapid growth of meetings in the home” as “suspicious.” By 1958, the year of enforced “church unity,” the TSPM was prohibiting house churches altogether: “All so-called ‘churches,’ ‘worship-halls’ and ‘family-meetings’ which have been established without the permission of the government must be dissolved.”

At “accusation meetings,” Christians were encouraged to denounce their own leaders as “lackeys of Western imperialism.” Despite this, a number of key evangelical leaders took a stand against Communist Party interference in church affairs. Wang Mingdao, pastor of the independent Christian Tabernacle in Beijing, accused Y. T. Wu (the first chairman of the TSPM) and his later successor Bishop K. H. Ting of denying the basic doctrines of evangelical faith. Wang was imprisoned for 23 years. In the south, Baptist-trained Lin Xiangao (later known as Pastor Lamb) was also imprisoned and sent to do slave labor in the coal mines. Allen Yuan in Beijing was sent to labor camp for opposing the TSPM. Many others were also persecuted. It is very doubtful whether the church would have survived in China without their sterling testimony and patient, Christ-like suffering in the dark days under Mao.

The crucible

Helen Willis, the last Protestant missionary to leave China in 1959, reported that Christians in Shanghai were meeting “frequently in twos and threes to pray, often with tears and much earnestness.” Some even met every Sunday in a home to share the Lord’s Supper. In 1962, four years after most churches had been closed, a Chinese writer in the Hong Kong Standard described informal Christian activities springing up in many places, despite persecution:

There seems little doubt that the long nightmare of the Cultural Revolution (officially 1966–76, although the period of major violence and anarchy lasted only from 1966 to 1969) was the crucible from which the Chinese house churches emerged spiritually refined and poised to spread the gospel across the nation. For an even longer period (1966–79), all church buildings were closed and Christian activities were banned. Bibles were burnt, and many church leaders (including TSPM pastors) were imprisoned for long years in labor camps. Meeting for prayer and Bible study was extremely dangerous. Miners met in the depths of the northern coal mines, their hymnbooks and scribbled Bible verses disguised as Mao’s “Little Red Book.” Miao Christian tribespeople in the far southwest hid Bibles in mountain caves to which they climbed for secret meetings.

While the official church was moribund, the house churches kept alight the flame of Christian witness. The church survived as a lay movement, often led by poorly educated Bible women who memorized Scripture and passed on the faith to family members and (if they dared) to neighbors and friends.

Reports from underground

By the early 1970s, the full force of the Cultural Revolution was spent. In 1971–72, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon visited China, and two places of worship for foreign Protestants and Roman Catholics living in Beijing were opened. The general situation for Chinese Christians was still extremely tight, but by now the first reports of house-church activities were leaking out to Hong Kong, mainly from coastal provinces.

In 1972, a report from southern Fujian said that meetings were more open but were still held only with relatives and close friends. Later reports spoke of 200–300 mainly young people attending Christian meetings in unfurnished rural buildings, as well as a community of over 1,000 believers that had sprung up over the last four years. Many had been converted, including at least one Communist cadre.

In 1974, there were reports of 50,000 Christians meeting in Wenzhou, Zhejiang—now known as the “Jerusalem of China” because of its explosive church growth. These groups became increasingly organized throughout the ’70s and held regular Bible studies, witnessing meetings, prayer meetings, training sessions, and seasonal Christian retreats. Early reports of house-church activities in the Wenzhou area have recently been confirmed by the Chinese scholar Li Feng:

House churches were active not only in coastal provinces but also in central, rural provinces like Henan. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, a number of charismatic peasant leaders, such as Zhang Rongliang, Xu Yongze, and Brother Shen, emerged in the Henan house churches. Their evangelism and leadership were so successful that the Fangcheng Church, the New Birth Church (popularly known as “weepers”), and the China Gospel Fellowship each now claim several million members, as do two similar networks based in the neighboring province of Anhui. Since the 1980s, they have expanded their evangelistic activities all over China as far as Tibet and Xinjiang in the far west and Hainan in the far south.

Expansion and persecution

In 1978, the new Communist leader Deng Xiaoping “reversed the verdicts” concerning the millions of people (including Christians) who had been unjustly persecuted during the Mao era. Soon after, the TSPM was formally resuscitated and the first places of Christian worship were officially reopened. For the next few years, the house-church movement saw colossal expansion. Many early leaders, such as Wang Mingdao, were released from prison and provided biblical teaching and godly counsel for the burgeoning movement. Pastor Lamb was released in 1978 and returned to Guangzhou. Today, 30 years later, he leads a flourishing house church of some 3,000 people in the heart of the city.

In 1982, however, the Communist Party published “Document 19” on the control of religious affairs. This stated that “so far as Christians carrying out religious activities in house meetings are concerned, they should in principle not be permitted, but they should not be rigidly stopped. Through work undertaken by the patriotic religious personnel [i.e., TSPM and CCC] to persuade the religious masses, other suitable arrangements should be made.” Although various refinements have been added in the last 25 years, this still remains the basic policy of the government toward the house churches. In principle they are frowned on, but in practice the actual implementation of the policy varies considerably from time to time and place to place.

During the government’s “anti-spiritual pollution campaign” in 1983, hundreds of house-church leaders and evangelists were arrested and some were sent to labor camps. Although by 1984 the campaign was brought to a halt, the government has sought periodically over the last two decades to enforce registration of all house churches, which means (with a few exceptions) supervision under the TSPM. Although a few independent house churches have applied, the majority have decided to remain unregistered. They believe that the liberty to worship and evangelize free of Communist Party interference is worth the risk of harassment.

At the grass-roots level, however, there is often little difference between registered and unregistered Christians. Many registered churches can trace their origins back to small home-meetings that outgrew their original meeting places and applied for official recognition in order to build larger church buildings. And many of these “official” churches continue to run home-meetings in the cities and to be responsible for pastoral work and preaching in house churches in the suburbs and in the countryside. Local churches in both circles exhibit a fervent Christ-centered, Bible-based faith expressing itself in evangelism and, increasingly, holistic ministry impacting society. Preaching, prayer, evangelism, healing and caring for the sick, visitation, and practical support ministries (such as clinics, old people’s homes, ministries to HIV/AIDS victims and drug addicts, and disaster relief) all flourish.

A new urban face

Since Deng Xiaoping restored limited religious freedom, the house churches have developed in unforeseen ways. In the early days, the center of gravity was largely in the rural areas, where even the leaders were often farmers with only primary school or lower–middle school education and virtually no Bible or theological training at all. This led to needless dissension over secondary issues and left many churches open to the devastating inroads of cults such as “Eastern Lightning.” In recent years, the torrent of migrant workers from the rural areas into the cities has left many rural churches facing a crisis in leadership and even membership.

Today, the cutting edge of Christian ministry in China has moved from the villages to the cities, many of which are less than 1% Christian. A new wave of students and graduates, including those who were converted and received theological training overseas, provide dynamic leadership. In two decades or less, 50% of China will be urban. Many house churches are already spiritually experienced and well equipped to take up this challenge. So far, although they minister in an increasingly materialistic society, their zeal shows no sign of abating.

Wang Mingdao

(1900-91)

No compromise

Wang Mingdao was born in Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion. His mother named him “Iron”—a name that foreshadowed his courageous life. He became a Christian at the age of 14 and later gave up his dream of being a politician to devote himself to Christian ministry. At one point he retreated to Beijing’s western hills and read through the Bible six times in 62 days—giving him a deep love for Scripture that grounded his preaching.

Wang worked to build an independent church with its own leaders, its own financial support, and its own evangelistic efforts. By 1949, his Christian Tabernacle (originally a small household gathering) had grown to 570 members, making it one of the largest evangelical churches in Beijing. Wang became widely known as an evangelist and speaker across China. He emphasized doctrinal purity and took a firm stand against any form of political involvement, believing the church and the state to have separate functions. Only the gospel could save his people.

During the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), Beijing fell under the control of the Japanese army, which sought to control the churches of North China. Wang was invited to join the Japanese-led Chinese Christian Federation of North China, but he declined on the grounds that his church was already an indigenous church, not pro-British or pro-American. The Japanese threatened him so many times that he kept a coffin in his house to prepare for the possible consequence of his stance. But the authorities took no action against him. This amazing turn of events, interpreted by Wang as divine protection, strengthened his willingness to be a martyr.

When the Communists came to power in 1949, Wang continued to stay away from politics and refused to join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. His reasons were not political but theological: Many in the TSPM had been influenced by modernism, which denied the inerrancy of the Bible and the miraculous elements in it. He wrote articles arguing that the so-called “imperialist poison” of the missionaries was for the most part the truth of the Bible: “We are ready to pay any price to preserve the Word of God. . . . Don’t give way, don’t compromise!” For such nonconformity, Wang, his wife, and other young Christians from his church were arrested at gunpoint in 1955 and taken to prison.

After being confined in a prison cell for a period of time, Wang cracked and signed a statement confessing that he was a criminal and promising to join the TSPM. He was released, but he felt he had betrayed Christ like the apostle Peter and grieved bitterly. He revoked his previous confessions as forced lies, and for this he was imprisoned and tortured repeatedly for the next 22 years.

Wang was released in 1979—old, toothless, and nearly blind and deaf. He lived in Shanghai with his wife and son, and regularly held meetings with Christians in their small apartment until he died on July 28, 1991. He is widely recognized as one of the most influential and respected Chinese Christian leaders of the 20th century.

—Yading Li

Chapter 9

Kim-Kwong Chan

In the early 1950s, the Chinese Catholic Church and the new Chinese government were on a collision course. The government regarded the Catholic Church as a form of Western interference in China. Catholics regarded the Communists as ideological archenemies out to destroy the church. This tension was tragically apparent in the fate of the Chinese Jesuit priest Bede Cheung. Fr. Cheung organized the Catholic Youth Movement and became the leading Catholic figure to resist the government’s attempt to create a “patriotic” (pro-Communist) Catholic organization. He was arrested in 1951 and died in jail three months later. When his family came to retrieve his body for burial, eyewitnesses reported that his body was broken almost beyond recognition and showed signs of torture. His death became an icon of loyalty to the Catholic faith and gave many others the courage to confront the government—courage that was much needed in the violent decades that followed.

Standoff

The government’s suspicion of the Chinese Catholic Church as serving “Western” interests was not ungrounded. Catholicism had come to China in the 1300s and been revived by missionaries like Matteo Ricci in the late 1500s. In the early 1920s, the Chinese Catholic Church had more than a million believers and thousands of clergy. But in 1922, even though 40% of clergy were Chinese, all 41 bishops in China were foreigners. Pope Pius XI finally appointed two Chinese bishops and issued an encyclical affirming that church leadership should be transferred from missionaries to local leaders as soon as possible. In 1949, however, Chinese bishops were still in the minority. The tension between the new Communist regime and the Chinese Catholic Church was heightened by Pope Pius XII, who ordered Catholics all over the world to resist Communism even to the point of death.

After all foreign missionaries were expelled from China, many Chinese dioceses were left vacant. Any new Chinese bishop had to be approved by Rome and was required to take an anti-government position—which meant that these bishops were soon arrested. Meanwhile, the government rallied some Chinese Catholics to establish a “patriotic” Catholic movement in order to lead Catholics toward a more pro-government position.

Chinese Catholics were squeezed between the authority of the papacy and the authority of the Chinese government. If they remained loyal to the pope, they would be seen as traitors by the government and almost certainly face incarceration. If they were loyal to their country, they faced rejection and even excommunication by the church. Throughout the 1950s, neither Rome nor Beijing would back down.

Deepening divide

In 1957, Chinese clergy held a national conference hoping to find a way to ensure the survival of the Catholic Church in China. Even those loyal to Rome lamented its paternalistic and highhanded attitude toward the Chinese church. As one senior member said, “Those old folks do not know the situation here. The best thing for them to do would be not to give orders imprudently. We are no children; we know what is right and wrong.”

The final straw came in 1958, when several Chinese bishops were consecrated without papal approval. Those responsible believed it was the only option if the Catholic Church was to continue to function in Communist China; Pope Pius XII believed it was a challenge to his authority and excommunicated the disobedient clergy. Soon afterward, the government formed the Catholic Patriotic Association, commonly called the Patriotic Church (similar to the TSPM for Protestants).

Those who refused to join the Patriotic Church continued their religious activities in secret and often ended up in jail. One such dissenter was Bishop Dominic Deng Yiming, later the archbishop of Guangzhou (Canton), who spent 22 years in jail—17 of those years in solitary confinement.

During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, all Catholics, regardless of whether they were pro-government or pro-Rome, experienced a catastrophic suppression. Public Catholic activity disappeared. Many priests and nuns were forced to marry. Chinese Catholics felt abandoned by the rest of Christendom.

When China reopened churches in the late 1970s, the division between Catholics reared its head again. The Patriotic Church re-emerged, began consecrating new bishops, and rapidly grew. At the same time, the pope issued a secret order allowing Chinese clergy in the underground church to appoint their own successors in a more flexible manner than in the past. The two groups fought over their legitimacy. Each side developed its own leadership, parishes, and seminaries. The schism intensified when the pope prohibited the pro-Rome faction from having any contact with the pro-government faction—despite their common suffering during the Cultural Revolution, common witness to the gospel in Chinese society, and common task of caring for the increasing Catholic population in China.

The need for reconciliation

Catholics in China must deal with deep emotional wounds as they come to terms with decades of bitterness and mistrust on both sides. Underground Catholics still face arrest. They believe they have paid a high cost in blood to preserve the true faith. If the Chinese Catholic Church becomes unified again and these underground Catholics find themselves sitting side-by-side with Patriotic Catholics, they will feel betrayed by Rome—their suffering would have been in vain.

But the patriotic faction feels that they, too, have suffered in their constant struggle to make a space for the public witness of the Catholic Church under a totalitarian regime. They have felt misunderstood by other Catholics as well as rejected, abandoned, and wrongly punished by Rome, which perhaps did not fully appreciate the difficult situation in which they were living.

One fine bishop is so respected by both factions that an underground prelate wrote personally to Rome pleading for him to be approved. As the bishop was consecrated, without papal ratification, he told this author that he was fully aware that he would be bearing a heavy cross. But this is the cross of the Catholic Church in China—the cross of discrimination, misunderstanding, judgmental accusation, historical wounds, and the experience of being forsaken.

Still, there are some signs of rapprochement. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a letter to Chinese Catholics urging the very thing the two sides most need: forgiveness.

Chapter 10

Stacey Bieler and Carol Lee Hamrin

For more than 100 years, China’s tiny cultural elite has wrestled with the role of Christianity in society. Traditional scholars educated a century ago in state-sponsored Confucianism tended to reject Christianity as a foreign teaching. But the new professionals of the 1910s and ’20s, as well as the growing middle class in the last 20 years, have been attracted to Christianity as a way to build a strong, modern China. Their initial question is often, “What can Christianity do for China?” For some, this utilitarian approach becomes a personal spiritual journey. The pattern has been a tidal wave of interest in times of political upheaval, followed by a low tide, often due to anti-Western nationalism. The third of these high tides is surging in Chinese society today.

The golden age of Protestantism

One hundred years ago, scholar-officials lost hope for reviving the Qing dynasty. Since China had to compete with the West on its own terms to survive as a nation, families began to send their children to Western-style, often Christian, schools in China and the U.S. The modern education offered English, science, and new professions such as medicine, law and journalism. A Christian moral curriculum was often an intrinsic part of the package.

The YMCA brought in Western lecturers on science and social issues, attracting the general public as well as students. Christian voluntary associations led movements against social evils like foot binding and the opium trade and offered social services to poor farmers and migrant workers. T. M. Fan, a Chinese reformer, was the editor of popular Christian magazines that promoted character building and public morality.

The 1911 Revolution, which established the Republic of China, was led by a Western-educated Christian medical doctor, Sun Yat-sen. He is honored today as the “father of the nation.” Despite the turbulent years that followed, civil society flowered, and Christianity was part of a worldwide wave of optimistic faith in gradual human progress through education, citizenship, and social reforms. Such hopes receded after Chinese national interests were betrayed at the end of World War I, when the West ceded some of China’s territory to Japan’s control. In 1922, Communists and anarchists protested the Conference of World Student Christian Federations in Beijing. After three other anti-Christian movements, many missionaries left China.

Revival in wartime universities

Christianity next spread rapidly among educated Chinese during the civil war of 1945–49. China Inter-Varsity Evangelical Christian Students Fellowship (IV-China) was inaugurated in July 1945 at a summer conference in Chongqing, the wartime capital. There were 160 students representing 40 of China’s 60 universities present.

Calvin Chao (Zhao Junying), the general secretary of IV-China, held powerful evangelistic campaigns in Chengdu, Sichuan province, the home of two great universities and the wartime refuge for five others. One hundred sixty eight students became Christians in four days. Their hearts and minds were open after living as refugees and seeing the desperate poverty in the mountains of southwestern China. In July 1947, 350 students from every Chinese university gathered for an IV conference outside of Nanjing. Chao opened with a reminder that Christians must prepare to be persecuted for the name of Jesus. Closing testimonies sparked a revival among the students.

Despite the growing political tensions, student work continued on almost 80 campuses, with Bible classes, retreats, and radio broadcasts. Teaching focused on 1 Peter, which had prepared the first-century church for persecution, and on prayer. The Nationalists were suspicious that IV-China was hiding Communists among its members, and the Communists wanted to crush the students’ allegiance to Christ. Campus workers sponsored the first (and last) city-wide evangelistic campaign in Beijing in the summer of 1948 and established soup kitchens and outreach in the city’s refugee camps.

After the Communist takeover in 1949, faculty, staff, and students had to attend political study groups. Yet students were able to keep holding prayer meetings and conferences until 1955, when silence fell. The series of political campaigns culminating in the Cultural Revolution targeted the elite classes, trying to break their allegiances to the West. From 1966 to 1976, all schools were closed, and professors and students were sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants.

When schools and churches began to reopen in 1978–79, many Chinese thanked the missionaries who had helped them prepare for persecution: “What you did for us in Peking [Beijing] was exactly right for us young Chinese Christians at that time.” One medical student, who had maintained a steady witness despite 12 years in prison, became a cancer researcher and leader of numerous house churches. Professor Feng Xizhang, a prominent U.S.-trained nuclear physicist, resurfaced in retirement to lead Bible classes in the university district church, mentoring the next generation of lay leaders.

Spiritual search after Mao

By 1980, official education exchanges restarted. Older scholars went abroad at first, followed by graduate students, until nearly 100,000 were overseas in any given year. Fascination with the West prompted curiosity about its cultural roots in Christianity.

After attending a church service in Cambridge, England, in 1979, the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi wrote, “Chinese intellectuals know something about the Renaissance, but very little about the Reformation. . . . The Reformation was certainly no less influential than the Renaissance, and in fact the two are inseparably linked.” A decade later, Fang sought refuge in the American embassy in Beijing after being blamed for instigating the Democracy Movement—a series of mass protests led by students and intellectuals calling for government reform.

On June 4, 1989, the Chinese army crushed the demonstration in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds of young people and arresting many. This violence, followed by the collapse of European Communism in 1990–91, dashed many people’s hopes for gradual democratic reform. They began to take Christian teaching more seriously since it offered a realistic understanding of sin. “Christianity fever” spread rapidly. Western teachers of English in China played a major role in demonstrating and explaining the power of self-giving love.

Before the June Fourth tragedy, Chinese scholars and students in North America had begun to attend English classes, potlucks, and Bible studies hosted by campus ministry workers. However, many carried deep scars from the Maoist past and were loath to trust any doctrine again. They also knew that their actions were being monitored and might be used against them when they returned to China. But after 1989, many more Chinese abroad became Christians. Magazines in Chinese for both seekers (Overseas Campus) and believers (Christian Life Quarterly) offered convincing testimonies. One Chinese scholar wrote, “I personally believe that China would have no future without embracing Christianity.” Over time, Chinese graduates who stayed in the U.S. as young working professionals formed their own churches.

A number of pro-democracy activists who escaped China in 1989 became Christians. Yuan Zhiming wrote how shocked he was to experience the fierce infighting for power and fame among his pro-democracy comrades, and also to discover that their idealized Western society was flawed. Yuan experienced unconditional love for the first time in a Princeton Bible study group. He was baptized and entered seminary. He concluded that economic modernization and democratic institutions were useless without personal rebirth and a transcendent faith in God’s ultimate authority. To this end, Yuan has produced a series of powerful films that are reaching thousands of Chinese for Christ.

By the late 1990s, Protestantism was growing faster in China than any other belief system. Urban house churches, spawned by groups that proliferated on campuses through the 1990s, provide a support system for young professionals and their families as well as returned scholars. Though these Christian groups are not registered with the government, they meet in apartments, rent commercial space for special events, and are trained through Chinese language seminaries throughout the Asia-Pacific. They participate in the burgeoning “virtual community” of Christian websites, databases, blogs, online counseling, and prayer chat rooms.

Christianity is touching all sectors and levels of society. University humanities departments have generated nearly 100 religious study centers, and conferences and field research have begun to explore the relations between faith and economics, or religion and law. Some faculty members have become “hidden” Christians, who like other state employees cannot yet risk being baptized or attending church. Chinese Christian writers and artists are beginning to compose their own novels, poetry, music, and drama. Both of the founders of the China branch of PEN, the international writers’ association, are Christians. One prominent journalist and social critic is no longer surprised when her friends announce, “Wo xin jiao,” literally meaning, “I’m a religious believer”—everyone knows this means they are new Christians.

A growing number of new Protestants are surfacing in the legal profession. They want to build a legal culture through public education and pursuit of justice in the courts. Many are inspired by Martin Luther King’s Christian principles of nonviolent resistance. Even business professionals are sharing their testimonies in glossy business magazines in China. Mr. Cao is one of several self-made millionaires who have found a new identity and hope in Christ and who now fund health and education projects for the rural poor.

The emerging church in China

As the Chinese search for a new social philosophy in this new century, China’s resurrected church brings hope for the future. Public opinion about Christianity has turned from negative to positive. Believers report, “Many people, including high government officials, have the opinion that Christians have an important role in dealing with matters such as family, marriage, interpersonal relationships, drug abuse, and alcoholism.”

People want to build up a new public morality to combat rampant self-centeredness, sexual license, materialism, corruption, and cynicism. One professor of religion believes that only the Christian framework offers both higher purpose for the individual and positive social values, helps Chinese identify with global modernity, and preserves conservative moral values, including the priority of the family. A senior researcher who has surveyed Beijing Christians concluded that the Christian spirit of humbly loving God and loving others “can help people to transcend themselves and become better persons. It is only through the individual Christian who acts as ‘salt and light’ that Christian influence can be achieved.”

Mary Stone (Shi Meiyu)

(1873–1954)

A healing gospel

Nothing was ordinary about Mary Stone’s life. Her parents were among the first Christian converts in central China; her father was a Methodist pastor (martyred during the Boxer Rebellion) and her mother the principal of a Methodist girls’ school. Mary was one of the first girls whose feet were left unbound despite the risk to her marriage prospects. She and her friend Ida Kahn became two of the first three Chinese women to obtain a medical degree in the U.S. She also became the first Chinese woman ordained in central China.

When Mary and Ida returned to China in 1896, they set up a mission clinic and nurses’ training center in the Yangzi River port of Jiujiang. Within months they were overwhelmed by the demand. At times they treated 5,000 patients per month. “Although we were so rushed that we did not even sit together to eat our regular meals,” Mary wrote in a letter, “yet we felt it was the happiest Christmas we have ever had.”

Mary served the mission hospital for 25 years, first with Ida and then with American missionary Jennie Hughes, with whom she adopted four orphans and gave foster care to others. Whole families and villages became Christian as a result of her ministry. She was known for her radiant smile.

In the 1920s, Mary and Jennie resigned from the Methodist Women’s Foreign Missionary Society because they objected to modernist trends in doctrine, which Mary called the “rice Christianity” of social action without faith. They launched the nondenominational Shanghai Bethel Mission to reflect their “old fashioned faith.” Their work grew to include not only a church and the Bible college run by Jennie, but also Mary’s hospital and China’s largest nursing school, primary and secondary schools, a clinic for poor migrant workers in Shanghai’s industrial area, and eventually several homes for war orphans.

Dr. Mary Stone can be given much credit for the revivals of the 1930s and ’40s that built up the independent Chinese church and sustained it through decades of war and revolution. The Bethel evangelistic bands traversed the nation. After the Japanese attack in 1937 destroyed the Shanghai compound, Mary set up a base in Pasadena, California, to raise money to support Bethel Mission in Hong Kong. In the post-Mao era, the Chinese Christian leaders her mission trained have gone back to China, providing teaching and financial support for the massive revival of today’s church.

James Yen (Yan Yangchu)

(1893-1990)

A new heart for the nation

James Yen, an athletic young man with an energetic smile, had become a Christian as a boy while studying at a CIM school in Sichuan. After graduating from Yale University in 1918, he did literacy work with Chinese laborers in France. He vowed that he would devote his life to the “release of the pent-up, God-given powers in the people. . . . When we have a new heart, we become new people, and then we have a new society, then there is a new nation.”

Yen returned to China in 1920 and started the Mass Education Movement (MEM), recruiting volunteer teachers and using a set of four readers with 1,000 Chinese characters. The YMCA and YWCA eagerly used the new resource, and the MEM spread.

James and his wife Alice, who was born and educated in the U.S., wanted their lives to reflect John 1:14: “The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” So they left the big city to live in the poverty-stricken countryside in Dingxian, a county of 400 villages north of Beijing. They wanted to address all four interlocking problems of village life: illiteracy, disease, poverty, and misgovernment. Yen convinced American-trained Chinese graduates in agriculture, education, drama, medicine, and political science to live and work in the primitive conditions of Dingxian. This living example of humble service was contagious. In 1933, 180 delegates from 14 provinces came there for a National Christian Rural Reconstruction Seminar. During the Japanese occupation, the MEM opened the National College of Rural Reconstruction near Chongqing, the wartime capital of Free China during the Japanese occupation.

In 1943, Yen was honored at Carnegie Hall on the 400th anniversary of the death of Copernicus, along with nine other “modern revolutionaries” including Albert Einstein, Orville Wright, Walt Disney, and Henry Ford.

After the Communist victory in 1949, James moved to New York and then started rural work in the Philippines. In 1960, he founded the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR) and spent the next 30 years improving the lives of thousands of poor farm families in the Philippines, Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia. Recently James Yen was honored on Chinese television as one of the outstanding Chinese leaders of the 20th century, and books on his approaches to development have been published. Today, IIRR is working in Yunnan, one of China’s poorest provinces.

Yifang Wu

(1893-1985)

Abundant life

Yifang Wu graduated as student president of the first class of Jinling College for Women in Nanjing, the first and largest college for women in China. She had become a Christian there after a family financial crisis and several suicides left her alone in the world. Wu later recalled how a Christian classmate’s “loving sympathy for me uplifted me out of self-imposed isolation. . . . Gradually I understood the real meaning of life and learned to aim at a worthy life purpose.” She and her classmates helped choose the school’s motto, “Abundant Life” (from John 10:10), which she made her own.

After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, she became president of Jinling—the first Chinese woman to hold a college presidency. In the 1930s and 1940s, Wu became involved in national and international circles, working on war relief with Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, and meeting reformer Jane Addams and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She served twice as president of the National Christian Council. As the only woman on a senior government advisory committee, she inspired women nationwide with a living example of capability, humility, and compassion. In 1945, Wu was the only woman in the Chinese delegation helping to draft the U.N. Charter, and the first woman to sign it.

Worried about what Communist rule might mean for Christian institutions, she chose to stay and try to keep Jinling open. After all Christian schools were merged into secular state institutions, Wu served in provincial education posts, government-sanctioned Protestant and women’s associations, and the National People’s Congress. She was sent to do manual labor and undergo thought reform during the Cultural Revolution, but she retained her faith and her commitment to the transformative power of education, pointing with pride to the high percentage of Jinling graduates among China’s senior intellectuals.

Chapter 11

Anonymous

My grandfather, a country doctor in north China, became the first Christian in our family through a CIM missionary. Later, he also became the first member of my family to suffer persecution when he was tortured to death during the 1947–48 Communist land reform.

My father, the eldest son, graduated from a Christian high school just as the Japanese army invaded north China. He was severely beaten by Japanese soldiers for helping the church provide food and shelter to Chinese refugees. He made his way to southwest China, completed seminary training, and was ordained.

In 1954–55, when the government closed most churches, my father was denounced for propagandizing “spiritual idealism” and our family was given a “black” label, meaning we were to be totally ostracized. My mother divorced my father and left me at age five. Forced out of the parsonage, we lived in a shack at the back of the churchyard, which became a factory. Father was forced to do hard labor for the next 25 years. My only childhood memory is being hungry all the time.

As a young boy, I could only see that my family was responsible for my being bullied at school. When the Red Guards were sent out of the cities to the countryside, I volunteered to go. In November 1968, 12 teenagers arrived in a very remote mountain village. Working hard 12 to 14 hours a day, we barely survived. Since my father was a “criminal,” I was usually alone. Many times, I sat on top of a mountain watching the sheep and wishing I weren’t alive.

I kept up my hope for the future by secretly reading anything I could find. After I managed to leave the village to work in a factory, I studied even harder, but still in secret. After Mao died, college entrance exams were resumed. I passed, despite very sharp competition and only an eighth-grade education. Deng Xiaoping’s policies allowed us “black” elements to find a way back into society. I was even recruited by the Communist Party.

I always blamed my father for my troubles. Only after I was married, finished school, and had a good job did I reconnect with my father and his family. While I was a visiting scholar in the U.S. in 1990, he came to live with my family.

That year was a major turning point in my life. When I learned the whole story of the June Fourth killings [in the 1989 Democracy Movement], I felt terribly saddened by what the government did in Tiananmen Square. I now had to face the question, “Should I continue to serve the Communist cause?”

I visited churches everywhere I went and stood quietly observing how the Christians behaved. I could see they freely chose to believe, and many helped me without knowing a thing about me. I began to rethink my father’s life. There was a stark contrast between June Fourth and my father—who never argued, never cheated, was always patient and kind, and was respected by all who knew him. I realized Marxism has no words to address a person’s individual needs. Where does love come from? Where do goodness and evil come from? I enjoyed reading the Bible’s answers to all these questions. God began to be real to me.

One special day I visited a Christian scholar who shared words from the Bible as a personal message for me. I was filled by the Holy Spirit as God spoke to me. I was so happy that I cried. A Communist with a heart of stone never sheds tears! Then I knew that the only explanation for my life’s journey was that God loves me, gave me my father, and was blessing me today through this stranger. I humbly accepted Jesus Christ.

I decided I had to use my knowledge and life experience for God, not for myself. I would serve God, not the Communist Party. The U.S. didn’t need more Christians, but China did, so I would return to China.

When I saw my father, I immediately told him, “Now I’m a believer.” He smiled and said, “I have prayed for you for 30 years.” I realized I loved and respected my father because he lived his whole life true to his belief. Happily, my son loved his grandfather and respected my choice. So when he went overseas to university, he immediately was baptized and joined the church. He has become the fourth-generation Christian in our family.

Appendix 1

Population of China

1812: 362 million

1851: 380 million

1949: 450 million

1980: 900 million

1990: 1.1 billion

1996: 1.2 billion

2010: 1.3 billion

Baptized Protestants

1800: 0

1834: 10

1853: 350

1869: 5,753

1876: 13,035

1898: 80,000

1911: 207,747

1934: 500,000

1980: 2 million

1996: 33 million (government estimate: 19 million)

2008: 39 million (government estimate: 20 million)



Protestants per Chinese

1850: 1 in 1 million

1900: 1 in 2,000

1926: 1 in 1,000

1952: 1 in 1,000

1996: 1 in 36

2008: 1 in 33



Total Christians (Protestants & Catholics) in China’s population in 2008

53 million, or 4 percent of the population, or 1 in 25

Source of Statistics: Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (1929); Tony Lambert, OMF (INTERNATIONAL); statistics of the People's Republic of China; Werner Bürklin, “Facts about Numbers of Christians in China,” The Gospel Herald, December 9, 2008; research of Liu Zhongyu from East China Normal University in Shanghai as reported in Mark Ellis, “China Survey Reveals Fewer Christians than Some Evangelicals Want to Believe” ASSIST News Service, October 1, 2007.

Appendix 2

1839-42: First Opium War ends with Treaty of Nanking: five treaty ports open to foreigners; Hong Kong ceded to British



1840s: Karl Gützlaff works in China

1843–60: American and British Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Episcopalians send missionaries to China treaty ports

1851-64: Taiping Rebellion



Missions explosion

1853: Taylor departs for China in September

1858-60: Tientsin and Peking treaties end Opium Wars: more rights granted to foreigners, including right to travel anywhere inland



1861: An exhausted Taylor and his family depart for rest in England

1865: Taylor resolves to lead China Inland Mission (CIM); writes China: Its Spiritual Need and Claims

1866: Lammermuir sails with Taylor, his family, and 16 CIM missionaries

1875: Taylor appeals for 18 pioneers to go to nine interior provinces; April: recovers from paralysis; July: China’s Millions Vol. 1, No. 1, published

1876-80: 18 CIM missionaries penetrate nine interior provinces

1877-78: Worst of the great Shantung-Shansi famine



1885: “Cambridge Seven” depart for China

1886: Taylor appeals for 100 new missionaries

1887: CIM committees in London and China clash over control of the mission; 100 new missionaries accepted

1894-98: Sino-Japanese War: China loses Taiwan to Japan and Korea to independence; various provinces ceded to Britain, France, Germany, and Russia



The Church in transition

1900: Boxer Rebellion-58 CIM missionaries and 21 children among those murdered; Taylor in Switzerland recuperating from illness; Wang Mingdao is born

1903: D. E. Hoste appointed general director of CIM upon Taylor’s retirement

1905: Hudson Taylor dies; abolition of old examination system opens way for mission schools

1904: Samuel Pollard begins missionary work among the Miao

1908: Revival breaks out in Manchuria under the ministry of Canadian missionary Jonathan Goforth

1910: World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh

1911-12: Revolution; Republic of China established; Kuomintang Party (KMT) inaugurated

1914-18: World War I



1917: Paul Wei founds True Jesus Church in Beijing

1919: May 4th Student Movement

1919: Treaty of Versailles awards German properties in Shantung, China, to Japan; China feels betrayed and refuses to sign; May Fourth student protest in Tiananmen Square marks new surge of nationalism and cultural reform in China



1920: Mary Stone launches Shanghai Bethel Mission

1921: Chinese Communist Party (CCP) founded

1926-27: Chiang Kai-shek launches Northern Expedition to unite China under KMT, and purges CCP from its ranks



1926: First two Chinese Catholic bishops are consecrated; Jing Dianying starts Christian community that later becomes known as the Jesus Family

1926-27: Nearly all 8,000 Protestant missionaries flee during chaos of Northern Expedition

1928: Watchman Nee starts “Little Flock” church in Shanghai; Yifang Wu becomes president of Jinling College for Women

1930: Norwegian missionary Marie Monsen visits Shandong and sparks Pentecostal-like revival across the province

1931: Japan invades Manchuria



1932: Pearl Buck gives speech, “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?”; Rethinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry After One Hundred Years is published in U.S.

1934: Long March: CCP forces under Mao Tse-tung retreat from KMT



1934: CIM missionary David Adeney arrives in north central China; John and Betty Stam are beheaded

1937: Wang Mingdao builds Christian Tabernacle in Beijing

1937: Japan invades north and central China; Communists and Nationalists unite in war against Japan; Japanese soldiers commit atrocities during the “Rape of Nanking,” during which American missionary Minnie Vautrin harbors women at Jinling College

1939-45: World War II

1941: U.S. allies with China after Japanese attack Pearl Harbor



1941-46: Most missionaries interred or evacuated but return to China after WWII

1943: Eric Liddell is sent to a Japanese internment camp along with other missionaries and foreigners in occupied territory (he dies there in 1945)

1944: John Sung dies

1945: China Inter-Varsity Evangelical Christian Students Fellowship is inaugurated in Chongqing and student revivals begin; Japan surrenders, ending WWII



The Communist era

1946: Civil War breaks out between Nationalists (led by Chiang Kai-shek) and Communists (led by Mao Zedong)



1948: Last Inter-Varsity evangelistic campaign is held in Beijing

1949: People’s Republic of China is established as a Communist state



1950: Protestant leaders led by Y. T. Wu meet with Premier Zhou Enlai and form Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM)

1952: All foreign missionaries are expelled from China; Watchman Nee is arrested

1955: Wang Mingdao is arrested; many churches closed

1956-57: Communist Party invites public criticism in “Hundred Flowers” movement, then suppresses it



1958: TSPM enforces church unity and closes more churches; Catholic Patriotic Association appoints bishops without papal approval, splitting Catholic church in China

1958-62: Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” program of economic development is a disaster, causing a famine that kills 30 million people

1966-76: Mao launches Cultural Revolution and instigates Red Guards to eliminate remnants of the old culture from China; all churches and universities are closed; church leaders, students, and elite are sent to work in the countryside

1972: President Nixon visits China; first reports of secret house churches leak out; Watchman Nee dies in labor camp



1973: Miao pastor Wang Zhiming is publicly executed; later he is one of ten 20th-century Christian martyrs commemorated in Westminster Cathedral

1976: Mao Zedong dies; radical leaders of Cultural Revolution are arrested

1978: Deng Xiaoping reverses many of Mao’s policies, pursues economic reforms, and improves relations with West



1978-79: Churches and universities begin to reopen; church leaders are released from prison; TSPM is reestablished; house churches flourish

1980: China Christian Council is formed; Bishop K. H. Ting becomes leader of CCC and TSPM

1982: Document 19 articulates government religious policies

1983: During the “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign,” hundreds of house-church leaders are arrested and sent to labor camps, but are released by mid-decade

1988: Billy and Ruth Graham visit China, meet high-level officials, scholars, and leaders of TSPM and house churches

1989: June Fourth Democracy Movement in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere is violently suppressed; many protestors flee to U.S. and some become Christians



1991: Wang Mingdao dies

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