More than 60 years ago, in an era of enormous instability and hardship, my father often journeyed into remote regions of North Jiangsu Province with a team of Chinese Christian colleagues to carry the gospel and to plant churches. Dad was the only foreigner — and invariably an oddity in these hamlets where many had never seen anyone with white skin.
He was the drawing card. He spoke fluent Mandarin. Yet few in these backwater hamlets understood his dialect. They came to gawk. He was the drawing card — this “foreign devil,” a strange alien being. Their language was a quaint, colloquial, slurred brogue. His was literary, with a Western accent. After Dad spoke, an older pastor preached, then the young evangelists trained by my father took over. They could bridge the dialect gap. So began many “preaching points,” places whose names I am only now learning.
Sheyang is one of these. Sixty years ago it was a fetid, miserably poor, primitive hamlet. Its narrow lanes were mired with the mud of reeking open sewers. The unpainted mud brick huts looked ready to collapse under sagging thatch roofs. Surviving photos show faces of creatures beaten down by poverty, exhausted by unending labor just to exist, and eyes expecting a devastating blow, that could mean a blessed end in death, or another more terrible round of tortuous forced labor.
The town was occupied first by bandits, then nationalist soldiers and later the Japanese juggernaut. These marauders extracted tribute and conscripted their able-bodied. Sheyang is 50 or 60 kilometers as the crow flies from Yancheng, my home, and maybe 30 kilometers in from the Yellow Sea. You could get there by foot, on narrow, slippery paths between rice paddies, or by canal on a houseboat. These sampans often crept silently at night through enemy territory held by warlords or bandit groups locked in conflict.
Dad would be gone weeks at a time. He lived on a houseboat, sleeping on a straw mat, existing on whatever was available, sharing this confined space with his team of colleagues, and the boatman’s family. Years later, one colleague related to me how it had been a cold, rainy winter. This Chinese brother was shivering, without any proper protection. Dad took off his rain-repellant topcoat and gave it to him.
Today, Sheyang is lovely and prosperous, a modern town with wide, paved streets and tall buildings, clean and appealing. You can get there by paved highway in only two short hours. Along the way today you’ll see the barbed-wire enclosures and watchtowers of the forced labor camps used in the Cultural Revolution.
What happened in that half century between? With the revolution of 1949, and the departure of all Westerners, those struggling bands of infant believers were left without parent, shepherd or care. From 1966 to 1976, during China’s terrible Cultural Revolution, all pastors and evangelists were removed to forbidding labor camps, separated from families for 10 years, all churches forcibly closed, and all Bibles confiscated and destroyed. Many pastors were martyred. Their suffering was terrible. Like veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, those who survived are reluctant to tell you the details. This was China’s Great Tribulation. Its despotic government opposed all religion. How could the church possibly survive, especially an infant, leaderless, unlettered, undisciplined flock of poor sheep?
I marveled at Dad’s persistent, faithful prayers throughout that 30-year blackout following our evacuation in 1948. I remember he kept a printed card in his Bible. On this card was the name of every pastor, evangelist, trainee, every church and preaching point. That card is lost now. I’d love to see it again. I’m certain Sheyang is one of the names there, prayed for daily those 30 years. Dad died in 1978. For 30 years he had no news, no word from Sheyang, or even one of his partners.
Last year I visited Sheyang. My heart still pounds because of what I saw and heard. That one preaching point has become a mother church with 64 preaching points, and far more than 20,000 believers! The two pastors devote their efforts to training lay leaders. There is a new, four-story training center behind the mother church. Two or three times each year the unsalaried lay preachers come. On the weekend they return home, immediately making use of their training, and caring for their flock. On the wall of an office is a chart recording what each “preaching point” (we call them house churches) contributed to the building of this center. Each has its own picture, and a mailbox. And the growth continues! It’s not the work of the ordained pastors, but of the people themselves — each one telling one as the word gets planted and grows in hearts already prepared by the Holy Spirit.
The impressions of my pilgrimage to my first home stay with me. It is impossible to keep from reflecting, and comparing. Why is it, for example, around the world the church grows so contagiously, while we report losses year after year? There are surely many explanations. But one keeps haunting me. It is the words of Paul to the Philippians, 1:29: “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake.” Must it be necessary for us to have to suffer for the gospel in order for us to grow once more? That’s a hard saying — a very hard saying for a modern affluent church weaned on a message of pain-free, costless prosperity.
Posted Aug. 21, 2002
David Bridgman is associate director, Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship.
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