1 of 3

At certain times during the Christian era, social, spiritual, and political forces have converged to create an environment primed for a revival. Such an alignment occurred exactly 150 years ago—seemingly a most unlikely time for God to do a new thing.

In Britain, Queen Victoria ruled over a vast bureaucratic Empire, but even outside the British sphere of influence, the Victorian Age was characterized by a love of orderliness and a sense of upper-class Anglo-Saxon superiority—what Rudyard Kipling infamously labeled "the white man's burden." Notably, it was also the time of the industrial revolution: a birth of factories and mass production. Their era's prosperous, mechanizing mood affected not only the way Victorians treated their servants and made their furniture, but also the way they preached the Gospel.

That is, until 1854. In that year, three men launched ministries that would shake their comfortable churches to the core.

The first rule of medicine is that a doctor should do his patient no harm. It might equally be said that the first rule of evangelism is that anyone preaching the Gospel should not condemn his listeners. What the pioneering missionary Hudson Taylor found upon arriving in China in 1854, however, was that the Western missionaries who had preceded him openly disdained and criticized their Chinese flock. His response changed missions then and now.

When the Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1851, its leaders claiming to embrace Christianity, Western mission societies had jumped at the chance to enter the country with the blessings of a new regime. Taylor, the son of a Methodist preacher, joined the rush, landing in Shanghai just before his 22nd birthday.

Once on this hot, war-torn, and disease-ridden mission field, the young man found that most of his fellow missionaries thought the prospects for evangelism dim. Many congregated in comfortable Western enclaves rather than venturing into the country's squalid interior. Their condescending attitudes toward the Chinese did nothing to reassure the peasants, who suspiciously viewed them as Western imperialists.

Deeply troubled, Taylor returned to England six years later and literally rewrote the book on Chinese evangelism. In China, Its Spiritual Need and Claims, he said, "What does the Master teach us? Is it not that if one sheep out of a hundred be lost, we are to leave the ninety and nine and seek that one? But here the proportions are almost reversed, and we stay at home with the one sheep, and take no heed to the ninety and nine perishing ones!"

He had already severed ties with his sponsor, the China Evangelization Society, and now he created the China Inland Mission, the policies of which, he intended, would undo the errors made by previous agencies.

Taylor returned to China in 1866, and throughout the years that followed he disagreed sharply with British policies and worked to build a mutual respect between his mission workers and the Chinese. On one occasion after locals looted and burned his mission outpost, British gunboats steamed up the Yangtze River to exact retribution. Taylor, however, refused to bring any charges against the arsonists and returned to re-establish his mission. Likewise, following the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 in which many British missionaries lost their property, the British government imposed fines on the Chinese by way of compensation. But Taylor would not accept any of the money, saying that the Chinese themselves had lost even more.

next page... |  1 of 3

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help