In 1925, George and Sally Benson took a “slow boat to China” one month after they were married. With $35/month support, they were determined to be missionaries. After skirmishes with the emerging Communist Party in China, they left for a short while for the Philippines, but courageously returned to China as soon as they could and began the Canton Bible School where among other things they taught English using the Bible as the textbook. The Bensons had learned Chinese using the Gospel of Mark as the textbook, so they found this to be a culturally appropriate and effective method of evangelism.
I just returned from China, where I visited five cities where Let’s Start Talking either works or has been invited to work, helping Chinese people with their English using the Gospel of Luke as the text. One of the cities I visited was Guangzhou—formerly Canton—where the Bensons worked almost a century ago.
Again I heard the “grandmother stories.” Everyone who has done any work in China in recent years has heard some version of this same story many times. Probably a Chinese university student or young professional says, I’m a Christian. My parents are not, but my grandmother was, and she told me the Christian stories, so when I went away from home and met some Christians, I was immediately attracted to them.
Throughout the centuries, Christianity would thrive for a period of time, then be driven to extinction by anti-western, anti-foreign rulers. Some form of early Christianity in China is documented as early as 635 A.D. The Jesuits began to penetrate China in the 16th century but were later banned because of a Roman church ruling that Chinese folk rituals amounted to idolatry.
Protestants list Robert Morrison, sent by the London Missionary Society, as the first missionary to China in 1806, but within two decades Europeans were (again) sentenced to death for spreading Christianity in China. Not until the period after 1860 did Christian missionaries return to China, but because of China’s opening to the west, the missionaries then came in droves!
In 1865, J. Hudson Taylor established the China Inland Mission and became what some historians have called the greatest missionary of all times after the Apostle Paul. I mention the CIM because the Bensons were advised on how to begin their work in China by CIM missionaries Mr. and Mrs. W. C. Smith.
Many Christian missionaries were massacred during the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901. Not long afterwards the Bensons and the first missionaries from Churches of Christ courageously entered China. This wave of missionaries had a window of just about ten years before the first conflicts of what became WWII broke out and threatened their lives. Some sent their families to the Philippines and stayed, but most left China.
In 1949 Mao’s Communist won control of China and Christians were no longer welcome, neither foreign nor Chinese. What pockets of Christians remained in China even through these earliest Mao years were further purged during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 when all forms of religious expression were banned and severely persecuted.
These are the years of the Grandmothers! The 1930s-60s were the years when young girls (and I’m sure there were some grandfathers also!!) who had been raised in Christian families hung on to their faith very quietly while their lives were in danger.
These were the young people taught at the Canton Bible School by George and Sally Benson and all those teachers in the 1930s who stayed in China as war became imminent.
I worshipped in a family church with 75 university students in Guangzhou (old Canton) last Sunday. Scripture was read, songs of praise were sung, and prayers were prayed. One young lady said she was ready to be baptized. When I asked how many family churches like this were in Guangzhou, the preacher just waved his hands to say too many to count!
While the growth rate of Christianity in China today is breathtaking and while the government seems to be aware but not terribly concerned, surely the history of Christianity in China reminds us that there have been many windows like this through the centuries, but those windows have most often been slammed tightly shut at some point.
- We should earnestly pray that this window stays open and that the Chinese Christians remain free to follow Jesus.
- We should give thanks for those early missionaries like the Bensons who took great risks, sometimes gave their lives, to introduce, and re-introduce the Good News for China.
- And we especially should give thanks for the Grandmothers, often the result of the work of those missionaries, who not only held on to their faith in direst circumstances, but then passed it on—often secretly—to their children and/or grandchildren.
The Christians in China, those who go to China, those who today work in China, and those who pray for China have a great cloud of witnesses who have lived and worked there before—for centuries–who spur us on!
And we can never forget: “For God so loved the world . . . .:
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