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A trip to five countries along the rim of East Asia in a month of speaking and fact-finding left me breathless. Under the sponsorship of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship and the Mustard Seed Mission, I was asked to visit mission fields in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore.
What made my assignment so emotional was that I was returning to countries in which I had spent my childhood. Thirty years, almost to the day, after I had left in my mid-teens, I arrived in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Memories came flooding back. Attempts to recall a language little used since that time proved at times embarrassing and on other occasions hilarious. At one point I preached in Mandarin. One is left with the distinct feeling that the audience felt I was speaking in an unknown tongue, without benefit of interpretation!
One incident stands out as I considered the difference between “now” and “then” and the inevitable comparisons that I made throughout my trip. In Taipei in Taiwan I was trying to negotiate the purchase of a seal with a merchant selling in a stall across the street from the spanking new MacKay Memorial Hospital wing. In halting Chinese, trying to recall long-unused phrases and expressions, my word order distinctly Western rather than Chinese, my tones flat and nasal through lack of practise, I attempted to describe Chung Shan North Road, Second Section, as it had appeared in 1953.
“There were pedicabs,” I commented. Blank expressions as cars and trucks crawled along in the heavy traffic beside us. “There were four houses there,” as I pointed across the road. I recalled how amused I was as a child to hear older missionaries call them ‘bungalows’, each with its six bedrooms and a verandah, replicas of Ontario manses built by the early missionaries at the turn of the century. “There was grass and trees and green,” I continued. The heavily polluted air choked us. He made polite noises, his traditional etiquette almost masking his incredulity.
We went back to bargaining for a seal with my name. “Mao Dah Lung” was my boyhood approximation of ‘Donald’ with the family name of ‘Mao’ which my grandfather had been given when he arrived in China in 1897 with an impressive crop of red hair. “Fur” seemed an appropriate way to describe it, before “Mao” became better known as the surname of China’s ruthless dictator. As I look at faded board-backed photos of his wedding in Shanghai in 1901 I wonder whether that name was given before his long dyed-black queue appeared, there resplendent in all its length.
Grandpa died in China in 1921 of a virulent form of cholera as he was returning to his mission station. We fled Shanghai in May of 1949 for Hong Kong’s safety. The missionary enterprise of two generations seemed wasted. Where was the church now? What was the lasting result of their efforts?
The answer to that question we now know. And the continuing reality to which Christians in East Asia returned as I asked them about their church life was that China’s example was their encouragement. Faced with the prospect of the death of an Emperor now well over 80, and aging ‘Gimo’ with a restive Taiwanese majority dominated by a tiny Mainland minority, the deadline of 1997, and constant coups and counter-coups, none of the first four countries I visited – Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand – seem that politically secure. Singapore’s political and economic stability appears the exception in the maelstrom that is East Asia. But Christians there know one thing for sure: if the church in China prevailed over repression and suffering, emerging the stronger for the experience, so can they. Repeatedly, in conference after conference, with missionaries and national leaders, the example of China was cited when I asked if they were not discouraged with the overwhelming odds they face as a minority religion in cultures where the ethical and moral value of the centuries seem to have been exchanged in the last several decades for a headlong rush into Western materialism. And with materialism, all of the Western decadence: pornography, violence, and alcoholism.
In the Office of the General Assembly in downtown Taipei, I encountered that optimism. Dr. Kao, the General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, is in jail. The Assembly met in April in the MacKay Hospital wing to which I referred, and heard a confrontational speech from a government representative, which seemed to many to emphasise rather than minimise differences between Church and State. But Andrew Hsieh, the Acting General Secretary of the denomination as appointed by that Assembly, spoke of renewal and fresh vision.
But Christians there know one thing for sure: if the church in China prevailed over repression and suffering, emerging the stronger for the experience, so can they.
Andrew, until he took his new job, pastored the historic Bangka Church in the old walled city of Taipei. Bangka Church, torn down and rebuilt in those early days of struggle when the courage and determination of George Leslie MacKay stared down the angry mobs, is experiencing parish renewal through small groups scattered across metropolitan Taipei. As well, their old building is being torn down to make way for a new structure that will allow them to minister more effectively in the inner-city and provide needed revenue for programmes of outreach.
Andrew also shared with me his own family’s experience of renewal. The Prayer Mountain Movement was introduced from Korea by several Ami Christians concerned that the early enthusiastic embracing of Christianity by their tribe during wartime Japanese persecution had settled into a comfortable apathy and complacency. Soon “Prayer Mountain Conferences” were sponsored in several of the tribal churches, especially with the Amis, and large crowds, hungry for spiritual renewal, attended.
The Movement has its dangers. But local pastors were wise enough to give it strong supervision, provide Biblical underpinnings, and balance its subjectivism with a wholesome objective grounding in common-sense realism. The movement not only filled many of the tribal churches: it also flowed into the Taiwanese congregations, and brought new life there as well. At one of these conferences Andrew’s own wife was a participant and was. in Wesley’s expression, “strangely moved.”
She came back home with a new vision, Andrew told me with excitement. Home and ministry had a new dimension. “It has affected all of us,” he concluded. “1 am happy to commend the Prayer Mountain movement as one way God is renewing his church in Taiwan.”
That vision is greatly needed today both in Taiwan and across East Asia. It is tempting to give up the struggle and for those in the Christian minority this can mean leaving the difficulties of the present and the uncertainties of the future and seeking the relative safety and security of North America.
On a visit to the East Coast of Taiwan, to the city of Hualien, I was taken to the historic Central Church. A beautiful new building, a strategic location, and a full congregation await a new minister. “They had a bright younger man who followed the faithful pastor who served so long and whom you knew as a child,” I was told, “but he went to America.” There was no criticism, only sadness. The politicised education children receive, the suspicion and misunderstanding of the state, and the attractiveness of greener pastures elsewhere, make the move regrettable but understandable.
The same theme recurred elsewhere: alone among the churches in East Asia I visited, the Japanese have leadership to spare. “Indeed,” one of the Japanese theological educators confided to me, “we have too much leadership. Our churches are so leader-oriented they have forgotten the priesthood of all believers. Our Japanese denominations are small and struggling because they gather around personalities. We need a recovery of the biblical concept of the whole church as the body of Christ.”
But elsewhere the problem is vastly different. In Thailand, the OMF’s Manoram Hospital is to be rapidly indigenised by government order. Where are Thai doctors to come from? Hospital Superintendent Peter Farringdon told me there are more Thai doctors in the United States than there are in Thailand. “Surely some of them are Christian. Why don’t they come back and help us?”
Leadership seems to be the great need. With my contacts gained from being in student ministry in Canada for five years, I was able to visit each national Inter-Varsity linked movement. In every location I discovered that this was becoming a national priority. But it was a difficult struggle.
Take, for instance, Hong Kong. There, staff of the Hong Kong Fellowship of Evangelical Students, a vibrant movement with a publication that appears on many newstands across the colony, told me their dilemma as they face the reality of 1997. That is the year the Chinese Communists indicate they will take back possession from Great Britain.
“Some Christians in Hong Kong have the option of leaving. What will happen to the church? We see our responsibility as helping students to see their obligation to serve the Church no matter what takes place after 1997. To do that, we must be careful not to needlessly antagonise the Peking government, or to make things even more difficult for our Christian brothers and sisters in mainland China.”
“We [in Japan] need a recovery of the biblical concept of the whole church as the body of Christ.”
Given the lack of leaders, missionaries are still needed in all five countries I visited. Speaking at the Orchard Road Presbyterian Church in downtown Singapore, I was surprised at the acceptance an “expat”, as we are called – short for expatriate – enjoys. Their friendly New Zealand Presbyterian minister has concluded a five-year term and they are looking for a replacement from overseas. “Ten years ago the church was 80% expatriate, 20% local. Now the proportions are reversed. Westernised Singaporeans feel comfortable with an expatriate Senior Minister. They want links with the church at large.” The church, which ministers to five ethnic groupings (English, German, Chinese, Indonesian and Dutch) is just across from one of the central subway stations now being built. It is engaged in a multi-million dollar expansion of premises. “We used to go out to evangelise,” I was told, “but now the clergy are kept busy dealing with people who come to us for instruction and baptism. There is an unprecedented spiritual hunger in Singapore, and we reckon our church doubles every five years.” The need for leadership in strong Biblical instruction was emphasised.
At the Taipei apartment of John and Betty Geddes I was hosted to an evening with the Canadian Presbyterian missionary contingent. The large crowd that used to gather thirty years ago at what we called “The Hermitage” in honour of the veteran Hildur “Hermie” Hermanson, was only a fraction of its former strength. But I was encouraged by the fact that two young people, Paul and Mary Beth McLean, had come to augment the numbers. As we walked over to the Geddes’ apartment, neighbors along the street greeted them. Their son, Andrew, was a magnet to the baby-loving Chinese.
“We know that God has brought us here. We have been received with great openness by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. We hope that there will be others to follow.” The McLeans, later that evening in their townhouse loaned by the General Assembly, shared both the loneliness and the challenge of their work. They are now off to a remote station, learning Hakka, and struggling to be identified with the church and culture to which God, they feel, has called them.
I left their home that night, making my way by cab across the dark and crowded street of Taipei, saddened that I myself was not able to join them in the land of my childhood; but also strangely heartened by their vision of a church in East Asia that is, amidst struggles and perplexities without and within, realising renewal and growth.