In this category — the story — we like to take a look back at some instructive moments in Christian history — the story of the church as we know it so far.  The next time we come to this category, I want to tell you something of a truly remarkable man named Hudson Taylor. 

However, I know that for many of you the name Hudson Taylor will be unfamiliar.  So, today I’m going to set the stage for that post by providing you with a brief introduction to the work of Christ in the land of China, and give you just a taste of Taylor’s role in that wonderful drama.

• When Hudson Taylor went to China (in the year 1854), he made a point of dressing and living like the Chinese people — which was a sharply criticized practice by the church in his day.  It is now completely commonplace for missionaries to live and dress like the people they seek to evangelize.

• Taylor was one of the very first missionaries to press beyond the great coastal cities of China and take the gospel into the vast interior.

• Contrary to the conventions of his day, Taylor believed that single women were fully capable of managing distant mission outposts without the aid of male missionaries.

• In 1865 Taylor founded the organization China Inland Mission.  It was his policy that he would never solicit funds from donors, but would rather trust the Lord to supply the needs of the work.  Today, 143 years later, the name of the organization has changed — to Overseas Missionary Fellowship (International) — but this policy has not changed.

• Taylor well understood the immensity of the task to evangelize all of China.  Even after thousands of conversions, he was still haunted by the thought of 400 million Chinese people who were unreached by the gospel.  This realization frequently drove him into severe depression.

• Taylor’s first trip to China, by sea, took half a year. 

• There were missionaries to China before Hudson Taylor.  Perhaps the very first was a man named Olepen, who went to China in 635 A.D.  In the Middle Ages (starting in 1294 A.D.) a Franciscan missionary named John of Monte Corvino gained many converts by buying young boys from their non–Christian parents (!), baptizing them, and training them for ministry.  He worked in this way for 11 years, baptizing more than 6,000 persons.

• The first Protestant missionary to China was a man named Robert Morrison, who arrived in 1807.  At this time it was a capital offense to evangelize or print Christian materials in China.  Foreigners were even forbidden to learn Chinese; however, Morrison did find two tutors who were willing to teach him the language — for exorbitant fees.  But these two tutors lived in constant fear of torture by the Chinese officials.  In fact, they carried poison with them every day so that if they were arrested they could end their lives quickly rather than die in a Chinese prison.

• Eventually Protestant missionaries became so fluent in Chinese that they played key roles in international diplomacy.  William Martin — a Presbyterian missionary — was responsible for the clause in the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin that allowed missionaries to enter the interior of China.  This treaty paved the way for Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission.

• In the 1860’s Christian missionaries began to open schools for the education of Chinese girls.  This was a radical break with Chinese tradition.  Prior to this event, Chinese women never received any formal education.

• During the Boxer Rebellion (1900), 188 Protestant adults and children were martyred.

• Between 1830 and 1949 China was the largest Protestant mission field in the world, with some 8,000 missionaries ministering inside China at one point. 

• By 1980 the number of Christians in China had grown to around 5 to 7 million, in spite of the fact that missionaries were expelled in the early 1950’s and Christians were severely persecuted in the 1960’s.

• The official, government–licensed church in China is known as the Three–Self Church.  It is so named because this church must be self–governed, self–supported, and self–propagating.  It repudiates all foreign (missionary) control of the Chinese church.  However, this idea did not originate with the Chinese government.  Rather, it was first employed by a Presbyterian missionary — John L. Nevius (1829–1893) — who used it to plant indigenous churches in China.

• Today there are some 50–60 million Christians living in China, though the official government statistics put the number at 25–30 million.