In October 2018, I met three elderly Chinese believers at an airport. Together, they were 265 years old. One of them had spent 27 years in prison for his faith and was still preaching the gospel after his release. That day, he stood near the terminal exit holding immigration papers he could not read, searching the crowd for a familiar face.
I was that face.
I carried their bags. I waited with them. There was no organization behind it, no ministry label, no reporting structure. It was simply an encounter—three white-haired Chinese sojourners, three lives marked by the trials of the Chinese church, standing in the middle of an American airport.
That man did not wait until he left prison to begin living out his faith. He preached inside. He preached after he came out. He preached after he arrived in the United States. The longer I have reflected on that moment, the more I have come to believe that his posture at that airport gate—holding unreadable papers, searching for a familiar face—was itself a theological statement.
Scripture is full of people who did God’s most significant work from places that looked like the margins: Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, Esther in a foreign court, the early church scattered by persecution, Paul writing letters from prison. Their posture was never, “Once I get back to the center, I will be useful.” Their posture was: I am here. God is at work here.
Diaspora is not a condition to be solved. It is a place to be inhabited.
Jeremiah 29 has been quoted so often that we can miss how strange it really is. God tells the exiles in Babylon to build houses, live in them, plant gardens, and eat what they produce. In other words: do not simply wait for rescue. Be fully present where you are—because I have sent you there. The scattered are not abandoned. They are sent.
I think of the Chinese Christians I know in Toronto, New York, Paris, and São Paulo. Most of them did not choose diaspora as a spiritual discipline. They came for education, for work, for safety, for their children. Many carry the weight of what they left behind: aging parents, familiar congregations, and the language in which prayer once came without effort.
Then there is the photograph I still keep on my phone: a child, three or four years old, bald after dozens of chemotherapy treatments, lying on his mother’s shoulder. Both of them are masked. They are in a children’s hospital in Pennsylvania. His hair is gone. Her eyes, visible above the mask, look straight at the camera.
The family had come from southern China so their child could receive treatment. They did not speak English. They did not know anyone there. They stayed in the nearest motel and cooked instant noodles each day with an electric kettle. On nights when the child was in treatment, the mother sometimes sat awake at the bedside all night—not because the child needed something every moment, but because she did not know what might happen if she closed her eyes.
I do not know how to write a theological commentary on that photograph.
I only know that someone needs to be in that room. Not to bring answers. Not to bring a program. Just to be there. To speak the same language. To carry bags. To wait.
This is something the Chinese diaspora church can offer. More than that, it is something we are called to offer—not because we are more capable than others, but because we know what it is to leave, to lose one’s bearings in an unfamiliar place, to feel the loneliness that rises when memory returns at midnight with the smell of something familiar. What the diaspora can offer the diaspora is not pity from above, but a hand extended from the same depth.
I grew up in the city historically associated with the beginning of Hudson Taylor’s inland mission. I was baptized in 1992. For more than three decades, I have watched the Chinese church walk under impossible pressures: the quiet courage of house church elders, the creativity of believers who learned to love God in the cracks the state left open, and the cost of speaking plainly from within those pressures. I understand that cost.
But I am no longer inside those pressures. And that freedom is not a vacation from responsibility. It is another kind of responsibility.
The diaspora church has freedom to say some things that cannot be said safely from within. It also has freedom to accompany people who cannot easily be accompanied from inside. It has freedom to sit down in a hospital room and say nothing at all, simply to remain present. The question is not whether we have this freedom. The question is whether we are using it.
This is important to say carefully. The diaspora church is not the rescue party. We are not the enlightened ones returning to liberate those still inside. That posture is arrogant, and it is theologically wrong. The church inside China has wisdom, resilience, and a depth of faith forged under conditions many of us have never faced. It does not need us to arrive with answers. What we can offer is something smaller, and perhaps more faithful: accompaniment, presence, and the willingness to remain in relationship across the divide.
That is what I was doing at LaGuardia. Not rescuing anyone. Simply being present at a threshold where someone needed a familiar face.
The man waiting at the airport had spent 27 years in prison, but prison had not altered his posture. He was still the kind of man who would preach the gospel at an airport exit while searching the crowd for a familiar face. Theological location, in the end, is not determined by geography.
We are not merely in transit. We are not waiting to become useful.
We are here. Here, as it turns out, is often exactly where God sends people when he has something important for them to do.
我是那张脸。
