Hong (pseudonym) was exhausted and overwhelmed. For much of her time serving in her cross-cultural location, she faced loneliness and cultural conflict. The spiritual darkness of that place often settled heavily on both Hong and her Chinese teammate. When she prayed, the darkness would lift, “but I knew it would come back,” she recalled.
During those difficult times, Hong often told herself, “God is good,” encouraging herself to keep going. But even through those dark times, the campus ministry she and her teammate had launched was thriving. Looking back, Hong now reflects, “I said to my roommate, ‘Look what God did for us,’ even though it was hard.”
Having left that location in early 2021, Hong looks back and sees clearly the goodness of God amid the struggle. “We need to be willing to make sacrifices,” she concluded. “If we don’t, then we won’t see the result.”
Hong’s story offers a glimpse into two aspects of the theological core for Chinese missionaries: piety and an expectation of suffering. In this article, we will explore how these convictions fuel their participation in God’s global mission.
Piety: Walking with God on the Mission Field
Piety has been a point of emphasis in the Chinese church throughout the twentieth century. In A Stone Made Smooth, Wang Mingdao writes,
All that God does is wonderful. He delivered me from the deep pit of sin; He cleansed me through the blood of his Son our Lord Jesus Christ, and by his Spirit he gave a new birth, and I became his child. He also chose me and called me, bringing me into his Service and setting me up to be a watchman both in the world and in the church.1
Wang goes on to reflect, “For a Christian to be usable he must first build a firm foundation based on the Bible and he must then go on to seek a pious and holy life.”2
This kind of piety continues to motivate Chinese missionaries today. In his study of the mission movement emerging from urban Chinese churches, David Ro cites Jin Tianming, a well-known Beijing pastor who helped to establish Mission China:
Pietism, loving the Lord, is connected to Chinese traditional culture as it is close to meditation. However, how is it related to missions? Pietism focuses on loving the Lord. They deeply value the Lord and see him as precious. With this precious love, they want to share the gospel. 3
Lu (pseudonym) is a young missionary motivated by such piety. As she lived in a difficult cross-cultural context, Lu found that maintaining a close relationship with God was crucial. Reflecting on her experience, Lu says,
Our vision must be fixed on God himself because our vision, if it is fixed on circumstances, or on co-workers, or on people, then it is very likely that we will be disappointed. It is very likely that we will leave, and we will have no way to continue serving there. So every day we must persevere, pray, go, read the Bible, and pray. If we don’t have our own life with God, we can’t change anything. That is, there is no ministry without prayer. So prayer and the relationship with God is the most important thing.
As she experienced life in a cross-cultural context, Lu discovered that her own life with God was essential to continue living there in a healthy way. Without that life with God, Lu felt that she would have had nothing to offer in mission. For Lu and many other Chinese missionaries, piety provides an ongoing motivation and a foundation for their perseverance on the mission field.
This leads us to a second theological emphasis among Chinese missionaries: the expectation of suffering.
Necessary Sacrifice: An Expectation of Suffering in Mission
Chinese culture has a phrase, 吃苦 (pinyin: chi ku, literally meaning “eat bitterness”) that refers to their expectation of hardship and suffering in this world. Perhaps more than any other Chinese Christian leader in the twentieth century, Wang Mingdao embodied this kind of suffering for the sake of Christian faith. After more than thirty years of thriving ministry, Wang was imprisoned in 1957 for his refusal to join the Three-Self Church. He remained in prison for 23 years until he was nearly 80 years old.
Recounting a conversation he had with an elderly Wang in the 1980s, Brother David quotes Wang this way: “There are two things that God wants to give to those who love him. One is the Cross, and the other is the Crown. …The Cross of Suffering is to be borne but for a few scores of years and will be completely obliterated at Christ’s appearing. But the Crown which is given in exchange for the Cross remains forever.”4 Wang understood better than most that his suffering, and the suffering of all Christians, prepared the church for Christ’s second coming, when Christians would be raised to glory with Him.
Chinese pastors today continue to preach on suffering from a similar perspective. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Victor Guo exhorted his hearers in this way: “For those who repent because of the grace of the gospel, if they turn around and continue to follow the Lord, not only will they pass the test of suffering in this life, but they will also pass judgment on the day of Christ. Suffering is a test for us as Christians. It shows us whether or not we have cracks, whether or not we are counterfeit.”5 Similarly, Noah Wang says that impurities “destroy your soul and cause you to fall into the devil’s trap. … How can we remove these impurities? Peter speaks of fiery trials, for only through trials can we see ourselves as we really are and recognize the true character of our faith.”6
David Ro notes that sacrifice and suffering contribute to the strength of the Chinese mission movement. He quotes Daniel Jin, one of the founders of Mission China: “The ‘theology of the cross’ needs to become the ‘core strength’ of the missionary movement overseas for Chinese churches in the future. Missions require us to take the Cross to follow the Lord, pay the price, sacrifice ourselves more, and be willing to be a martyr.”7 A theology of suffering, which seems to have grown out of a Chinese cultural mindset that expects suffering and hardship, has come to characterize the Chinese house church movement and its mission movement.
The topic of suffering is frequently emerged in conversations with many of the missionaries I interviewed. Qi (pseudonym) encountered challenges in her cross-cultural context. Speaking about the conflict that arose with the local Christian partners, Qi says, “That’s a moment that really squeezes out what is inside of you. It’s very easy to say, ‘Okay! I’m done! I’m going home! I don’t want to do this anymore!’ Aiya! That’s also the time that we were really frustrated and very angry and sad and exhausted. But after we finish everything, you see the fruit, you see the change. You see the Holy Spirit is doing great things, and it’s okay. ‘Lord, if this is what you ask me to do, I think I will do it again.’”
Qi communicates with striking honesty about how it feels to go through that kind of suffering on the mission field. But at the same time, she also sees how the fruit of God’s work makes that suffering worth it, so much so that she is willing to go through it again. Qi feels that even when cross-cultural suffering and challenges seem overwhelming, God’s Spirit is still at work bringing about God’s purposes.
Piety and an expectation of suffering have provided a strong motivation and foundation for Chinese missionaries in their service to the Lord. The next post in this series will look at how today’s younger Chinese missionaries are engaging in mission, both through evangelism and more holistic approaches.
Editor’s note: This article was originally written in English and was translated into Chinese by the ChinaSource team with permission.
- Ming-Dao Wong, A Stone Made Smooth (Southampton, England, Robesonia, PA.: Mayflower Christian Books; distributed by OMF Books, 1981), 30.
- Ibid., 105.
- David L. Ro, “A Study of an Emerging Missions Movement in Urban China: From the Perspective of Four Beijing Pastors” (PhDDiss., Oxford Centerfor Mission Studies, 2023), 119-120.
- Brother David, Sara Bruce, and Lela Gilbert, Walking the Hard Road: The Wang Ming-Tao Story (London: Marshall Pickering, 1989), 76.
- Victor Guo, “True Love,” in Faith in the Wilderness: Words of Exhortation from the Chinese Church, ed. Simon Liu and Hannah Nation (Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2022), 83.
- Noah Wang, “Test of Faith,” in Faith in the Wilderness: Words of Exhortation from the Chinese Church, ed. Simon Liu and Hannah Nation (Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2022), 108.
- Ro, 191.
