The Finish Line in China

As Eric Liddell settled into a long train trip to China in 1925, he turned his focus to what was ahead. He had accepted a teaching position at the Anglo-Chinese College, a secondary school for boys in Tianjin. The school was founded by the London Missionary Society and it aimed to reach the children of Chinese business leaders and others with the gospel. It wasn’t exactly a hardship post. Liddell lived with other missionaries in the French Concession, an area of the city set apart for foreign residents. There were tennis courts and ballroom dancing and afternoon tea, but there was also trouble brewing outside. And what started out as life in a comfortable enclave would end with death in a miserable prison camp, but the end wasn’t hopeless.

In this last episode, we’ll look at Liddell’s final lap in China, and we’ll also explore what’s it like to run the Christian race in China today, and how do Chinese believers keep running even when the race gets really hard and really costly. I’m Jamie Dean and from the team at Radical, this is Glory Road.

To understand what happened with Eric Liddell, we actually need to start with July 1937, Japan.

The Japanese took control of the city, the headquarters of Chinese Kuomintang, the National People’s Party. Surrendering Chinese soldiers were killed, but the majority were civilians.

Japan invades China. It’s a war that will last nearly a decade. Many missionaries leave China, but some stay including Eric Liddell. Most foreigners remain in areas still considered safe zones, but they won’t be safe for long.

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

As Japan attacks Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the U.S. enters World War II, Japanese forces run internment camps in China. The civilian captives include foreign missionaries like Eric Liddell. Liddell wouldn’t survive, but many would. And after the war, some missionaries who had left China returned, but their stay would be short-lived. In 1949, Chinese Communist Party leader, Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Missionaries were expelled from China by 1952. It would be more than three decades before any returned. Churches in China faced a demand, agreed to come under official oversight of the Communist Party and their churches could continue. About half of Chinese churches agreed, but many refused and they gave a simple reason. They believed Christ is head of the church and their highest allegiance is to him. And if they couldn’t meet publicly, they would meet secretly and they would pay a high price.

In fact, many in a whole generation of house church leaders were imprisoned in labor camps. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, any dissent was crushed and religious practice of any kind was banned. Chinese Christians still worshiping in secret, suffered their worst years of persecution. To the outside world, Chinese Christians had gone silent for nearly 30 years. Many thought the Chinese church was probably gone, but the 1980s brought a new moment.

Ronald Reagan: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

Communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe. U.S. President Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and called on Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev to bring it down. The wall did come down along with the Soviet Union. And in China, another kind of wall was coming down too, not communism but isolationism. The new leader of the Communist Party started opening the country to the outside world. It was part of an effort to revive the closed-off Chinese economy and society, but it also revived outside involvement in the Chinese church.

As foreigners were allowed back in for business or education, missionaries began returning. And what they found was amazing. The Chinese church was still alive. Yes, it was diminished and it was largely a rural movement, but a generation of indigenous Christians had survived. Missionaries looked for ways to bring the gospel to China’s cities and to a new generation of Chinese people. And in the 1980s and 1990s, the church in China boomed. Many unregistered churches started meeting openly, renting their own spaces, sometimes gathering in large numbers, practices local officials tolerated at least in some regions. And they kept calling themselves house churches, maintaining a connection with the indigenous generation who survived. But the Communist Party was still in control.

The approach to Tiananmen Square by troops from the west of Peking last night was typical of everything-

In 1989, a brutal crackdown on student demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square shocked the world. But even this sparked more interest in Christianity. As many students grew disillusioned with politics. Over the years, Chinese Christians faced cycles of pressure and opposition, but they also welcomed new believers and they were about to face a day of new challenges. In 2013, the Communist Party officially tapped Xi Jinping as its new leader, and he was ready to enforce renewed loyalty from Chinese citizens, including members of any unregistered religious groups. In 2018, the party enacted a new set of regulation for religious groups across the country, and at least one house church drew a lot of attention, Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu. The pastor, Wang Yi, was a well-known human rights lawyer before becoming a Christian in 2005. As a pastor, he kept speaking out. He emphasized his message wasn’t political, it was spiritual, but it was also bold.

Wang declared that the church’s religious freedom to proclaim the gospel and worship God is given by Christ himself. Any government attempt to infringe on that freedom is evil, he said. In December 2018, police arrested Wang, his wife, and more than 200 church members. The police shut down the church’s place of worship, along with a school and a seminary the church ran. Most members were released. The pastor wasn’t. A year later, a Chinese court sentenced him to nine years in prison. The charge, subversion of the state.

In a document he wrote before his arrest, the pastor said he respected the governing authorities God had established in China, but he deplored the persecution of the church by the Communist Party. He wrote, “The calling that I have received requires me to use non-violent methods to disobey those human laws that disobey the Bible and God. The goal of disobedience is not to change the world, but to testify about another world.”

To learn more about house churches in China, I wanted to talk with Hannah Nation. She’s the managing director of the Center for House Church Theology and the content director for China Partnership. Both groups highlight the work and the challenges for the indigenous house church movement. Hannah edited a book of essays by Wang Yi and others called Faithful Disobedience. I kept thinking about that explosion of growth in Chinese churches after the country reopened. And so that’s where we started.

Hannah Nation: Why did Christianity boom from the 1980s on? You can point to a lot of different sociological reasons. On the one hand, there was a lot of disillusionment within China, a lot of disillusionment with the communist ideology, especially with Tiananmen Square and post-Tiananmen. There was very much a whole generation who were looking for answers beyond what China was providing. China essentially eradicated all of their kind of core fundamental beliefs as a culture. They eradicated Confucianism, they eradicated traditional Chinese religions, and then communism failed. And so there really wasn’t a underpinning as a society and there weren’t answers for the kind of big questions of life. There was a lot of moral failure. And so when you talk to a lot of people who became Christians in the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond, they will often talk a lot about just the kind of fallout socially and morally in China that has happened in these decades and how that has caused a lot of people to seek.

But also you have to look at the re-entrance of missionaries into China. I don’t think they would want me to go into a lot of details, but from the moment that China reopened, there really was just a very significant effort to go back in and to evangelize. And right now, we’re beginning to have second and third generations of Christians. But still, generally speaking, most believers within the house churches are first-generation Christians, and many of them, especially in the urban cities, first heard the gospel at university, on their campus. And whether through teachers or foreign students, both from the United States and Korea, there is just a massive, massive effort to evangelize within China.

So I mean, you have these kind of sociological answers, but ultimately I think it’s because the Lord wanted to work. The Lord wanted to bring in a great harvest in China and… I’m getting emotional. But I think there’s not, at the end of the day, a really great human explanation for it. I think it’s just one of the most remarkable stories in church history, that there was so much effort by the West to convert China before in 1950. And when you look back, there’s middling success. It’s a complicated story before the rise of the communists and then there was just this period where it went silent and no one knew what was happening, but God was at work.

Just how big is that harvest? That’s hard to say for sure. But between registered and unregistered churches, Hannah thinks the number of professing Christians in China is somewhere around 100 million. To put that in perspective, Operation World estimates the number of Christians in China just a few decades before was probably less than 3 million. That’s astounding growth. It’s also confounding to the Communist Party, a religious group of that size with its highest loyalty to something other than the party. There’s the rub. When the party published new rules for religious groups in 2018, Hannah says at first it wasn’t clear how seriously the government would enforce them, but the grip did tighten. And sometimes regulations have been so complicated, churches aren’t even sure if they’re breaking them. COVID made that even trickier.

Hannah Nation: There’s one story I can think of where a church, they’re in their city. They had been under lockdown, so the church had been meeting digitally, but they hadn’t had communion with each other for a while. And so the lockdown was lifted and they rented a hotel meeting space to gather together and have communion with each other. And while they were gathering, the lockdown was put back into place. So they weren’t breaking a regulation when it started, but by the time their service had finished, they were now breaking a regulation and that kicked off direct interference with the church. And multiple people have spent time incarcerated because of that. And so that’s just a good example of how COVID mixed with the religious regulations intensified everything.

Additionally, the CCP used COVID to implement facial recognition across China. You cannot go into China right now and not deal with the realities of facial recognition. Every single apartment building, every neighborhood, it’s everywhere. And so this is also now a reality that the church navigates in a way that COVID has impacted the life of the church, the kind of ability to hide and be unseen as the church is really more or less gone. And so the question is not really can you hide, but what can you do or what should you do to not kind of make yourself open for interference?

That’s a point of debate among Chinese Christians. Most churches aren’t as proactively outspoken as Wang Yi of Early Rain, but most still deal with real pressures, especially church leaders, but they also keep pressing on.

Hannah Nation: So it’s just really amazing watching and seeing how much just this renewal and the understanding of God’s grace has really empowered a lot of the churches as they go through this uptick in persecution again and this understanding that the only difference between them and their persecutors is the grace of God in their life. They are not better people than their persecutors. They are not any different in the end from their persecutors, apart from the grace of God. And so there’s one pastor in particular that I know, and he talks about using the car ride to the police station as a time to repent of his own personal idols and a time to reflect of his idol of the comfortable middle-class life and face his persecutors with grace and with love because he has spent that time preparing with repenting of his own sins and his own idols.

She says most of the Chinese Christians she knows love their cities and care about their neighbors. A lot of their sorrow over opposition comes from not being able to bless them more. Hannah suggested I talk with one of the house church pastors. Jacob serves a growing congregation in China and Hannah’s group, China Partnership, actually has a lot more of Jacob’s story and others at their podcast called The House Church in China. I was able to connect with Jacob but were not able to use his own voice or his real name. He’s someone who’s felt the pressure of the Chinese government firsthand, but I was eager to talk with him, especially when I found out that he’s not only a pastor, he’s also a runner. In fact, he felt his sense of calling to ministry confirmed on the starting line of a marathon in China.

Jacob: So in the beginning, we sing the national anthem. It was like worship. Suddenly, I realized this is worship in one of the best cities in China and the people from all nations and ethnic languages come here, but we are running for a medal which can perish.

Jacob had been inching towards ministry in China, but now he was sure. He wept on the starting line.

Jacob: I think this might not be the last race I want to run, but I want to run a better race for a medal that will not perish.

And like Eric Liddell, Jacob has run a very different race from the one he once expected, but this isn’t how his race of faith started. In fact, like many in China, Jacob was born into atheism. His parents were intellectuals. His father didn’t believe in any religions at all. His school teachers declared that Christianity was a Western tool of brainwashing, and then he went to college. It was a moment when Western missionaries had a wider window to serve in China.

Through an invitation to a campus ministry, Jacob learned about the true teachings of Christianity and he came to embrace the gospel. He says he had just one fear, that God would call him to full-time ministry. Jacob thought he was better suited to pursue a career and support missionaries in China. For a while, that’s what he did. After college, he landed a good job, he did well, but he was neglecting his spiritual life and he drifted from church. To reconnect to a deeper understanding of Christian doctrine, someone offered a surprising suggestion, the Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin. Jacob also read Jonathan Edwards and C. S. Lewis, and eventually Tim Keller and Sinclair Ferguson. He returned to the church and he started serving. He had conversations with American ministers who came to teach in China. He was riveted by one professor’s lectures and writings on Christ-centered preaching.

Jacob: He gave two lectures on Christ-centered preaching and Christ-centered worship. I took him from the airport and to the airport. It was a luxury conversation with him for 45 minutes. He encouraged me to preach and seek Christ always from the Scripture. I think that’s the moment I commit myself to the Word of God and to the people.

Jacob eventually traveled to the U.S. with his young family to study theology. The years were full and they went by fast. It was almost time to return home, and that’s when things started shifting in China. The series of laws China enacted in 2018 were having real effects on Chinese house churches, and Jacob was facing a new reality as he prepared to return. Life hadn’t been easy for Christians in China before, but now it could be much more difficult, especially for pastors. Not long before his return, he attended a Christian conference in the U.S. He says it was like his Gethsemane. He loved gathering with so many other Christians openly and singing praises to God. And he knew China would be different. It was hard to leave.

Jacob: See, that’s the hard part. I love the experience of tasting the new heaven on earth, but I have to leave it. I also think about it’s so hard for Jesus to leave Heaven. I think that’s the hardest part. It’s not about us. Even during the hard time, I can experience Jesus more.

He meditated on Psalm 130.

Jacob: One verse at that time that was very encouraging me is I think Psalm 130. The watchmen wait for the dawn, first of all. And it’s like there’s so many uncertainties. They don’t have an iPhone to tell them when the sun rises. They know the sun will rise, but they don’t know when. This is how watchmen did it. And also it’s plural, watchmen, not a solo waiting. It’s waiting with others. Like in the New Testament, Anna, she waits for 84 years with all the people in Jerusalem for the hope of redemption. So a little bit overwhelmed emotionally. Yeah, I know it’s dark and don’t I know when it will end, but I know it will end.

But not all was dark in China. It took time, but eventually, Jacob planted a church back in his home city, working with others. At the first worship service, a handful of people attended. A year later, and right in the middle of COVID, it had grown to over 100 and it’s kept growing. The majority of the church are first-generation converts. That brought a lot of work and joy, and eventually, it brought scrutiny.

Jacob was interrogated by local officials. He’s not entirely sure what brought the attention, but the church does meet in a rented space. It’s not a secret. Police questioned Jacob for several hours. He says they played good cop, bad cop. The bad cop dangled the prospect of prison time. They eventually let him go, but it was exhausting and it cast a cloud. The church lost its meeting space. There was a second interrogation. Even now, Jacob doesn’t know where it’s all headed. But in the face of trouble, the church kept growing. Even unbelievers exploring Christianity keep coming despite the threats. So Jacob keeps preaching and teaching, meeting with church members and helping them share their faith with unbelieving friends. Instead of turning inward, the church is doubling down on evangelism. Still the dark clouds do hover. How do he and his family prepare for what might happen? Jacob says they really don’t.

Jacob: Because even in the Scriptures, they don’t prepare too much. Otherwise, we think about that, that we can be kind of an idol for us. And yeah, we don’t talk about it that much. We’re just very cautious about our faithfulness, not fearing to do anything.

Of course, Jacob does have concerns. He thinks about his family, he thinks about church members. He thinks about visitors, but he trusts God’s sovereignty and he doesn’t take another Sunday for granted.

Jacob: I don’t think about it too much because yeah, Jonathan Edwards says the worst thing that has already happened to Jesus, and the best thing is coming. So the worst thing already happened on the cross, the best things are to come, the new Kingdom, the new heaven on earth. So we are in the midst of that. So I usually don’t do the worst assumption. And yeah, we still pray every week. We praise God for one more Sunday and prepare as if it was the last one.

When he thinks back to the starting line of that marathon and his commitment to remain in China, he says he has no regrets.

Jacob: This is how God has helped me to wait for his second coming. Yeah, I’m facing a lot of persecutions and hardness, but God’s grace is even more than that. So no regret.

Jacob was honest that this isn’t easy and it’s not easy for churches. They’ve sin, they fail, they need the gospel every day. And that reminded me of something Hannah said when I spoke with her.

Hannah Nation: I try to say this as much as possible is just house church pastors and house church Christians are not heroes, and I really, really mean that. And people often can kind of have their feathers ruffled when I say that. Everyone wants a hero and everyone wants there to be Christians out there that are like, “That’s the Acts Church and we can look to them and be inspired.” And the Chinese churches, I’ve just spent a lot of time talking about how great they are and how much I love them and how much there’s so much we can learn from them. But the point is not that they are great. The point is not that they are holier. They are a messed up group of people. They deal with all of the same fights and struggles that we deal with. They fail as Christians constantly. I think the real difference is just what Jesus is doing among them.

And so we don’t look to them as heroes. We look to Jesus as the hero. And that’s really, really important when engaging the persecuted church because it does not help them to make them heroes, and it does not help us to make them heroes. The hero of this story is Christ. The hero of this work is Jesus. It is his church and he is that work. And I think we can look to the Chinese house churches to be encouraged by what the Lord has chosen to do among them. And the question is not how do we become more like the Chinese house churches. The question is how do we become more like Jesus and how do we look at what he’s doing in their lives and ask him to do the same thing in our lives. Humans are always just so tempted to make other humans an ideal, and that’s always going to disappoint. But Jesus doesn’t disappoint and it’s his work. But, yeah.

Eric Liddell never seemed to think of himself as a hero either, at least that’s what people who knew him in Scotland and China remembered. He wasn’t a perfect man. Like all of us, he was a sinner who needed a savior. I think he simply tried to be faithful. Occasionally that happened on a big stage like Paris, but largely it happened in ways that most people would never see and wouldn’t hear about until long after his death in China.

As Liddell took up teaching in Tianjin, he taught science. He also spoke at chapel, taught Sunday school, went to prayer meetings. He ran occasional races in China. And to his great joy, he married the daughter of another missionary. Eric and Florence Liddell were wed in Tianjin on March 27th, 1934. God would bless them with three daughters.

Internal strife was still roiling in China, but an even bigger conflict began unfolding when Japan invaded China in 1937. Chinese cities began to fall, but Liddell kept serving, and he set his ambition on some of the harder-to-reach places in China. He wanted to bring the gospel to the Chinese countryside even during a war. He and his brother Rob set out for a mission post that needed relief in northern China. With roads and trains out of the question, they traveled by boat. Bandits robbed them more than once. As they traveled back and forth over the coming months, Liddell was questioned by both Japanese and Chinese forces. After they arrived at the rural mission post, Liddell set out to the villages, making pastoral visits to a countryside ravaged by cholera and plagued by hunger. Murdered men lay in ditches. Hostile forces were all around. Liddell traveled with the essentials, a Bible, a prayer book, and a compass. That compass eventually pointed Liddell back to Tianjin as Japanese forces shut down the missionary outpost. He made a final trip to Scotland on a short furlough before heading back to China.

In 1941, as World War II grew fiercer, Liddell made the difficult decision to part with his family. He sent his wife and two daughters to Canada until things hopefully improved. Florence was pregnant with their third daughter. Liddell would never meet her. He and other missionaries remaining in Tianjin essentially fell under a form of house arrest within the city by Japanese forces. Soon, they were imprisoned. In March of 1943, Liddell arrived at the Weixian Internment Camp. He would never leave. What happened in that camp over the next two years was both monotonous and remarkable. With no running water, no heating, and latrines that overflowed, the camp filled with 1,800 prisoners, including 200 missionaries.

Biographer Duncan Hamilton says that Liddell saw the camp as an extension of his original mission. He took extra turns at pumping water. He cleaned the latrines. He tended to the elderly. He swept floors. He played chess to boast the spirits of depressed prisoners. Liddell was also a camp pastor, offering counsel and encouragement and studying the Bible with other prisoners. When more than 200 school-age children arrived from the China Inland Mission, Liddell became known as Uncle Eric. He organized chemistry classes and sports. One woman who had been a child in the camp later remembered Liddell as Jesus in running shoes because believe it or not, Liddell also ran. He would give his opponents a head start, but still win. But that streak wouldn’t last.

In 1944, Liddell ran his final race. He had been losing weight and growing weaker for months, but to keep up morale, he agreed to a friendly race with younger challengers. To the prisoner’s surprise, a diminished Liddell finished second. In the months ahead, Liddell kept deteriorating, and it wasn’t just the scarcity of food. He had trouble thinking straight. His mood fluctuated. He got headaches. Later an autopsy would reveal, Liddell had a brain tumor. But even after he checked into the prison hospital, he continued to receive visitors, encourage people as he could. Near the end, he suffered a stroke. Then, two more. A longtime missionary friend sat next to his bed keeping vigil. She says the last words Liddell said before drifting away were, “It’s complete surrender.” Liddell died on February 21st, 1945. He was 43 years old.

Three days later, his fellow prisoners held a funeral service. On a frigid morning, they sang the hymn, Be Still, My Soul, and a group of thin pallbearers carried his wooden coffin at their shoulders. There’s no photo of that day, but it reminds me of another image of Liddell. It’s a photograph from 1924, just days after his Olympic victory. His friends celebrated his triumph by carrying him through the streets of Edinburgh on their shoulders. Now, two decades later, a different set of friends were grieving, but also celebrating another kind of victory. It’s a victory rooted in the promise of Christ before his own death and resurrection, “Whoever loses his life, for my sake and for the gospel will save it.”

About a decade before Liddell’s death, a journalist asked him if he was still glad he became a missionary. Didn’t he miss the thrill of running and the cheers of victory? Liddell replied that he thought about it occasionally, but he was happy with his choice. He said, “I’m glad I’m at the work I’m engaged in now. A fellow’s life counts for far more at this than the other. An incorruptible crown, you know.”

This year’s Summer Olympics have come and gone, but Paris will get one more moment in the spotlight later this year. Organizers say on December 8th, they’ll reopen the Cathedral of Notre Dame. When I visited Paris in February, renovations were still underway. Those efforts included a massive amount of scaffolding surrounding the cathedral on every side. It sort of covered up the parts I most wanted to see, and it was hard to picture the final result. But on my last night in Paris, I walked by the cathedral one more time, and the scaffolding looked beautiful. It was all lit up, almost like an intricate little city of its own. And it made me think of all the scaffolding in God’s Kingdom.

It’s in places like small churches and broken neighborhoods in Scotland where the gospel is starting to take root. It’s in the back room of a coffee shop in France where Muslims are hearing the good news. And it’s in the hopeful gatherings of believers in China who don’t know what the future might hold, but who do know that Jesus is worth it. God is building his Kingdom in a thousand different ways. And even if we can’t quite imagine how the final picture will look, it’s going to be beautiful. It already is. It’s amazing that God gives us the opportunity to work on a little piece of it to make our days count for his glory until our days end. That is where every road leads for every believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. But even then, that finish line is just the beginning. I’m Jamie Dean and from the team at Radical, this has been Glory Road.