Planting Gospel Seed

Planting Gospel Seed

One plants, another waters, but God gives the increase.

JAMES TAYLOR had a pharmacy in Yorkshire, England. In early 1832 he knelt in the back of his shop beside his pregnant wife, Amelia, and prayed, “Dear God, if you should give us a son, grant that he may work for you in China.”

God gave them a son a few months later, and they named him James Hudson Taylor. Although his parents did not tell him of their prayer for him for years, as a boy he would often say, “When I am a man, I mean to be a missionary and go to China.”

But by the time Hudson was seventeen, he was a typical rebellious teenager and had no interest in being a missionary. But his family continued to pray. That summer when his mother was visiting her sister forty miles away, she felt led to lock herself in a room to pray for Hudson’s salvation and not come out until she had the assurance that her prayer had been answered. Back home, Hudson picked up a gospel tract that afternoon on Christ’s death on the cross for sinners and accepted the Savior.

Within a few months after Hudson experienced his new birth, his call to China was reconfirmed during a night of prayer, which he described as filled “with unspeakable awe and unspeakable joy.”

With a sense of urgency, Hudson finished his schooling and sailed for China at the age of twenty-one. At that time there were 350 baptized Chinese believers. During his first term he married and made several evangelistic trips into the closed interior of China but was forced to return to England because of illness.

There he regained his health and felt an increasing burden for the millions in the interior of China. When the interior was opened to Westerners, Hudson could find no mission willing to back him, so he founded the China Inland Mission (CIM) in 1865. The CIM had several unique distinctives. It was interdenominational and missionaries were recruited from the working class rather than from the universities. Direct appeals for funds were forbidden, with missionaries depending directly upon God for their support.

Initially Hudson prayed for twenty-four workers, two for each unreached province of China. The first fifteen sailed in May 1866, and by 1882 the China Inland Mission had workers in every province. By 1895 it had 641 missionaries, and by 1914 the China Inland Mission was the largest missionary organization, reaching its peak in 1934 with 1,368 missionaries. There were now five hundred thousand baptized believers in China. Then civil war broke out between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists. The two enemies joined forces to fight Japan; but after the war they went back to fighting each other. By September 1949 the Chinese Communists had won, and the Nationalists retreated to the island of Taiwan. The last CIM workers left China on July 20, 1953, leaving behind about one million believers.

The first two decades under Communism were ones of intense persecution. In reaction the church went underground, and many Christians stopped attending church. Yet by 1980 there were two million believers.

Since the early 1980s the growth of the church in China has no parallels in history. In 2000 there were approximately seventy-five million Christians in China. The church of the Lord Jesus Christ in China is larger than the Communist Party.

The sacrificial seed sown by the missionaries of CIM and other missions bore fruit a thousandfold, yet God chose to have the missionaries removed before the harvest that he alone might receive the glory.

Reflection

How would you account for the explosive growth of the church in China since the 1980s? Do you get discouraged when you share your faith with little or no results? The story of the Chinese church should encourage all of us that once the seed of the gospel has been planted it is God who gives the increase.

The rain and the snow come down from the heavens and stay on the ground to water the earth. They cause the grain to grow, producing seed for the farmer and bread for the hungry. It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it.

Isaiah 55:10-11