John Sung

On February 17, 1927, a Chinese student was admitted to Bloomingdale Hospital, a psychiatric institution in White Plains, north of New York City. He was twenty-five. A psychiatrist had examined him. The doctors were not sure what to call his condition. His file contains phrases such as paranoid condition and paranoid dementia praecox, the old term for what would later be called schizophrenia. Union Theological Seminary, where he had just begun his theological studies, paid more than seven hundred dollars from an emergency fund for his stay.

A year earlier that student had earned a doctorate in chemistry. His name was Song Shangjie. In America they called him John Sung.

Anyone who saw him in White Plains then would never have believed what became of him. In the twelve years that followed he traveled through China and Southeast Asia, as far as Batavia, Surabaya and Ambon. Historian Daryl Ireland of Boston University writes that in those years he traveled farther, spoke more often and brought more Chinese people to faith than anyone else. But his story is also one of the most reworked stories in the history of the Chinese church. He himself, his missionary friends and his later biographers told it again and again, each in their own way. Since researchers have read his files and diaries, we know more, and sometimes something different.

It began in a parsonage in Fujian.

A BOY FROM HINGHWA

Song Shangjie was born on September 27, 1901, in the village of Hong Chek, near the city of Hinghwa in the Chinese coastal province of Fujian. Today the city is called Putian. He was the sixth child and the fourth son of Sung Xue Lian, a pastor in the Methodist church. At birth he was given the name Zhu En.

China was still ruled by an emperor then. Western mission societies, among them the American Methodists, had founded churches and schools in the coastal provinces. The Song family belonged to that small Christian minority. The Putian dialect was hardly understood outside the region. That would cause him trouble later on.

In 1909, in his father’s church, the boy witnessed a revival that became known as the Hinghwa Pentecost. According to the English Wikipedia it began on Good Friday, with a sermon by the preacher Lim Hongban. He was seven at the time. It moved him, writes the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity, but he was not yet born again. According to the Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia, he wanted to become a pastor from an early age, just like his father.

FIVE AND A HALF YEARS IN AMERICA

In 1920 he left for the United States. He studied chemistry at Ohio Wesleyan University, a Methodist university, and earned his bachelor’s degree in three years. There he became friends with Rollin H. Walker, a Bible teacher. Then he went on to Ohio State University. In 1924 he earned his master’s degree, and in 1926 his doctorate in chemistry.

They were impressive years, and he later liked to talk about them. The Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity notes that recent research found errors in his own account, including about his academic results. The doctorate itself is certain. Yale Divinity School, which holds his papers, mentions the Ohio State doctorate from 1926.

After that he chose theology. In 1926 he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Union was known as a liberal, modernist school. That would matter later in the struggle over his story.

A VOICE ON FEBRUARY 10

What happened inside him in the winter of 1926 to 1927 comes down to us in two versions.

The first is Sung’s own. He said that on February 10, 1927, he heard a voice telling him his sins were forgiven. Later he called that day his spiritual birthday. In his own words, freely translated, Jesus found him in room 405 of an atheist seminary. He also said that he had attended evangelistic meetings during those weeks.

The second version comes from the archives. In 2010 Daryl Ireland tracked down Sung’s student file at Union. He also read the diaries Sung kept all his life, some six thousand pages. Those sources reveal a young man who was seriously ill. He saw visions. He spoke of himself as the prophet of a new age. He believed he could read secret messages in the crossword puzzles of The New York Times. Ireland describes him as a gifted student living with schizophrenia.

Both stories can be true at the same time. A person can meet God and be ill at the same time. What is certain is that Union’s leadership was worried. Rollin Walker, his old teacher from Ohio, forwarded a letter from Sung to the seminary. A week after February 10, Sung was admitted.

ONE HUNDRED NINETY-THREE DAYS

He stayed at Bloomingdale until August 30, 1927. That is about six and a half months. Christian tradition has held on to the number one hundred ninety-three days, and it matches the dates in the hospital file.

Sung himself later saw those months as a great misunderstanding. He said he was locked up because his faith was too fervent. A 2008 article in Christian History says that in the institution he read through the Bible forty times. As far as I can tell, that number comes from his own testimony. Nobody else counted.

Accounts of how he was released differ. According to the Biographical Dictionary it happened through the efforts of a friend, Dr. William Walker. According to Ireland he was discharged because Union could no longer pay for his care, not because he had recovered. He was released into the care of a family named Fowler. Henry Sloane Coffin, Union’s president, refused to let him return. Sung went home, and according to Ireland he still carried his delusions with him.

I find this the hardest part of his story, and also one of the most honest. How would you look at a preacher you knew had spent half a year in a psychiatric institution? Many Christians have preferred to leave that part of his life out, or to bend it into a story about persecution. The sources show something else: a broken man who went home and had to find his way there.

OVER THE RAIL

In the autumn of 1927 he sailed back to China. On that voyage came the story he is best known for. This is how he told it himself later: before the ship reached the Chinese coast, he threw his awards and diplomas overboard. He kept only his doctoral diploma, to give to his parents. According to one account it was for his father, according to another for his mother. He gave his savings to his father, his books and clothes to his brother.

No witnesses wrote it down. The story comes from his own mouth, and the serious biographers say so too. Still, the image has stayed with people: a man who let the titles he had worked years for sink into the Pacific Ocean. From then on he wanted to be nothing but a preacher.

In December 1927 he married Yu Jin Hua, who was also called Jean. Their parents had arranged the marriage years earlier. He began teaching chemistry and Bible at his old high school in Putian, the Methodist Guthrie Memorial High School. That lasted about a year. In 1928 the Methodist conference of Hinghwa appointed him an evangelist.

A LETTER FROM W.B. COLE

In February 1928 an American Methodist missionary in Hinghwa, W.B. Cole, wrote a letter about the young evangelist. It was the first missionary report on what had happened in New York. According to Ireland, his conversations with Cole helped Sung to center his life on Christ again. But Cole also had an aim of his own. He was a fundamentalist and wanted to show how blind Union’s liberal theology was. His letter suggested that the seminary had wrongly declared Sung insane.

Union responded with its own version: Sung had already been ill when he arrived. So the life of a Chinese student became a stake in an American battle between modernists and fundamentalists. Sung himself told his story in 1933 in the booklet My Testimony, which he dictated to Wang Minxue. Ireland shows that in it he even moved a vision by a week, to the day he was admitted. That made the story stronger.

I do not write this to make Sung smaller. Everyone tells their life with a purpose. The question is what remains when you peel away the layers. With Sung, a great deal remains.

ELEVEN HUNDRED NINETY-NINE SERVICES

In the first years he preached mainly in Fujian. In Xiamen and Fuzhou he spoke English with an interpreter, because his dialect was not understood there. According to Ireland, in the villages he preached about a supernatural God who intervenes in the ordinary world, and he held his message up to the light of both the spiritual life and science.

In 1931 he spoke in Shanghai at a revival meeting of the National Christian Council of China. After that he joined the Bethel Worldwide Evangelistic Band. This was an evangelistic team of the Bethel Mission in Shanghai, founded by the American missionary Jennie Hughes and the Chinese doctor Shi Meiyu, known in English as Mary Stone. The team’s leader was Andrew Gih. In two years Sung held 1,199 revival services with them, Ireland counts. They traveled from Inner Mongolia in the north to Guangxi in the south.

In December 1931 he also began to pray for the sick. Ireland sees his faith healing as something that offered Chinese people a third way, alongside traditional Chinese medicine and Western hospitals. Strikingly, he himself was never healed of the ailment he had brought back from America.

In 1933 it came to a break. After conflicts with his teammates, Gih among them, and with the two women who led the mission, he had to leave. From 1934 he worked independently, and from then on in Mandarin. His preaching drew many women. They took up his call and formed their own evangelistic teams.

In May 1938 he was ordained an elder in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Xinghua, by Bishop John Gowdy. He remained a Methodist, even long after he had gone his own way.

“COME HOME”

From late 1935 he also traveled south. The countries south of China were home to large Chinese communities. The first trip lasted two months and took him to Singapore, Malacca and the Dutch East Indies. Up to 1940 he made five such trips, almost two years in all. He went to Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma (now Myanmar), Taiwan and Indonesia.

For a Dutch author like me, that last country is special. Indonesia was then the Dutch East Indies, a colony of the Netherlands. Most of its inhabitants were Muslim. Many Chinese lived there, among them the peranakan: Chinese whose families had lived there for generations and who spoke Malay rather than Chinese. They formed the core of the Chinese churches on Java.

Historian Barbara Watson Andaya of the University of Hawai’i has researched Sung’s trips to the Indies, using Dutch newspapers as a source. He first came to Java at the invitation of the Pentecostal community in Soerabaja (now Surabaya). In Batavia, today’s Jakarta, a special Chinese committee was formed to invite him. His visa for Batavia took six months to come through. When he finally arrived, the Chinese church on the Prinsenlaan turned out to be too small. The services moved to the much larger Portuguese Outer Church, where worship was normally held in Malay. That church, built in 1695, still stands and is now called Gereja Sion.

The Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad wrote about him in November 1938 and February 1939, and Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië in August 1939. According to Andaya, the Dutch-language newspapers were unanimously positive. They spoke of a great success and an astonishing number of visitors. The colonial government saw no danger in him. Some Dutch missionaries compared his campaigns to the great revival in Wales.

In 1939 Cornelia Baarbé sat in one of his services in Surabaya. She was a Dutch missionary who worked among the Chinese on Java. She came with doubts and went home an admirer. In 1949 she published her account in the mission magazine Lichtstralen op den akker der wereld. She described how he drew the lost sheep on a blackboard with a few lines and strokes. During his sermon on the crucifixion, she wrote, it was as if she could hear the hammer blows. On Java he kept singing a Malay song whose title means “Come home.” About every five minutes he started it up again.

He preached in Chinese robes. When someone asked him about Gandhi, he answered that China did not need Gandhi’s teaching. Andaya sees in these choices a man who deliberately presented his message as Chinese.

“YOUR HEARTS ARE SO HARD!”

On Ambon, in the Moluccas, things went differently. Ever since the days of the Dutch East India Company, Ambon had been a stronghold of the Reformed church. There is an account of this visit from 1940 in The Australian Evangel, an Australian Pentecostal magazine. So it is a source written by friends of the movement, and you have to read it that way.

According to that account, a Reformed minister threatened to forbid his members to attend the meetings if he did not like the sermons. Sung received threatening letters. The Pentecostal missionaries advised him against using the island’s largest Protestant church as a venue. Another minister then paid for a large tabernacle made of atap, dried palm leaves. He borrowed a piano, a blackboard and chairs to go with it.

Three days after arriving, Sung sat down in the middle of a service. He said to those present: “Your hearts are so hard!” He threatened to leave for Makassar. He stayed. At his last meeting, according to the Pentecostal magazine, there were about four thousand people. I know of no other counts.

Sung himself said that of all the places in the Indies, Ambon was the hardest. I find that an honest detail. Even a man with a great name could get frustrated and say so.

His call for “all Java for Jesus” was not fulfilled, Andaya writes dryly. But his written-out sermons and songbooks kept circulating, and lay preachers used them for years.

A CAMP BED IN DECEMBER

By then Sung was already ill. In America he had developed fistulas, inflammations that would not heal and caused him great pain. He often preached three times a day, two to three hours each time. He held retreats on the whole Bible lasting from ten days to a month. In 1936, according to his own notes, he went through the whole Bible in one month with about two thousand people.

Meanwhile, in 1937, war with Japan broke out, and the work in China became more and more difficult. That was one of the reasons he went south so often.

In December 1939 he preached for the last time, in Indonesia. He was lying on a camp bed. Ireland mentions it briefly, without naming a place. It was his last sermon. After that he went back to China.

SIX THOUSAND PAGES

He spent his last years in Xiangshan, the Fragrant Hills near Peking. He underwent several operations. His wife and children came over from Shanghai. In 1941 his youngest son, Joshua, died. Sung spent most of his time in bed. Ireland writes that there he learned the quiet ministry of prayer. Christian History attributes a short sentence to him: “Without great tribulation, there is no great illumination.”

On August 18, 1944, he died in a small house outside Peking. He was forty-two. The sources differ on the cause of death: Yale names tuberculosis, while Ireland and the Biographical Dictionary point to the fistulas he had brought back from America. The Chinese preacher Wang Mingdao led his funeral. He left behind his wife and children. The reference works do not agree on exactly how many children there were.

What he also left behind were his diaries. Every evening he wrote down how many people had come and how many had come to faith. They also contain sermons, prayers and lists of people he prayed for. The 2008 article in Christian History calls him someone who constantly examined himself and repented anew every day. A daughter published edited versions of the diaries. His daughter Levi kept the papers, and after her death they went to the library of Yale Divinity School. In 2016 Ireland was the first researcher to use the unedited diaries.

Nobody knows how many people came to faith through him. Estimates range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, and they are not counts. The numbers in his diary come from himself. The Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia calls them reliable on the whole, and also notes that Sung admitted he sometimes exaggerated in his sermons.

Perhaps that is why I enjoyed writing this chapter. John Sung was not a saint without cracks. He was ill, sometimes unreasonable, sometimes a man who made his own story more beautiful. And in the Chinese churches of Asia his sermons and songbooks passed from hand to hand for a long time.

The notebooks in which he wrote down his day, evening after evening, now lie in the library at Yale. Between the numbers of those who came are his prayers.