Wang Mingdao

On Sunday morning, August 7, 1955, Wang Mingdao preached in his own church in Peking, today’s Beijing. The building stood on Shijia Hutong, a narrow street in the old city, and was called the Christian Tabernacle. He was fifty-five. His sermon was titled: The Son of Man Is Betrayed into the Hands of Sinners.

A week earlier the magazine Tianfeng, the voice of the official Protestant movement in China, had published an attack on him. In the night after that service, at about one o’clock, the police were at the door. Wang was arrested, together with his wife Liu Jingwen and eighteen young people from the church. Shortly afterward the building was sealed.

Wang Mingdao would spend more than twenty years in prisons and labor camps. In China he became the man who refused: first the Japanese occupiers, then the church movement that supported the new government. He is also the man who, once, did sign. That belongs to his story, and he himself never kept it quiet.

It began in a besieged quarter, in the summer of 1900.

BORN AMONG THE BULLETS

In 1900 the Boxer Uprising swept across northern China. The Boxers were a movement that attacked foreigners and Chinese Christians, because they saw them as agents of the Western powers that were pressing hard on China at the time. China was still ruled by an emperor, of the Qing dynasty. In Peking, Christians fled to the Legation Quarter, where the foreign embassies were. That quarter was besieged for weeks.

The Wang family was there too. The father, Wang Zihou, was a doctor and had ties with Western missionaries. According to the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity, the family feared for their lives for that reason. Before his son was born, Wang Zihou took his own life in the besieged quarter. On July 25, 1900, the child was born.

His mother, Li Wenyi, was a member of the church of the London Missionary Society, a British mission organization. She named her son Tiezi. It means iron son. The life that followed was hard. Mother and son often did not have enough to eat, and the boy was weak and often ill. They lived in a crowded courtyard among poor families. According to his Chinese biography, he saw quarreling, violence and deceit up close there, and a strong aversion to evil grew in him.

At nine he went to the primary school of the same mission organization.

A FRIEND WHO PUT HIM IN HIS PLACE

In the spring of 1914 the fourteen-year-old received a sharp rebuke from a Christian friend. What exactly that friend said has not been preserved. We do know what Tiezi did next. He began reading the books of Xie Hongfu, a Chinese writer who worked for the Christian youth organization the YMCA. Wang later wrote that he then began to understand the meaning and the responsibility of life. At Easter that year he was baptized in a chapel of the London Missionary Society.

In those years he dreamed of a career in politics. China had become a republic in 1912. In June 1918 he fell seriously ill. According to his own account, he promised God that he would give his life to Him if he got better. He recovered, and he kept that promise. What happened in that sickroom we know only from what he himself told about it.

Have you ever made a promise in a moment of need, and then forgotten it once things were going well again? Wang did not forget.

ICE-COLD WATER NEAR BAODING

In 1919 he became a teacher at a Presbyterian mission school in Baoding, a city southwest of Peking. Presbyterians are Protestants who baptize children and have their church led by elders. In 1920 Wang took a new name: Mingdao. It means roughly: understanding the Way, or understanding the Word.

In the same year he became convinced that the Bible speaks of the baptism of believers by immersion. His earlier baptism, by sprinkling, he no longer considered enough. For the school that was unacceptable. He refused to give up his view and lost his job, and according to The Gospel Coalition also a chance to study abroad. Together with five friends he had himself immersed. It was winter. According to his Chinese biography, it happened in ice-cold water under a bridge outside Baoding.

After that he withdrew to the Western Hills near Peking. This is how he told it later: in sixty-two days he read the whole Bible six times. The number comes from his own memory. What is certain is that he came out of those years as someone who knew the Bible almost word for word and wanted to build his life on it.

A CHURCH WITHOUT FOREIGN MONEY

From 1921 he preached, at first in small circles. Early in 1925 he began holding meetings in his own home. In 1927 he started a magazine, the Lingshi Jikan, known in English as Spiritual Food Quarterly.

In November 1926 he became engaged in Hangzhou to Liu Jingwen, the daughter of a pastor. In August 1928 they married. They had a son, Tianduo.

The group in his home grew. It moved a few times, to halls in the city. In the spring of 1936 the congregation bought land at number 42 Shijia Hutong. On August 1, 1937, the building was opened. It was named Jidutu Huitang, Christian Tabernacle.

What made this church special was its independence. It belonged to no Western denomination and accepted no money from foreign mission organizations. In the China of that time this was rare. Most Protestant churches had been founded by missionaries and were partly paid for by them. The Biographical Dictionary notes that long before the Communists came to power, Wang lived by what would later be called the Three-Self principles: a church that governs itself, supports itself and spreads the gospel itself.

He was also strict. Someone was baptized only after showing that there was real repentance and a new life. Between 1933 and 1949 a little over five hundred and seventy people were baptized in the Tabernacle. That number comes from the congregation’s own count. Wang preferred a small church of true believers to a full church of nominal Christians. He preached about conversion, holiness and an honest life, and he was sharp toward preachers who, in his view, no longer took the Bible seriously.

A COFFIN IN THE HOUSE

In the summer of 1937, in the very weeks when the new church building was finished, the Japanese army invaded northern China and took Peking. The occupation would last until 1945.

The Japanese occupiers wanted to bring the churches under control. The Gospel Coalition relates, for example, that from 1939 Wang refused to put patriotic slogans in his magazine, as was demanded of publishers. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the churches of British and American missions in Peking were closed. In January 1942 the Japanese set up a Christian federation for North China, which all churches had to join. Wang was invited. He refused.

On October 10, 1942, he was summoned to a Japanese official, Takeda Hiroshi. Takeda explained that the unity of the churches was Japanese policy. Wang’s answer has been preserved, in Chinese. In substance he said that he would never obey an order that went against God’s will. Joining was impossible for him and his congregation, he said. He appealed to the biblical command not to be unequally yoked with those who do not believe.

His biographers tell that in those years he kept a coffin in the house. Nothing happened. The Japanese left him alone, and the Tabernacle stayed open. Wang saw God’s protection in this. Whether there were other reasons why the occupiers left him in peace, we do not know.

“I WON’T ATTEND”

In 1949 the Communist Party came to power in China. At the end of that year some seven to eight hundred people attended a service at the Tabernacle. In May 1950 a statement by a group of Protestant leaders appeared in Peking, the Christian Manifesto. It was the beginning of what would become the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. That movement was meant to cut the Protestant churches loose from abroad and have them cooperate with the new state.

On paper the movement asked for what Wang had been doing for thirty years. But he refused to take part. His objection was first of all theological, all his biographers write. In the leadership of the movement he saw people he called modernists: Christians who, in his view, explained away the core of what the Bible teaches about Christ. He could not share a church with them. In December 1951 he wrote in his magazine: “I covet the faithfulness and courage of Martin Luther.”

In July 1954 a national Christian conference was held in Peking. Leaders of the movement tried to persuade him. His answer, according to Christian History: “I won’t attend.” In September the movement organized a meeting in Peking at which he was publicly denounced. He sat there, looked at the ceiling and said not a word. Afterward he was allowed to go home.

In the summer of 1955 he wrote a long piece titled We, Because of Faith. In it he explained one more time why he could not join. Christian History quotes from his writings of those years an appeal to his readers: “Don’t give way, don’t compromise!”

Two months later came that night of August 7 to 8.

THE STATEMENT OF SEPTEMBER 1956

What happened in the cell we know in broad outline. Wang was given fifteen years. According to Christianity Today of April 1957, fellow prisoners were put in his cell who talked at him day and night. According to other accounts, he heard that Christians who sympathized with him had been arrested, and that his wife was ill in prison. According to The Gospel Coalition, he was afraid of a long sentence or even the death penalty.

At the end of September 1956, at a special meeting in Peking, he made a public self-condemnation. He confessed to a long list of counterrevolutionary crimes, things that according to all his biographers he had not done. He signed a letter in which he promised to bring the Tabernacle into the Three-Self Movement. After that he and his wife were released.

I do not want to hurry past this. In many stories about courageous Christians, a moment like this is left out or made smaller. With Wang Mingdao that is impossible, and it is not necessary either. He signed. He said things that were not true, because he was broken.

What followed was worse for him than the cell. In the spring of 1957 Christianity Today reported that, according to reliable sources, he was a changed man, under a dark cloud. According to the Biographical Dictionary, he nearly collapsed. He saw himself as Peter, who denied Jesus, and at other moments as Judas, who betrayed Him. He did not preach for the movement and did not join it either.

Do you know that feeling, of having said or signed something you know was not true, and of not being able to let it go?

BACK TO THE POLICE STATION

Slowly he recovered. His faith was restored, the Biographical Dictionary writes. Then he did something most people in his situation would not do. Together with his wife he went to the police. He withdrew his statement. He said the accusations were false and that he had confessed to them under pressure.

His biographer in the Biographical Dictionary sums it up like this: he decided it was better to die in prison than to lie.

The consequences came quickly. In April he and his wife were arrested again. The year differs from source to source. The Biographical Dictionary gives April 1958. The Gospel Coalition gives April 29, 1957, and another account speaks of exactly seven months after his release. I have not been able to decide this. Wang was now sentenced to life. Liu Jingwen received fifteen years.

Watchman Nee, the subject of an earlier chapter in this book, was also in prison in those years. Two very different leaders, with very different churches, ended up in the same place in the same years.

OF MORE VALUE THAN MANY SPARROWS

Of the years that followed, we know mainly places and dates. Wang was held in various prisons in Peking. In 1963, according to Asia Harvest, he lay in the prison infirmary coughing up blood. According to Christian History, in that same year he sensed that his spiritual life was being restored. In 1966 he was moved to a labor camp near Datong, in Shanxi Province. In April 1968 he went to Yinying in Yangquan district, also in Shanxi, where prisoners worked in a coal mine. He was beaten and, according to Asia Harvest, kept in handcuffs for months.

In the summer of 1971 a letter from him reached the outside world. He wrote to his family that they need not worry about him, because he was of more value than many sparrows. He was referring to the words of Jesus to His disciples, when He was preparing them for persecution: Do not fear therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:31)

A man who fifteen years earlier had nearly collapsed now wrote that he did not need to be afraid.

Liu Jingwen was released in the 1970s. Here too the sources differ: 1973, 1974 or 1977. According to the Biographical Dictionary, she had gone blind in one eye. She went to live with their son in Shanghai.

A RELEASE HE REFUSED

In November 1979 the government decided to release Wang. He was seventy-nine. But his release paper stated that he was a counterrevolutionary criminal. He refused to leave. According to his Chinese biography, he said that before God he was a sinner, but that before the law of the land he had never committed a crime. Asia Harvest gives a similar statement: “I am not a criminal.”

It is a remarkable picture. An old man who does not want to leave prison, because he does not want to sign something untrue one more time. Twenty-three years earlier he had done just that.

On December 29, 1979, the guards took him to a house outside the prison walls. With that his imprisonment was in effect over. In January 1980 his son came for him and took him to Shanghai.

A ROOM IN SHANGHAI

He came back an old man without teeth, almost blind and almost deaf. He needed a hearing aid. He lived with his wife at their son’s home, from 1983 on Wukang Road. People gathered in their home to read the Bible and pray.

Visitors also came from far away. In 1981 the missionary David Adeney. On April 23, 1988, the American evangelist Billy Graham. For Christians inside and outside China, Wang had become a symbol of a church that would not let its faith be dictated to it. According to Christian History, his refusal helped prepare the way for the house churches in China, congregations that met in homes outside the official structures.

He was not an easy man. His biographer Stephen Wang wrote that in old age he became very stubborn. A Catholic reviewer of a book about him called him a martyr for the faith, and also a man with perhaps too much pride. Leaders of the Three-Self Movement saw him as someone who kept himself apart and would not help build a new country. I cannot weigh those judgments. I see a man who all his life found it hard to bend along with anything, and who paid a high price for it.

On the morning of July 28, 1991, Wang Mingdao died in Shanghai. He was ninety-one. His Chinese biography says he was faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ until death. Liu Jingwen died nine months later, on April 18, 1992. They were buried in Dongshan Cemetery, by Lake Tai, southwest of Suzhou.

TWO SIGNATURES

Anyone who lays out the life of Wang Mingdao sees two moments when a paper was put in front of him.

In September 1956 he signed. He was afraid, he was tired, his wife was in prison. He signed something that was not true.

In November 1979 he was given another paper. He was old, half blind and deaf, and the door stood open. He did not sign.