Watchman Nee

At the end of May 1972, a niece of Watchman Nee (one of the sources says a grandniece) found a scrap of paper under her uncle’s pillow. He had died a few days earlier in a labor camp in Anhui province, in the interior of China. He had been in captivity for twenty years. His body had been cremated before the family arrived.

On the paper were a few sentences in his handwriting. Christ is the Son of God, he wrote, who died for the sins of mankind and rose again after three days. He called this the greatest fact in the world. The last sentence read: “I shall die believing in Christ.”

We know about that note through his family. There is no photograph of it in any archive I was able to consult, and the wording differs a little from source to source. But biographers, historians and a Chinese Christian reference work all pass it on. In China in those years there were rumors that he had renounced his faith. This note said something else.

The man who wrote it was, in the West, one of the best known Chinese Christians of the twentieth century. His books, such as The Normal Christian Life, are still read today. In China he founded hundreds of churches that wanted nothing to do with Western denominations. He was also a businessman, a man against whom serious accusations were made, and a prisoner. All of these things belong to his story.

It began with a promise his mother made.

A GONG IN THE NIGHT

He was born on November 4, 1903, in Shantou, a port city in Guangdong province in the south of China. Westerners wrote the name as Swatow at the time. China still had an emperor. The country was poor and divided, and Western nations had forced their way in with trading posts and influence. Christians were a small minority.

His parents were Christians. His father, Ni Wenxiu, worked for the imperial customs service and was himself the son of a pastor. His mother, Lin Heping, had attended a Methodist mission school. Watchman was the third of nine children. When he was six, the family moved to Fuzhou, further up the coast.

His mother had given birth to two daughters before he came. According to his own testimony, which he told in 1936, she had prayed that if she had a son, she would give him to God. We know that story only from him.

He was given the name Shuzu, which means roughly: proclaim the merits of your ancestors. Later he chose another name for himself: Tuosheng, after the sound of the night watchman who strikes a bamboo gong at night in a Chinese city to mark the hours. From that name comes his English name: Watchman. According to Wikipedia he took the name in 1925.

A ROOM IN FUZHOU, APRIL 1920

Watchman attended schools of the Church Missionary Society, an Anglican mission organization from England. From 1916 he went to the secondary school of Trinity College in Fuzhou. In his final exams he came second in his class.

In the spring of 1920 the evangelist Dora Yu held meetings in Fuzhou. She was a Chinese Methodist evangelist. First his mother went. She came home and apologized to her son. Then he went himself.

His conversion took place at the end of April 1920. The sources give April 28 or 29. He later told how it happened. He sat alone in his room and wrestled. For him, believing and being called belonged together. If he said yes to Jesus, he was also saying yes to a life in His service, and no to the career he saw ahead of him. He confessed his sins, he said, and found peace.

Do you know that feeling, when saying yes to God costs you something straight away? For this seventeen-year-old it was no side issue. He knew he was giving something up.

THE MISSIONARY WHO BAPTIZED HIM AGAIN

After his conversion he went for a short time to Dora Yu’s Bible school in Shanghai. According to Wikipedia he was sent away because of his habits. Other sources I read do not mention this.

The person who would shape him most was an Englishwoman. Margaret E. Barber (1869-1930) had come to China as a missionary, but had cut her ties with the Anglican Church. She lived without a fixed income, depending on God. In 1921 she baptized Watchman and his mother again. They no longer considered the infant baptism they had received as babies enough, and wanted to be baptized as believers.

The Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity calls Barber the most important personal influence on his thinking. His emphasis on the inner life with Christ fits with Western writers such as Andrew Murray, according to the Christian Research Journal. A co-worker of Barber gave him a simple task: pray every day by name for your classmates. According to his own account, within a few months all but one of his roughly seventy classmates came to faith. Only he ever gave that number.

BREAKING BREAD WITHOUT A DENOMINATION

In 1922 Watchman began meetings in Fuzhou in the way he believed he saw in the book of Acts. Believers were baptized, the Lord’s Supper was celebrated every week, and elders led. There was no pastor in the usual sense, and no tie to any Western denomination.

That was a bold choice. At the time most Chinese Christians belonged to churches founded by missionaries: Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists. Watchman saw that division as a problem. In his view there should be only one church in each place, just as the New Testament speaks of the church in Ephesus.

In 1923 he started a magazine, and later a second one followed. He wrote a great deal and read even more.

Then he fell ill. Doctors diagnosed tuberculosis, a disease that killed many young people in those days. The sources disagree about the year: 1924 according to his own testimony, 1926 according to the Biographical Dictionary. During that period he wrote The Spiritual Man, a work in three volumes published in 1928. He later said that after fasting and prayer he received a word from the Bible about faith, got up and walked down the stairs. He believed God had healed him. When he visited Dora Yu, she was shocked, because she had heard he was dying. This too we know from his own story.

THE LITTLE FLOCK IN SHANGHAI

In the second half of the 1920s Watchman moved to Shanghai. The sources give 1926, 1927 or 1928. Shanghai was the largest and most international city in China, with districts under foreign administration.

There his work grew into a movement. He himself simply spoke of the church in that place. Outsiders called the group the Little Flock. Co-workers traveled the country as itinerant workers and founded new churches. Families sometimes moved to another city to start a church there. By 1932, according to Wikipedia, there were already churches in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

In 1933 Watchman traveled to England and America. In London he broke bread with the church at Honor Oak, and also with missionaries outside the circle of the Brethren, an English movement of independent churches. In 1935 leaders of the strict branch of that movement, the Exclusive Brethren, broke off fellowship with him and his churches.

In 1934 he married Zhang Pinhui, known in English as Charity Chang. Her aunt opposed the marriage. According to the Biographical Dictionary, she spread accusations about his conduct, after which he withdrew from leadership for a time. The following year he took it up again. Charity and Watchman had no children.

Around the same time he brought a younger man from the north to Shanghai to edit his writings: Li Changshou, known in the West as Witness Lee. That name will come up again.

“IN A FLASH I SAW IT”

In 1938 and 1939 Watchman was in Europe again. He spoke to groups of young Christian workers, in Denmark among other places. The talks were about the letter to the Romans, about what Christ had done on the cross and what that means for the life of a believer.

Those talks became the book The Normal Christian Life. They appeared in installments in an English magazine from 1940 onward. The Briton Angus Kinnear later collected and edited them. His foreword is dated Bangalore, India, 1957. Since then the book has appeared in many languages.

At its heart is one verse: knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him (Romans 6:6). In the book Watchman tells how for months he had tried to reckon himself dead to sin. It did not work. One morning, while he was reading the Bible and praying, he saw it. In his words: “And then in a flash I saw it.” He saw that he was in Christ, and that he had died when Christ died.

I find it striking that Watchman gives no method in that chapter. He describes something he saw. How much of what you know about God have you seen like that, and how much have you only heard?

A PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY

In 1939 Watchman became involved in the pharmaceutical company of his brother, a chemist. According to Asia Harvest it was called China Biological and Chemical Laboratories, and Watchman became chairman of the board. The aim, according to that source, was to earn money for the work of the churches, which were short of funds.

It was wartime. Japan had launched a major attack on China in 1937, and Shanghai was occupied territory. In 1945 Watchman moved west to Chongqing to oversee the factory there.

A Christian leader running a business raised questions. But what happened in 1942 was about more than business.

SIX SILENT YEARS

In 1942 the elders of the church in Shanghai removed Watchman from his ministry. He was no longer allowed to preach. After that the church in Shanghai stopped meeting for a time.

Why this happened is disputed to this day. I will set the sources side by side.

According to Wikipedia and Asia Harvest, the elders had difficulty with his involvement in the company. The Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity gives two reasons: irregularities in his business and sexual immorality. A Hong Kong church historian who devoted a long study to it in 2002 concluded that it was not about the company but about his personal morals. Writers from within the local churches themselves speak of great unrest and of rumors which, in their view, were untrue.

I cannot settle this, and I am not going to try. What is certain is that there were accusations, that his own elders took action, and that he did not serve in the church for six years. What it was like for him inwardly, we do not know from any reliable source.

In April 1948 revival came to the church in Shanghai. Witness Lee and a co-worker, Peace Wang, had rebuilt the church in the preceding years. With Witness Lee’s help, Watchman returned to the ministry. On that return the sources agree.

THE MAN WHO DID NOT WANT A WESTERN CHURCH

Around 1949, according to the Biographical Dictionary and Christian History, the movement numbered some seven hundred churches with about seventy thousand members. These are estimates that the sources do not support any further. Another article speaks of at least six hundred churches.

In 1949 the Communist Party took power. At the end of 1948 and the beginning of 1949 Watchman gave a training for leaders at the mountain resort of Guling (Kuling). According to the historian Joseph Lee, it dealt among other things with martyrdom. He sent Witness Lee to Taiwan, so that the work could continue outside the mainland.

What followed is complicated. The new government set up the Three-Self Movement: churches had to govern themselves, support themselves and spread themselves, without foreign help and under the supervision of the Party. All his life Watchman had argued for Chinese churches without Western leadership. In 1950 he encouraged the churches to take part. The movement also signed the Christian Manifesto, a declaration of loyalty to the new state.

It did not help. In September 1951 four members of the church in Nanjing publicly denounced him as a reactionary, an enemy of the revolution.

APRIL 10, 1952

On April 10, 1952, Watchman Nee was arrested in Manchuria, in the northeast of China. The sources name different cities. The charges concerned his company: bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property. The company was confiscated.

Asia Harvest writes that he was portrayed as a capitalist who broke the law. According to the Hong Kong church historian, he was arrested in the first place for commercial offenses, not for his faith. In China that distinction can never be fully drawn. A Christian leader with a business was a double target for the state.

For four years he was held without a sentence. In January 1956 co-workers and elders of the movement were rounded up across the country. In Shanghai, denunciation meetings followed, where people had to testify against him in public. According to Asia Harvest, about two thousand five hundred people gathered on January 30 in the church building on Nanyang Road. Among the accusers were former leaders of his own movement. It was there too that accusations of sexual misconduct were made public.

On June 21, 1956, the High Court of Shanghai found him guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to fifteen years. Christian History gives the description under which he was convicted: head of a counterrevolutionary clique. The elders of the church in Shanghai excommunicated him.

WHAT WAS TRUE?

Here I have to be honest about what we do not know.

The American historian Joseph Lee, who studied the denunciation material from those years, calls it highly contested evidence. It was written in the language of the Maoist campaigns and was meant to break Christian communities. The 2002 Hong Kong study reaches a different verdict: exaggerated, but largely justified. Writers from the local churches see all of it as political propaganda and rumor.

I have let those three voices stand side by side. A court in the China of 1956 was not a place where a defendant received a fair trial. That does not automatically make the charges untrue. It does make them unreliable as evidence. What happened in his personal life, I cannot establish from here.

What is certain: he was convicted, and he stayed in prison, even after his sentence had ended.

TWENTY YEARS

Watchman was first held in Tilanqiao Prison in Shanghai. There are stories from a fellow prisoner about what he said and did there. Joseph Lee warns that they should be read with great caution, because their tone is strongly hagiographic.

According to Christian History, he was someone who said, “I want nothing for myself, I want everything for the Lord.” In prison that was put to the test. His sentence was due to end in 1967. He was not released. An English biography relates that he was offered release if he would stop preaching, and that he refused. I have not been able to check that story in an independent source.

After that he was transferred to a labor camp in Anhui. According to Joseph Lee this was in 1969, according to Asia Harvest not until 1972. The camp was called Baimaoling.

Charity was arrested in 1966, during the Cultural Revolution, and according to Asia Harvest severely mistreated. In 1971 she fell, broke several ribs and died a few days later. Watchman was not allowed to attend her funeral. They had been married for thirty-seven years, nineteen of which he had spent behind bars.

A TRACTOR ON THE WAY TO THE HOSPITAL

In May 1972 his heart was in serious trouble. According to the Biographical Dictionary and Asia Harvest, he was eventually taken by tractor to a prison hospital about nineteen kilometers (twelve miles) away. He died on May 30, 1972, in his sixty-ninth year. There was no official announcement and no funeral. On June 1 his body was cremated, before his family arrived.

Afterwards his niece found the scrap of paper under the pillow.

THE WATCHMAN ON THE WALL

What Watchman Nee left behind has gone in two directions.

Outside China his books were widely read. According to Wikipedia, more than a million copies of The Normal Christian Life have been sold. Many of those books grew out of talks that others wrote down and edited, often years later. In Taiwan, and later in the United States, Witness Lee built up a worldwide movement of local churches that appeals to Watchman Nee. That movement has its own history and its own debates, which lie outside this chapter.

In China the churches went underground. According to Joseph Lee, the Little Flock’s way of working, with small groups, lay people in leadership and no ties abroad, became a model for many house churches after 1978.

He was no picture-book saint. He was accused by his enemies and by his own brothers. Some of those accusations have never been cleared up. What remains in the sources is a man who wanted the gospel to be Chinese, who saw what the cross had done to him, and who spent twenty years in captivity without any known evidence that he let go of Christ.

In the Chinese cities of his youth, a watchman walked the streets at night with a bamboo gong. He struck the hours. Watchman Nee took that sound as his name. The last thing he sounded lay under a pillow in a camp in Anhui.