WATCHMAN NEELOYAL SOLDIER OF JESUS CHRIST
Angus I. Kinnear
EARLY in July this year reliable news reached the West that on 1st June, at the age of seventy, Watchman Nee of Foochow passed into the presence of his Lord. At the time he was, we are told, somewhere in Anhwei Province, several hundred miles up the Yangtze. Less than eight weeks had elapsed since the completion of his twenty years' confinement in prison and labour camp. There seems no means of knowing whether he was ever aware of the powerful impact of his earlier preaching upon the lives of Christians round the world during this period.
Older readers of A Witness and A Testimony will remember the transcriptions over the initials W.N. of a series of addresses given in 1938 at Helsingor, Denmark, under the title "The Normal Christian Life". We too at the Christian Fellowship Centre, Honor Oak, London, were among the few Christian groups in Europe to hear, over a brief period in that and the following year, the inspired preaching of this gifted and clear-thinking Chinese brother. It is safe to say that all those who remember him thank God for his gracious personality and for his truly Christ-centred teaching and exhortation.
It was in February 1920 that a Chinese woman evangelist was preaching Christ in Foochow. The resulting dramatic conversion of Watchman's mother from a revolutionary agitator for Sun Yat-sen to a humble follower of the Saviour induced him, the eldest son, to attend the meetings in search of an explanation. A few days later, in a change of heart no less complex, he himself found the Lord Jesus as Saviour and King. From that day he made the Scriptures his special study, and set himself to bear witness to his Lord by life and word, preaching the good news first among his fellow students at the C.M.S. Trinity College, Foochow, and later more widely through the southern provinces.
Working from Pagoda Anchorage, Foochow, he was soon faced with the problem of what to do with his village converts. Not a few Chinese of his generation were finding the confusing variety of Western church traditions ill-adapted to their people's situation. Watchman and his young co-workers sought instead a simpler and more flexible pattern of church fellowship. (In this his reading of the New Testament was for a time coloured by the writings of the earlier Brethren.) By 1928 the centre of his work had moved to Shanghai, with well-attended meetings at Hardoon Road and a widely distributed devotional magazine.
The ensuing years saw household churches spring up far and wide throughout China, all with a strong evangelistic witness. The simple message of redemption and new life in Christ Jesus met a deep hunger among Chinese of all classes. His Rethinking Our Missions (English translation, Concerning Our Missions, Shanghai and London, 1939) indicates the point then reached in their strategic thinking. It was to be a long pilgrimage and a painful one, for because its methods were untraditional the 'Little Flock' (as the movement was nicknamed from the title of its hymn-book) was viewed with caution and even hostility by some in the establishment of the Western foreign missions. There were always those among them, however, who saw in Nee a Christian thinker and [81/82] missionary strategist of outstanding spiritual insight. On his visit to Britain in 1938-39 he enjoyed stimulating fellowship with Christian leaders like Mr. Norman Baker of the China Inland Mission, while particularly in Mr. T. Austin-Sparks, editor of A Witness and A Testimony , he made a close friend. And few who were present at the Keswick Convention of July 1938 failed to be moved by his prayer at its great missionary meeting.
With the ending in 1946 of the Japanese war, Watchman Nee began an intensive training of young workers to carry the gospel throughout China. His plan to evanvelise its unreached cities by group-migration of Christian believers into the far interior (an idea based on Acts 8:4) seems in retrospect an inspired preparation for the Church's enforced dispersal so soon to follow. After 1948, in a statement perhaps deliberately exaggerated, he was credited by the People's Government with heading the largest Christian denomination in the country.
