Here is the latest inspirational and informative article on influential Scots in Church History and Missions by Paul James-Griffiths of Christian Heritage Edinburgh.
Paul writes, “Today’s article is about another Scottish pioneering missionary to China called John Ross. His impact, like William Chalmers Burns before him, was significant. I hope that as you read this article you will be inspired and challenged.”
As William Chalmers Burns lay on his deathbed looking out to Manchuria, pleading for God to thrust out missionaries to these people, he told his friends, “God will carry on the good work; I have no fears for that!” Far away in Edinburgh at that same time another Scotsman was studying theology at the United Presbytery Hall. Increasingly he sensed God’s call to China. Together with his first wife, Revd Dr John Ross from Rarichie in Easter Ross, departed for China in 1872.
Arriving in Chefoo he found the mission base well-manned. Realising that he needed to pioneer a new work in China, they left that same year for Manchuria and settled at Niu-Chuang. Within months tragedy hit the couple with Ross’ wife dying. She was buried close by the grave of Burns who had died four years earlier. With great sacrificial kindness Ross’ sister came out to help look after Ross’ baby from his first marriage, until he married, secondly, Isabella McFadyen.
Within two years a small church of thirteen Chinese members of the first Manchurian church had been established. Following Burns’ model, Ross trained up four Chinese evangelists and sent them out to preach Christ and distribute Chinese Gospels. By the time Dr John McIntyre arrived, who had also trained at the United Presbyterian College in Edinburgh, the work was becoming stronger, with a vision to plant churches from Niu-Chuang to Mukden, the capital of Northeast China. Two of the Chinese evangelists, called Tang and Wang were sent to Mukden, and after much persecution, managed to establish a bridgehead there. By 1884 a medical mission was running at Mukden and local Chinese were being trained up to lead a self-supporting church. The effectiveness of the missionaries in founding a self-replicating model as soon as possible is shown by the fact that the next year 104 Chinese adults were baptized from Mukden and Liao-yang, but only two women among them had become Christians through the Westerners; all the rest had been converted through their own people.
By 1889 a new church building had been built in Mukden for 700 people. The missionaries were not only determined that local self-supporting, self-propagating congregations would be planted in China, but that they would be thoroughly Chinese in their style. To this end a very Chinese-looking church building was constructed. At a communion service in 1892 the Scots and Irish Presbyterians came together, and in unity handed over the Chinese church to its own local presbytery. By this time there were twenty churches in Manchuria with a membership of over 2,000. Two years later a Theological Training Scheme was launched to equip the locals with biblical understanding, which also included a course on Confucius so that the students could grapple with their own heritage, just as the Christians did in Alexandria in the third century when they wrestled with the views of the Greek philosophers. Through this method the local Chinese began to develop a well-reasoned Christian worldview, which was especially adapted for their own culture.
By now the Christian faith was mushrooming and breaking out all over the place. In I-lu the people were so hungry for God that the men who usually had to be up at dawn for work went every evening until midnight to hear the gospel, “or until the preacher in sheer exhaustion had to send them away… This movement,” wrote Dr Ross, “was indeed like the beginning of the Church as recorded in Acts.”
When war broke out between Japan and China over Korea on 1st August 1894, many Chinese soldiers were killed, and the Chinese authorities just left the wounded as they fell, with no care. The missionary doctors at Niu-Chuang treated the wounded free of charge, day and night, so that in this period over 1,000 Chinese soldiers were nursed back to health. As a tribute to the missionaries’ work, one of the commanders told them:
“Pastors, we are returning to our camps, and we will tell our officers, from the general downwards, what the foreigners have done for us; and when we return to our homes, we will make it known to our fathers and mothers, our wives and children, and they will hand it down to their children’s children, and you will not be forgotten for ten generations.”
The love by the locals for the missionaries was remarkable, especially considering the hatred they had first experienced as “white devils”. When the Japanese soldiers captured Niu-Chuang, one of the converts called Liu, spread himself over the body of Revd James Wylie to take the blows. He was dragged away, and the missionary later died of his wounds. At first the locals had a saying, “Why should I trouble myself with the affairs of another?” But now they were learning to love their neighbours, and the Christians showed the way by involving themselves in helping others.
In 1888 a Chinese letter was written by the leaders in Manchuria and sent to the Church of Scotland, with these words:
“Respectfully presented by the Presbyterian Church of Manchuria of the right religion of Jesus to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland… truth is not selfishly private… We acknowledge the value of the Six Classics and the Four Books; but how could Confucius and Mencius repair the ruins of man’s heart?… At that time [when Dr Ross came in 1872] Manchuria had not yet heard the name of Jesus… Now all is changed: there are about a thousand who have been baptised. The revilers of truth are day by day decreasing; those embracing the truth are day by day increasing. The congregation has the appearance of daily growing prosperity; the converts exhibit a daily enlarging zeal. Finally, many have turned their backs on their old dispositions. The rigorous and fierce are become gentle; the proud and conceited are become humble; the deceitful and lying have learned truthfulness… the vulgar and rude have become sincere.”
“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19, NKJV).