Tony Lambert reflects on the life of Pastor Samuel Lamb who went to be with the Lord in recent months
Pastor Samuel Lamb died in Guangzhou (Canton) in south China in early August 2013.
He was an outstanding Christian leader. He emerged from 23 years in prison for his faith in 1978 to spend the next three decades building up his independent house church to some 3,000 attendees. The scale of his spiritual influence was proven when some 30,000 Christians sought to attend his funeral, and the police tried to turn people away!
Turbulent era
Pastor Lamb, or Lin Xiangao as he was called in Chinese, was born in 1924 in Macau, the son of a Baptist pastor. His long life of nearly nine decades spanned a turbulent era of China’s history. As a young man he narrowly escaped the Japanese bombing of Hong Kong and learnt to live a hand-to-mouth existence by faith for food and Bible school tuition fees. ‘Each time I faced a problem, I prayed’, he notes in his autobiography. In 1946, soon after he began to preach the gospel himself, he witnessed the Chinese Civil War, then the Communist victory in 1949, and was caught up in the struggle to maintain the spiritual freedom of the church as Communist control tightened.
Pastor Lamb was one of a select few evangelical Chinese leaders who dared resist Communist pressure and persecution of the church, not for political reasons, but on purely biblical principles. He was adamant in his resistance to the Protestant Three Self Patriotic Movement, a puppet organisation set up in the 1950s by the government to control, infiltrate and destroy the church. It was then largely controlled by liberal and even Marxist theology, denying cardinal truths of the Bible. He paid a heavy price. He was first arrested on September 14, 1955 and jailed for one year and four months. He was then freed briefly but re-arrested on May 30, 1958 and held in prison for a full 20 years until May 29, 1978. He was accused of being a member of a ‘counter-revolutionary clique’ — a serious accusation in Communist jargon which could have warranted the death sentence.
He was cutting the hair of a fellow prisoner in a pig pen when the roof suddenly fell down but he was uninjured. Later, he did slave labour in the coal mines in north China. He told me many years later that he must have coupled together about 2 million coal trucks in the semi-darkness underground. Many men were seriously maimed or killed. ‘But I still have all my fingers. Praise God! In 20 years I had not denied my Lord once — not by my own effort, but by the will and power of God my faith remained strong.’
House church
After his release in 1978 Pastor Lamb returned to his former home and meeting place at Big Horse Lane (Damazhan) in Guangzhou. His wife sadly had died two years before his release. He began to teach English to young people as a means of evangelism. He held his first baptism in 1980 for four new believers. A decade later his house-church had swelled to some 1,000 members meeting on Sundays and at repeat meetings throughout the week. I well remember trying to squeeze up the rickety wooden stairs to reach the main room where he was preaching, with people sitting on every stair. Such was the hunger for the word of God he usually preached for well over an hour.
In 1989 he baptised 169 people. Over the last two decades the numbers baptised have averaged 300–400 a year in some half a dozen baptismal services annually.
Blind eye and Bibles
Although China’s religious policy eased after 1979, permitting the opening of tens of thousands of registered churches under the auspices of the revamped Three Self Patriotic Movement, the authorities still regarded unregistered house churches with suspicion. Compared to many house church leaders in the hinterland, Pastor Lamb escaped lightly, with the local government turning something of a blind eye. Damazhan became a major depot for channelling Bibles and much-needed Christian books from Hong Kong to house churches throughout China. Young Christians at his church also mimeographed thousands of gospel tracts and Pastor Lamb’s own sermons for widespread distribution. Eventually the patience of the authorities ran out.
Re-arrested
In Pastor Lamb’s own words: ‘On February 22 1990 at 11.30 pm, after the church fellowship had finished, four women came up to try to make me register with the ‘Three Self’. Then 50–60 policemen rushed upstairs. All of the Christian books, the Bibles from overseas, several thousand of our stencilled tracts and 6,000 copies of our hymnbooks were all taken away. In addition they confiscated ten tape recorders, an organ, a generator and our mimeographing machines’. He was then interrogated for 20 hours and witnessed boldly to the officers. ‘If I did not believe that Jesus truly rose again (unlike some of the Three Self pastors who say that all this talk of resurrection is not necessarily true) I would have discarded this dead Jesus in the mid-1950s if not sooner. But after I was arrested twice, my faith was not only strengthened but I proclaimed the risen Christ because he is alive. We believe and know that we are now saved and we shall go to heaven.’
Poster washed away
Shortly after he was released I visited Damazhan. A handful of local believers had crept in to hear Pastor Lamb ‘share’ sitting down (he was not allowed to preach). I shall never forget that prayer-meeting as we knelt on the hard wooden floor and the pastor prayed: ‘Oh Lord! We are like the children of Israel at the Red Sea with nowhere to go. Help us, Lord!’. The Lord did answer. A few months later the rain had washed away the official poster forbidding the meeting, hundreds of Christians came back, and meetings resumed on an even bigger scale. The authorities have ever since turned a blind eye, no doubt also encouraged by the high profile Pastor Lamb had by now gained overseas, particularly in America. Billy Graham paid him a visit when he came to China.
Nevertheless, he always kept his bag packed in the modest room he lived in at the back of the meeting-place — just in case of arrest.
Christ crucified
Pastor Lamb was first and foremost a gospel preacher. Christ crucified was the central theme of his ministry. People in China were (and still are) hungry for the gospel. I remember one sermon I heard him preach in his clear Cantonese, lasting 1 hour and 40 minutes — long even by Chinese house church standards. He had his idiosyncracies — one group of American Presbyterians I took to meet him were aghast at his premillennial prophetic views and penchant for biblical numerology. He also upset some by denouncing the much-vaunted Back to Jerusalem Chinese mission movement as being largely bogus in its early, extremist manifestations overseas.
Like many Chinese house church leaders he did not fit easily into the theological categories we in the West have formulated. He prayed for the sick and the demon-possessed but did not allow speaking in tongues at his meetings and was strongly critical of some aspects of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements.
Church of 70 million
He trained a team of a dozen younger, full-time gospel workers who live by faith. They are well able to carry the work forward. The 30,000 Christians who poured out on the streets of Guangzhou to attend his funeral were well aware that an era has passed with his death. The older house-church leaders who stood for Christ at so great a cost from the early 1950s to the late 1970s have now mainly gone to glory. Pastor Lamb was one of the youngest of this generation. His younger successors are well aware that it is because of the living testimony of men and women like Lin Xiangao that, under God, the Chinese church has now grown to over 70 million believers to become the largest evangelical community in the world.
