Jonathan Bayes with a little bit of history of the church in China during the 1930s to encourage us
Shandong is a coastal province in the north-east of mainland China.
It covers an area just a little bigger than England and Wales, and has a population of over 96 million. It saw much suffering in China’s difficult 20th-century history. It was severely afflicted during the war with Japan and the civil war and during the dark days of the Cultural Revolution.
5am prayer
The Christians in Shandong today are of a remarkable calibre. Many of their churches hold a prayer meeting at 5 o’clock every morning. The prayers are fervent, earnest, passionate, heartfelt and are accompanied by many tears. The churches of Shandong long to see revival in their province, and beyond.
This spiritual calibre and passion is a legacy of God’s blessing on Shandong province in an earlier revival, accompanied by the refining power of intense persecution.
I want to tell the story of the two years of revival in Shandong, which lasted from the Autumn of 1931 until the middle of 1933. The revival brought mighty blessing to churches right across the board. However, it is the Southern Baptists who most fully documented the wonderful works of God, which left them marvelling, in what has been called ‘one of the greatest revivals in modern history’.
Countless thousands
The missionaries repeatedly described 1932 in superlative terms. The spiritual temperature, both in the life of the churches, and attending their gospel efforts, had never before risen so high. The results of their evangelistic labours were greater in that single year than in many previous years put together. Souls were being saved on a daily basis. In one area of the province an average of 100 people were saved every week. Overall, ‘countless thousands’ were converted and baptised. Marie Monsen, a Norwegian Lutheran missionary who witnessed the revival writes: ‘The attentive crowds that filled the large chapels are unforgettable. It was wonderful to watch so many being gathered in like ripe fruit.’
Crying out to God
Missionaries and Chinese Christians were amazed and encouraged as people started coming to them to initiate conversations about the way of salvation. Sometimes souls began crying out to God for mercy before a preacher had finished his message. More than one missionary noted how, previously, they had asked God to help them in their work, whereas now they stood at the side and saw him mightily at work.
One missionary wrote home with this news: ‘There are now villages in which every family has one or more saved persons, and in some villages nearly everyone has accepted the Lord.’ Soon the revival had spread right across Shandong. Consequently, church attendance multiplied many times over in a few months. One missionary wrote in his report for 1932: ‘This past year has been worth all the others spent in China.’
Two friends
The place where the revival began was Pingdu. Here a series of evangelistic rallies was held. Two friends, Jiang and Li, attended the meetings, and afterwards they would amuse themselves by making fun of the preacher and the message, and by mimicking the reactions of those who had come under conviction of sin. One time Li left the meeting acting in a really weird fashion, and Jiang laughed, assuming that Li was, as usual, mocking the event. However, Li said: ‘No, I’ve got the real thing this time.’
Over the next couple of days, Jiang felt rather lonely as he no longer had anyone with whom he could make a mockery of the revival. He continued to attend the meetings, but turned a deaf ear to the preaching, until the very last rally, when he felt the power of God and bowed the knee to Christ.
At Huangxian a student who had joined the Communists and become involved in great sin became so convicted that his body became rigid and he thought he was going to die. He was in that state of agony for half an hour. He then cried out to God for mercy and began confessing his sins. He had plotted to kill those students who were better off than he was. He had tried to convince his fellow students that there was no God. ‘For an hour he poured out his heart to God’, until God graciously forgave him and he ‘received peace and salvation.’
Burden for souls
This explosion in the number of conversions was associated with a compulsion to reach the lost on the part of believers. Christians suddenly woke up to the fact that their friends and relatives were eternally lost. They were filled with a great burden for unconverted souls, and went out to seek them for Christ, finding a new joy in witnessing. Previously, churches had used various ‘soul-winning programmes,’ which had never had much success; these now became superfluous, as Christians simply witnessed with a new-found spontaneity.
The hallmark of the revival was a new-found joy in a mighty assurance of God’s gracious love. It was a joy that was incomparable and overwhelming. Believers felt closer to the Lord, and were blessed with a deeper love for Christ than ever before. One missionary wrote in the Mission’s 1932 Annual Report: ‘It is absolutely beyond the power of human tongues to express the sheer joy and rapture of this new, marvellous, intimate fellowship into which we were brought with the glorified Redeemer himself.’
Before the revival
Charles Culpepper of the American Southern Baptist Convention compared the annual meetings of the Mission for the years 1930, 1931, and 1932: the 1930 meeting ‘had sounded a note of despair. Gloomy reports had reflected a dissatisfaction among the missionaries who presented them. The 1931 meeting saw little change except that there seemed to be a desire for spiritual power. But 1932 was quite different.’ By then the revival was underway. Already there were numerous reports of conversions and of towns and villages being transformed.
The sense of despair and hopelessness articulated at the 1930 meeting, and the hunger for spiritual reality expressed in 1931, had been emerging in parallel over several years. In 1928 the Chinese Southern Army had reached Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, to wage war against the Japanese forces. The ensuing difficulties had exposed so much of the missionaries’ work as ‘hay and stubble;’ the missionaries were forced to face up to the fruitlessness of their labours and the deadness of the churches.
Something had to happen
All this had led to a longing for a deeper experience of the Lord, a longing to see more of the power of the Spirit in the work. One missionary analysed the situation like this: ‘Whenever we have been troubled in conscience about our spiritual impotence, we have added another wheel – a new committee or commission, a new plan or programme.’ However, this had resulted in no increase in spiritual power. Now there was an increasing desperation to see God at work. When the Southern Baptist Mission leaders met in June 1931, the meeting became four days of earnest prayer. ‘I had never heard such brokenness in prayer and such pleading to God,’ writes Culpepper. ‘Something had to happen.’
This is an edited extract of the article that appeared in the July–August 2016 issue of Reformation Today and is used with permission.
