AN ASIAN HARVEST:
An Autobiography
By Paul Hattaway
Monarch Books. 320 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 0 857 218 483
This is an often brutally frank autobiography of a New Zealand missionary who has worked for many years in east Asia, particularly China.
Hattaway came from a dysfunctional family and seemed doomed to be trapped on a downward spiral. His early life, he admits was ‘ a brutal battle for survival.’
However, he was soundly converted as a teenager in Australia and this led to his whole-hearted immersion in God’s Word and to a life of prayer.
In March 1988 he heard a preacher from mainland China, George Chen (whom this present reviewer also knew), and was eventually led to begin Bible-smuggling into China at a time when Bibles were still very scarce.
God answering prayer
Hattaway then shares many moving insights of his ministry to support the house churches in China and of God’s signal answers to prayer in healing and deliverance from danger.
His ministry has been punctuated by controversy. Firstly, he shares in some detail some very unsavoury matters concerning alleged sexual abuse by a leading missionary in north Thailand. The present reviewer is unable to comment on the veracity of his allegations which, if true, reveal a shameful incapacity of that missionary community to confront and deal with heinous sin in a biblical manner.
Secondly, he gives a spirited defence of the ‘Heavenly Man’ (Brother Yun) who escaped from China and embarked on a worldwide ministry for many years. It is here that the present reviewer begs to differ. Highly sensational and exaggerated claims were made which bore little or no resemblance to the reality in China. Claims were made that 100,000 house church missionaries were poised to march through the Islamic world in obedience to the ‘Back to Jerusalem’ vision.
The present reviewer undertook extensive research across China, interviewing many of the respected mainstream conservative evangelical leaders who he had known for several years – men who had suffered for Christ in labour camps for many years. None of them were prepared to endorse the ‘Heavenly Man’ and many were highly critical. Travelling as far as Kashgar, he found one of the very few surviving members of the original ‘Back to Jerusalem’ movement in the 1940s on the eve of the Communist victory. This elderly, godly lady for years had been conducting extremely low-key ‘presence evangelism’ to her Uygur workers on her small market garden, and there was no evidence at all of thousands of house church evangelists ready to cross into Central Asia.
The godly elders of the house church movement as well as the original ‘Back to Jerusalem’ pioneers had wholeheartedly taken over from the China Inland Mission the principle of living by faith without publicly appealing for funds, and were horrified by the news of the ‘Heavenly Man’ and his activities which blatantly used Hudson Taylor’s famous saying that ‘If I had a thousand pounds I would give it all to China’ to raise millions of dollars, with very little accountability. Hattaway admits that ‘in recent years some of the Westerners who have been associated with Yun are not those I would endorse as of godly character’ (p.250). Actually, from the very start, Yun seems to have been taken over by extreme Pentecostal ‘minders’ who used him to raise large sums of money.
Missionaries from China
Hattaway arranged for an open letter to be written in support of the ‘Heavenly Man’, but as I recall nearly all the signatories were either foreigners or charismatic overseas Chinese pastors living in such places as Paris; there was a signal lack of support from the mainstream house church leaders in China itself. On the positive side, despite all the hype, the genuine ‘Back to Jerusalem’ vision has percolated throughout the Chinese church shorn of extreme Pentecostal excesses and, as of mid-2017, reliable sources estimate that there may be several hundred mainland Chinese missionaries already serving overseas.
We are indebted to Hattaway for writing a definitive book (Operation China) which showed that China has over 500 minority ethnic groups, rather than the 55 stated by the Chinese Government, and this has been hugely instrumental in galvanising prayer and outreach to these needy people-groups.
This autobiography has much of interest and use for all those called to or praying for China and East Asia, despite the flaws noted.
