On Saturday 24 June 1865, James Hudson Taylor visited a friend in Brighton, England. Six years of missionary service in China had intensified his burden for the interior of that great land and its 300 million people.
But there was no mission organisation prepared to launch out into the inland provinces. He was burdened by the fact that every hour of the day a thousand Chinese were dying without Christ.
On 25 June 1865, Hudson Taylor went to a church service but, as he wrote in his journal, ‘unable to bear the sight of a congregation of a thousand or more Christian people rejoicing in their own security, while millions were perishing for lack of knowledge, I wandered out on the sands alone, in great spiritual agony; and there the Lord conquered my unbelief, and I surrendered myself to God for this service. I told Him that all the responsibility as to issues and consequences must rest with Him; that as His servant, it was mine to obey and to follow Him – His, to direct, to care for, and to guide me and those who might labour with me. Need I say that peace at once flowed into my burdened heart? There and then I asked Him for 24 fellow-workers, two for each of 11 inland provinces which were without a missionary, and two for Mongolia; and writing the petition on the margin of the Bible I had with me, I returned home with a heart enjoying rest such as it had been a stranger to for months.’
God’s answer
So began the China Inland Mission (now the Overseas Missionary Fellowship – OMF) and by the end of 1866 God had answered the prayer that he had put on Hudson Taylor’s heart and 24 missionaries were labouring in inland China.
On 25 June 2015 on Brighton beach, James Hudson Taylor IV, himself an OMF missionary, addressed a gathering of Christians. Holding the Bible in which his great great grandfather had written his petition, we were reminded that James was motivated by gratitude to his great Saviour and obligated by the great commission of Matthew 28.20.
Pastor Andrew Shen, one of an estimated 70 million Chinese Christians, spoke movingly of the debt he felt for the bringing of the gospel to China.
In our time
As Brighton Christians gathered again on the following evening, we were encouraged by the thought that this answered prayer and the immense fruit of the gospel arising from it was brought to the Lord at Brighton, where hearts seem as hard as the stones of our beach. But we come to the God who makes the dead to live and we cried that he would do such a work in our time and in our city – that we might have such a story to tell to his glory.
