Against the tide : the story of Watchman Nee

227 Pages·1968·3.7 MB·English

by  Angus I Kinnear

CONTENTS
Foreword: by Leslie T. Lyall
Preface
Who's Who
1. The Gift
2. Honor Your Ancestors
3. Revolution
4. Dedication
5. Across the Grain
6. The Proof of Faith
7. Foreign Fields
8. The Old Wineskins
9. Fragile Clay
10. Disenchantment
11. New Horizons
12. Rethinking
13. Heyday
14. Withdrawal
15. Return
16. Consistent Choice
17. The Trap Closes
18. Ordeal
19. Suppressive Action
20. Unhindered
Notes on the Text
Maps:
China
Foochow
Shanghai
To Jean
FOREWORD
/
N EVERY age of human history, men and women have emerged with
qualities of character and intellect which have been recognized by their
contemporaries as qualifying them for leadership. In the history of Europe the
names of Garibaldi, Napoleon, Cromwell, and Churchill at once come to mind.
North America has produced an Abraham Lincoln, a George Washington, and an
Ike Eisenhower. All these men have impressed their personalities on their
contemporaries, and their convictions have altered the course of history. They
were men of destiny.
So too in sacred history. Abraham was the founder of Israel. Moses molded a
community of Hebrew slaves into a potentially great nation. David, despite his
humble origin, became king of Israel and Judah. But what is so refreshing and so
encouraging to us who know ourselves to be far from perfect is to see the
honesty of the sacred historians in depicting the lives and the work of their
heroes. Moses was not always the meekest of men, and even after he had learned
meekness he impetuously forfeited the hoped-for privilege of leading his people
into the Promised Land. David, the man after God's own heart, at the height of
his power sank to the lowest moral depths and set in motion a sequence of tragic
events affecting his family and the nation.
The history of the Christian church is studded with the names of "men of
destiny": Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Luther, Calvin, Xavier, Knox,
Wesley, Zinzendorf, Livingstone, Carey, Hudson Taylor, C. T. Studd, etc. But no
one who has read the intimate biographies of these men can be unaware that they
were all very human and that their sanctity did not deliver them from errors of
judgment nor even serious mistakes which affected their followers, the Christian
church as a whole, and the missionary movement in every continent.
China, like the other great fields of missionary endeavor, has produced her
national heroes—men of spiritual stature to serve their own generation in the
will of God. Pastor Hsi, the converted scholar and drug addict, pioneered the
church in Shansi in the last century and composed hymns of beauty and spiritual
understanding. Heroic Chinese Christians chose death rather than deny their
faith in the Boxer massacres of 1900. Men like Wang Chi-t'ai called the church
to revival in 1910. Ting Li-mei also exercised his gifts as an evangelist in the
early years of the Nationalist revolution. Dr. James Yen pioneered mass
education in China in the name of Christ. Dr. Ch'eng Ching-yi, in the early days
of the Chinese Communist Party when the Chinese church was being seriously
threatened, summoned the church to revival and dependence on God alone. Dr.
John Sung and Dr. Andrew Gih profoundly stirred the Christian church and led
many to faith in Christ during the '30s. Marcus Cheng was a gifted Bible teacher
and writer, while Dr. Chia Yu-ming was an outstanding Biblical scholar and
convention speaker right up to his death at the age of over 90. And in an era
when association with foreign missionaries was embarrassing and unpopular,
men like Chang Lin-shen (True Jesus Church), Ching Tien-yin (Jesus Family),
and Watchman Nee (Little Flock) headed movements independent of foreign
missions and the traditional denominations. Wang Ming-tao maintained an
individual independence without starting a separate movement and exercised a
nationwide influence on the churches.
The list of outstanding Chinese Christians is long, but the records of most of
them have never been written; and so everyone will welcome the life story of a
man whose name has become a household word among Christians all over the
world. Watchman Nee personally wrote and published only one book, but he left
an almost complete record of his sermons, lectures, and conference addresses
which were published in the several magazines he edited. Some of these Angus
Kinnear has collected and skillfully edited under such titles as The Normal
Christian Life, Changed into His Likeness, and Love Not the World. Over the
years Dr. Kinnear has also collected much historical information about the life
and work of Watchman Nee, whom he came to know personally in England in
1938.
Calvin Chao, a first generation Christian who became an outstanding
evangelist and student worker, once said that it takes a third generation Christian
to produce the maturity and depth of insight needed to expound the mysteries of
the gospel with the pen of an Andrew Murray or a Bishop Handley Moule.
Watchman Nee, unlike Calvin Chao and other contemporary leaders, was a third
generation Christian, and to him was certainly given an insight into Biblical truth
which is unique. Few modern Chinese preachers have so glorified Christ and so
edified their hearers as did Watchman Nee from the depth of his experience and
the breadth of his reading.
But, like David and Paul, Wesley and Studd, Watchman Nee was not free
from human error and human frailty. His insistence on the "one locality, one
church" principle led him into separatism and a denunciation of all churches
other than his own, and this inevitably caused deep division in the Body of
Christ. His well-intended but misconceived venture into industry and commerce
alienated him from his own church people, hindered his usefulness to God for at
least five years, and provided a weapon for the Communists to use against him.
His belated attempt to emulate the early Church and to impose on his churches
the practice of having all things in common again divided his followers and
presented his enemies with ample grounds for criticism and condemnation.
These were the kinds of aberration which almost inevitably occur when a single
individual both starts and then controls a movement, lacking the credit checks
and doctrinal safeguards of the more established churches. Church history,
ancient and modern, contains plenty of examples of this principle. So lessons are
to be learned from Angus Kinnear's biography.
But when the history of the Chinese church comes to be written, it will be
impossible to ignore the life and work of an outstanding leader whose influence
will last and whose legacy may well be a Christian fellowship which will survive
the fires of persecution and the attempts being made to destroy the Christian
church in China. Watchman Nee was surely another "man of destiny" who
endured to the end as seeing Him who is invisible. In twenty years of
imprisonment he never betrayed his Lord. Among his converts, colleagues and
followers, as in other branches of the church, there are many of like courage and
faith in God who live on to continue the testimony.
Leslie T. Lyall
PREFACE
T
HIS ACCOUNT of the life and ministry of Watchtman Nee is presented
from the standpoint of an observer at a distance who has at no time been
involved in the China scene. When in 1938, as a young missionary about to
leave Britain for India, I was privileged to spend some valuable weeks with him,
I found my whole outlook on Christian life and service greatly enriched and
given a fresh direction and purpose; and now that there has fallen to my lot the
task of setting his remarkable story in writing, he has once again profoundly
affected my thinking. For, as one might expect, his message proves to be
inextricably woven into his life. By setting the one in the context of the other and
making full use of his own many interpretive anecdotes, we are able to trace
God's hand in the course of his pilgrimage through a scene of world-shaking
events.
Over the years I have been privileged to meet and converse with many who
knew Nee intimately, and it is largely to these that I owe the vivid picture it has
been possible to reconstruct in these pages. Some earlier encounters were, alas,
all too brief, and it is to my sorrow that prevailing circumstances have not
allowed me to pursue some of them further. Of these personal accounts, many
have helpfully dovetailed to reinforce one another, but for some details I have
had to rely—and have felt it right to do so—upon the evidence of single
witnesses quoting from memory. Furthermore, occasionally, where the evidence
was slender, I have had to make my own prayerful deductions as to precise
timings and sequences and, for the sake of brevity, to take a few short cuts. For
any errors and inconsistencies I must assume personal responsibility, as also for
my assessments of Nee and his colleagues. I wish to apologize in particular for
any pain or inconvenience that might possibly arise from my misunderstanding
of the meanings, causes, or motives behind events.
I have been given a great deal of assistance by many people, and in the first
place I must record the immense debt I owe, in all my work for Watchman Nee,
to the gifted versions and transcriptions by the late Miss Elizabeth Fischbacher
of the best of his preaching and writing. She has skillfully captured and
preserved the spirit of the man, and her contributions have appeared, hitherto
unacknowledged, in the series of books by Nee I have been privileged to edit.
They are drawn upon again in the present volume. In the interpretation of events,
the view I have taken owes much at several critical points to the mature spiritual
wisdom of another servant of God. I refer to Watchman's friend from boyhood
days, the late Mr. Faithful Luke.
At different periods I have received much help in the form of reminiscences
and impressions, private documents, translations, etc., from the following: T.
Austin-Sparks, Hubert L. Barlow, David Bentley-Taylor, Joy Betteridge,
Dorothy Beugler, Lena Clarke, Elizabeth Fischbacher, Theodore Fischbacher,
Mrs. Nancy Gaussen, Doris E. Hinckley Herald Hsu, Hilda Holms, Victoria
Holms, Mary Jones, Sophia Jorgensen, Stephen Kaung, Witness Lee, Gaylord
Leung, Serene Loland, Faithful Luke, Leslie T. Lyall, James Ma, Shepherd Ma,
George McHaffie, Kristeen Macnair, Simon Meek, Joy Meggach, D. Vaughan
Rees, Mrs.
Carol T. Stearns, Newman Sze, A. G. Taylor, Mary Wang, K. H. Weigh,
Mary Weller, Mrs. Betty Williams, Lucas Wu, and Alan C. L. Yin. Printed
sources are acknowledged in the Notes.
I should like also to express my gratitude to Miss Jean Wood and Miss
Rosemary Keen of the Church Missionary Society and to Dr. Jim Broomhall and
Miss Irene King of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship for their willing help,
and to Hugh Fuller of Victory Press for his encouragement and long patience
while I have been writing this book. And I wish to thank most warmly the four
who have read through the manuscript and helped so constructively with advice:
Gaylord Leung, Janet Killeen, Leslie T. Lyall, and my wife Jean, who also did all
the typing.
A word about the transliteration of Chinese names. Except where older
spellings have been universally used, I have tried to follow the Wade-Giles
system, but without the "frills." That is to say, as in newspapers and reference
books, I have omitted the accents and apostrophes as being meaningless to the
great majority of English readers. Inconsistencies and misspellings are due to my
own ignorance of Chinese. To reduce the number of difficult personal names in
the text, I have supplied a Who's Who of the Nee family and other main
characters in the story.
The "Notes on the Text" (at the end of the volume), besides acknowledging
valuable sources and supplying hints for further reading, are designed to embody
a fairly full bibliography of Watchman Nee's writings and edited addresses
available in English up to the date of this publication, linked where possible with
their date of origin and historic setting.
The task of preparing this book has been a rewarding one in which I have
been aware of the constant help of God. To His hands, for His use, I now entrust
it
ANGUS I. KINNEAR London, 1973