Becoming All Things to All People

Hudson Taylor

 

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

Hudson Taylor was my personal childhood hero, a saint that I think of nearly every day in my current situation as a missionary in East Asia. I used to live very close to one of the villages that he and some of his compatriots evangelized in the 1860’s, at that time over a day’s journey from the colonial city of Shanghai, via dirt roads between rice patties. 

When I was just three years old, I heard the story of the stubborn foreigner who wore Chinese-style clothes, spoke Mandarin, ate with chopsticks and slept on a board, all so that he might be able to tell the Good News of the Lord Jesus Christ to the lost and dying Chinese, many of whom would have never seen a foreigner, never read a book, and had never heard about God before. I was absolutely entranced by this story. This was a heroic figure, a man who had voluntarily taken up another people, another race, another language, and who had turned his back on his own, privileged identity. He had become, just like the Lord that he loved, a servant, a slave, a beggar, a despised wretch in the sight of those with power and authority. Yet, as Christ, he had not “counted it loss”, but instead, lived, worked and helped these despised people in a full measure of self-sacrifice and joy, like the great saints of old had displayed. 

Hudson led many to a saving knowledge of the Lord, in Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi, and on into the midlands of Anhui and Henan provinces. He met Mandarin officials, Confucian Scholars, merchants, boatmen, farmers, prostitutes, and beggars. He shared the love of Christ and the message of the Gospel to all. He was remarkable to the Chinese, who, while seeing that he was not brown-eyed and black-haired, wore his hair in a pigtail and shaved the front of his head, just like they did. Hudson startled the Chinese with his clear blue eyes, and yet his passably good language skills assured them that he was one of them. This approach proved to be widely successful, winning souls, baptizing, planting churches, and establishing a network of native pastors. Over time many others joined Taylor in “native dress”, and the China Inland Mission was established (later becoming Oversees Missionary Fellowship). Hudson Taylor was faithful to his calling until death, as have been several generations of children and grandchildren. 

To understand why other foreign missionaries of Taylor’s day were highly offended, why they scoffed at young Hudson’s idea of “blending in” as “going native” and thought of him as a crazy, offensive “low life” who made all foreigners “look bad in the eyes of the Chinese,” one must understand the general political climate of the day. It was widely accepted at that time that the colonial aims of expansion, control and subjugation went hand in hand with missionary goals. Rudyard Kipling called this idea, very accurately, “The White Man’s Burden.” The “natives” must first be humiliated, their own culture and language destroyed and replaced, and once the people had assumed the manners and dress of the conquerors, then they could become “good Christians.” 

This "missionary philosophy" was the line that the East India Company had taken, this was how the British Empire justified the Opium Wars, and this was the way in which places like Shanghai and Hong Kong, which were huge chunks cut out of the Chinese Map and under the governmental authority of western powers, were considered “centers of missionary activity.” The exteriors of Western Civilization had been confused with Christian values and the Message of the Gospel, thus the hardened hearts of the religious westerners could be salved as “helping the poor and winning the lost” when, in reality, the Western Powers were enslaving and abusing the Chinese through addiction to opium, unfair trade treaties, and military force. This proved to be a losing political agenda, directly leading to many of the colonial territories giving way to Marxism, which played on the bitterness of exploited people. 

Christians never win over unbelievers to their cause through force or cultural imperialism. Christians cannot be “greater than their Lord” and if Christ came as a humble servant, a weak, despised, disadvantaged Jew in the time of Rome’s imperial power, than how are we going to use “Rome” as a hammer against those who disbelieve in Christ? Christ is not a weapon, He does not side with the good over the bad, does not like white more than black, and does not see the proud, religious man as having more worth than the proud, atheist man. He is our Creator. He came to “seek and to save that which was lost.” 

We must, like Hudson Taylor before us, realize that it is only in humbling ourselves, making ourselves comprehensible, and speaking into the pain and alienation of people (who are people just like ourselves) as Christ speaks to us, that people will be able to hear the Good News of the Gospel of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Only when they hear this and believe it, realizing how much God loves them and we love them, will any kind of change be possible – and that, only, by the Power of the Holy Spirit!