“It was just resting in Jesus and letting Him do the work.”
– Maria Taylor [1]
THE SHORES OF ENGLAND, THE STREETS OF DARAA, AND THE BACKROADS OF GEORGIA
In 2011, two events redirected the direction of my life—one in the Middle East, the other in the South Pacific. In March, protest began in a Syrian city called Daraa. I watched videos of swelling demonstrations of Syrians calling for the fall of the Assad regime and the brutal crackdown that followed. The Syrian Civil War had begun. By then similar uprisings were engulfing the Arab world. The Tunisian President, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, fled to Saudi Arabia in January. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned in February. Libyan leader Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi was killed in October. As the protests evolved into full blown war across Syria, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Iraq and other Arab nations were teetering on the brink wondering if they were next to take the plunge into bloody revolution and regime change. The Arab Spring was now underway.
In January of that year, my second son, Elisha, was born in Tauranga, New Zealand, where we were living and pioneering. We had established a prayer and mission community with a vision for extravagant worship “from the ends of the earth” that would lead to the mobilization of Gospel workers into the nations. Many early mornings I would sit on my couch in the living room with his sleepy, little, milk-filled body on my chest while I caught up on the news from the Middle East—a region that had captured and burdened my heart through some strange concern that (because of its intensity) I felt could only have come from outside of myself. While Elisha grew out of his newborn diapers, the Arab world continued to unravel.
One evening in July, after realizing that we were out of said diapers, I got into my Subaru Outback and drove for the nearest grocery store. As I was pulling into the parking lot, the Lord spoke to me in an inner, audible voice that resounded within me as clearly and as strongly as it would have had a friend sitting next to me in the car shouted: “Surrender your future to Me and embrace the Islamic world.”
This word from the Lord came at an inopportune time. Having just completed the process of securing permanent residency in New Zealand, my wife and I were making plans to buy a house, adopt children, have more children of our own, and double-down on our ministry ambitions in the South Pacific. In fear of how it would be received, I hid it in my heart and shared it with no one. And then in October, I could hold it in no more. I told my beloved wife, “I think we should pray about considering the possibility of praying about considering the possibility of praying about considering the possibility that possibly the Lord is calling us to surrender our plans here and to transition to the Islamic world long-term.” She looked at me with knowing eyes and graciously but reservedly said, “Where? To do what? And with whom?” I responded, “I don’t know, I’m not sure, and I’ll get back to you.” We spent November praying about it with the intention of convening at the end of the month to compare our impressions. On December 9th, while the details were far from clear, we knew we were to begin the transition.
A week later we boarded a flight with our two sons bound for Georgia, where Anna’s parents and our home church are located. Our plan was to discuss our vague plans with our families and our pastors to get the ball rolling. At this stage I knew that we were moving in the right direction, but I didn’t know where that direction was leading us. What does it mean to embrace the Islamic world? Where do we start? Who could we work with? A hundred unanswered questions were racing through my mind. Elisha was now 11 months old and loved stroller rides around Green Acres, Anna’s parents neighborhood in rural Georgia, on the border of Alabama. So every day, I would take him for a walk around those beautiful country roads and pray about what lay ahead. The primary question I was wrestling with was whether the Lord desired us to work with an existing organization or if we were to pioneer a new one. Seeing pros and cons to both paths, I was conflicted. My intuition told me the latter, but knowing the burden of what that would mean for me and for my family, I needed something more.
Two days before Christmas I struck out on another walk with Elisha. This time I took my Kindle Reader with me. Placing it on the handle of the stroller, I began reading Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission: The Growth of a Work of God out-loud as we walked. While familiar with Taylor in a general sense, this was my first introduction to the CIM. The third and fourth chapters of the book arrested me. He described a conflicted walk on the shores of Brighton Beach after walking out of a church service “unable to bear the sight of rejoicing multitudes in the house of God” while millions perished in China without a witness. The biographer told of Taylor’s surrender to the Lord’s call on his life: a new agency must be founded and founded immediately. There at low tide, he made a deal with his Master—Taylor’s job would be to obey, the Lord’s job would be everything else. In his journal, he wrote:
Thou shalt have all the burden! At Thy bidding, as Thy servant I go forward, leaving results with Thee.
In his autobiography, A Retrospect, Taylor wrote the following:
On Sunday, June 25th, 1865, 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 twenty-four fellow-workers, two for each of eleven 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, and with an assurance that the Lord would bless His own work and that I should share in the blessing. I had previously prayed, and asked prayer, that workers might be raised up for the eleven then unoccupied provinces, and thrust forth and provided for, but had not surrendered myself to be their leader.
On June 25, 1865 the CIM was founded on the shores of England. On the reading of this story, on December 23, 2011, FAI was founded on the backroads of Georgia.
THE THREE MANDATES
I have read and been inspired by more missionary biographies than I can count or remember. This experience was altogether different. That first encounter with Taylor’s core methodology bore incredible influence on my mind and heart. At first reading, three things leapt off the page. These three things informed what would become—and still are—the foundational infrastructure, composition and organizational philosophy of FAI. Within our spiritual family, we call these “our three mandates.”
I saw that locally Taylor’s vision was for the evangelization and discipleship of unengaged Chinese for the planting of indigenous, autonomous churches in the interior provinces of China. He wasn’t burdened for evangelism in a general sense—he was gripped by the specificity of the interior provinces that were overlooked and wholly unengaged. I saw that regionally Taylor’s vision was for the training and mobilization of pioneering leaders who shared this burden for the unengaged interior. And I saw that internationally Taylor’s vision was for recruitment and advocacy among the nations. He traveled to and from China no less than 11 times by ship. He traversed the earth bearing witness to the needs and claims of China. Funds and workers flooded the barren harvest fields of the far east. First dozens came, then hundreds, then thousands.
Seared onto my heart like a cattle brand, I returned to my in-laws’ home with blazing clarity—the Lord wanted us to follow Taylor’s example in pioneering a new organization that would engage in evangelism and discipleship locally, training and mobilization regionally, and recruitment and advocacy internationally. With this conceptual framework now laid, I went to sleep that night with a growing conviction burning on my soul—conflict zones in the Islamic world were to be our “interior of China.” Every resource, plan, and prayer would now be diverted from everything else and focused resolutely on engaging those vast barren fields for harvesting.
HOW THE ETHOS OF THE CIM INFLUENCED FAI
A few weeks later we settled on the name of this new work. It would be called Frontier Alliance International. With the framework and the name settled, eager to glean, I began digging deeper into Taylor’s mind and experience to learn more about the composition and inner logic of the CIM. I discovered their seven core values:
Priority is given to unreached inland provinces while seeking to evangelize the whole of China
No solicitation of finance, or indebtedness; looking to God alone; pooling support in a life of corporate faith
Identification with Chinese by wearing Chinese dress and queue (pigtail), worshiping in Chinese houses
Indigenization through training Chinese co-workers in self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating principles
Recruitment of missionaries not based on education or ecclesiastical ordination, but spiritual qualification; deployment of single women in the interior and Christian professionals
Interdenominational-International Membership
Headquarters on the field, director rule; leaders and workers serving shoulder-to-shoulder[2]
These values resonated with me, as did the fruit of them in practice. Richard Lovett’s description[3] in 1899 of the CIM missionaries who had adopted them was inspiring:
They have an excellent spirit—self-denying, with singleness of aim; devotional, with a spirit of faith, of love, of humility.
Their operations are carried on with great efficiency and economy.
They are able and willing to bring themselves into close contact with the people, by living in their houses, using their dress, and living for the most part on their food; in short, “becoming all things unto all men, that they may save some.”
They are widely scattered, but one or two families in a city.
They are having good success; many are doing a great amount of preaching and praying, and souls are “added to the Church,” and are, I trust, truly converted.
They are not generally educated men, but men from humble labouring classes, converted and brought out by the revivals in England, Ireland and Scotland, and showing zeal and aptness to preach and labour for the salvation of souls. Hence they will not be very likely to fritter away foolishly their time in reading dusty old Chinese tomes, and in making books and tracts that nobody will read.
They are willing to “rough it.”
Encouraged by their witness to China, I began to pray for and to believe that the same kind of workers could emerge in our day to engage the out of the way places of the Muslim world.
THE IMPACT AS A DOOR OF HOPE
In 1894, Taylor gave an address in Detroit, at the Second International Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions. The CIM was almost 30 years old. And Taylor was about to enter the final decade of his life.
Now, there has been much failure on my part and on the part of those who have worked with me, but there has been no failure on the Lord’s part, none at all. That little work began in a very small and tiny way, and the Lord picked the least man perhaps physically and intellectually and in every other way that He could lay His hand on when He called me for that purpose. But the great and mighty God has been working, and, thank God, there are now in connection with the missionaries and their associates over six hundred men and women and about three hundred native laborers working in connection with us, and over four thousand communicants, and many candidates for baptism in over a hundred churches in inland provinces. It would take you a month perhaps to go over to Shanghai by either of your American routes. But when you got to Shanghai, it would take you a great many months indeed to get to our more distant stations. Now, at these great distances in the far interior of China, God has been blessing and prospering His great work. And why? because it is His work. And there let me just throw in a remark. You must bear the childish way in which I am speaking to you — I do not want to lose the opportunity of just bringing the thought that God’s work is God’s work; it is not men working for God, but it is God working through men. And oh, my dear friends, the preparation of preparations is to be such a man as God can work through. There is no fear that He will not work through one who is fit to be worked through. If we are only in that state of soul in which the Lord can use us, He is delighted to use His people. Oh, He loves to use them! Now, if we believe that God’s work is God working, then there is infallible success before us. That object which God has to attain, will be attained by those who are in His hands, who are free in His hands to be dealt with as He sees fit. Oh, let us trust in God to work.[4]
Eleven years later, Taylor died on June 3, 1905, in Changsha, Hunan, China. Between the morning he surrendered to the Lord on the shores of Brighton and the day he was laid into Chinese soil for burial, the CIM mobilized no less than 811 foreign pioneers onto the field for service in China. They planted 200 stations, 521 outstations, and 476 churches. They founded 150 schools, 7 hospitals, 37 dispensaries, and 101 opium asylums. As a result of this aggressive and innovative flurry of Jesus-exalting ministry, no less than 21,675 Chinese were baptized in Chinese rivers, streams, lakes, and pools.[5]
In 1900, five years before his death, 58 CIM missionaries and 21 of their children were martyred when many thousands of Chinese Christians were brutally slaughtered during the Boxer Rebellion.[6] The blood of indigenous Christians mingled with the blood of the missionaries who came to serve them bore an unimaginable harvest. The CIM—along with a number of other courageous pioneering organizations—laid foundations, through blood, sweat and tears, for what became the largest and fastest-growing church in the world.
Looking out across the expanse of unreached people in the Islamic world and beyond, the impact of Taylor and the CIM on China is for us a door of hope. Let us pray, and give, and go with all of our might until we see in the Middle East what Taylor saw in the Far East.
I am so grateful that at the beginning of our journey, we had a detailed account of the end of Taylor’s journey. I often wonder what I would be doing today had I never read his story. Surely I would not be here.
Dalton Thomas is the Founder & President of Frontier Alliance International and Co-Founder of MARANATHA, a global fellowship of ministries. He is the director of several FAI STUDIOS films and writer of the Ballads of the Revelation soundtrack. He lives in the Golan Heights with his wife and four sons.
[1] Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor, Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission: The Growth of the Work of God. London: E.C.4., 1919.
[2] Daniel Bacon. “How Hudson Taylor Got Recruits for China.” Missio Nexus. July 01, 1984. Accessed October 21, 2018. https://missionexus.org/how-hudson-taylor-got-recruits-for-china/
[3] R. Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society, 1899. p. 74.
[4] Accessed from http://www.path2prayer.com/article/735/revival-holy-spirit/books-sermons/new-resources/famous-christians-books-and-sermons/hudson-taylor-missionary-to-china/j-hudson-taylor-spiritual-preparation-of-missionary-volunteer
[5] Qing Tang, The First Hundred Years of Protestant Mission in China, 1987. p. 486.
[6] J. Hudson Taylor, A Retrospect. p. 94.