by Billy Graham
“I felt I had been to the catacombs and back,” Ruth wrote later in her diary, comparing this situation with that of the churches in Rome during their times of tribulation.
How many Christians were there in China by this time? The China Christian Council claimed four and a half million Protestants in their ranks. There was no way of getting an accurate count of independent house-church Christians, of course, but by some estimates there might have been 30 million or more. While still small when compared with China’s huge population of 1.2 billion, all observers agreed the churches had grown greatly during the “hidden years” of the Cultural Revolution and afterward, often because of the silent witness of the Christians’ love and integrity.
There were also an estimated 4 million Catholics, who were joined together in the officially recognized Catholic Patriotic Asso-ciation. Technically, they were not Roman Catholics, since they were not permitted to have formal relations with the Vatican; but for all practical purposes, they were Catholics. The Catholic bishop in Shanghai was most cordial when I went to visit him; he asked me to convey some of his thoughts to the pope, which I promised to do. He showed me a copy of the four Gospels that he had translated into contemporary Chinese for distribution among the Catholics.
For me personally, the undisputed high spot of the trip was my chance to see Ruth’s birthplace in Tsingkiangpu. It was now part of the larger community of Huaiyin, a metropolitan area made up of several former cities and towns in what is now called Jiangsu Province, with perhaps a quarter-million inhabitants. It straddled the Grand Canal, the longest man-made waterway in the world, originally completed in the thirteenth century and stretching a thousand miles from Yangzhou to Beijing. A little section of that metropolis, now called Qingjiang, was the old Presbyterian mission hospital compound; there Ruth was born and spent her childhood and early teen years.
The station had been founded in 1887 by Dr. and Mrs. Absalom Sydenstricker, parents of Pearl Buck; Ruth’s parents, as I mentioned, went there in 1916. We discovered that Moses Chen, one of the hundreds of babies Dr. Bell delivered there, was currently the organist in the nearby church.
In order to get to Huaiyin, army pilots flew us in an old Russian propeller plane to the port city of Lianyungang. Making the final approach, the pilots saw large, black water buffalo grazing on the landing field, with one or two of them on the runway. The crew buzzed the field once to scare the herd off and then landed.
The port holds bittersweet memories for Ruth, for she and her family had been forced to flee China by ship from Lianyungang in 1937, after the Japanese bombed Shanghai and foreigners were ordered out. Now, half a century later, she was back. On the trip by car to Huaiyin from Lianyungang, we passed through miles and miles of what Ruth called “old China,” with little villages, mud farmhouses with thatched roofs, ducks, a small pond, water buffalo, and a few chickens. “I felt at home,” Ruth wrote in her diary. “I’m sure I have peasant blood in my veins!”
Halfway through the drive, we stopped for a break at a beautiful spot by a large lake. We sat in a dining room, sipped tea, and drank in the tranquil scene.
For the last half of the trip, Sidney Rittenberg sat beside me in the back of the car, giving me another helpful briefing on the situation in China. The whole trip took several hours, so there was plenty of time for me to ask him questions.
When we finally arrived in Huaiyin, we were an hour and a half late. The mayor, Madame Xu Yan, a lovely, highly educated lady, was waiting. She took us straight to the banquet hall, leaving us hardly enough time to wash our hands. Then we were served a magnificent feast.
Afterward the mayor showed us a film about the whole province—an area largely given over to agriculture. She did the narration herself. Then she led Ruth and me to a large, newly redecorated room in the government guest house where we were to spend the night.
At the welcome banquet, we learned that there were still people around town who remembered the Bell family. On the next day came the moment we had all been waiting for. Our drive through the city was almost like a parade. Crowds lined the streets, and people leaned out of the windows to watch us go by.
About the first thing Ruth spotted as we approached the former mission compound was the gray brick house the Bells had built, with her favorite room on the top floor. I had heard so much about this place for the forty-five years we had been married that I think I could have found my way around it blindfolded. As if we were in the Louvre in Paris or the National Gallery in Washington, Ruth pointed out to us the things so cherished in her memory: the mantelpieces, the rusty hooks that used to hold a porch swing, the creaking wood stairs to her private alcove under the eaves, where she slept, read, meditated, wrote, and enjoyed the glorious sunsets.
“Love and Mercy” they had called the mission hospital. We were happy to learn that the earsplitting construction noises nearby heralded the restoration of the complex to its original use as a hospital, though now it would be under government auspices. In a larger building to be added, Chinese acupuncture and herbal treatments would be combined with modern medical practices. The city officials showed us an old stone slab that had been dug up; its Chinese characters read “Love and Mercy Hospital.”
Quite a crowd had gathered while we were touring the site. When we came out of one of the buildings, several made a dash for Ruth. They were old patients, nurses, and household staff from the Bell era. To Ruth, it was the highlight of this trip home. They clustered around me too as I led the group in a prayer of thanksgiving for the ministries by loved ones we remembered that day.
At one point, Ruth told them how someone had once asked her father in his latter years how many of his old patients in China were still alive. He thought a moment, then replied, “I would guess 90 percent are now dead.” Then he added, “Which only shows that what we did for them spiritually is the most important.” As Ruth spoke, a face in the crowd lit up with an understanding smile—undoubtedly one who remembered and still believed what the missionaries had taught.
Reminiscences between Ruth and old friends crowded the hours we spent there. I thought of her father and mother, and of Ken and Kay Gieser. The latter couple had befriended Ruth and me in our student days at Wheaton. An eye surgeon in China, he too had been forced to leave by the Japanese.
Various mementos were given Ruth, including, in a beautiful satin-lined, brocade-covered box, those rusty old swing hooks from the front porch. It was her sister Rosa who had spotted the hooks on their visit in 1980; afterward Ruth sent the gift box to her.
At the local church, seventy-four-year-old pastor Fei Su, who had been there since 1936, told us that as many as 800 attended Sunday services now in the old missionary house of Jim and Sophie Graham, spilling out into the yard. When Ruth saw the house in 1980, it was a wholesale grocery outlet, the former living room decorated by a picture of Chairman Mao. Now many of the partitions had been removed to provide room for the Christian worshipers. Pastor Fei estimated there were 130,000 Christians in that area of the province. One church member told us that the pastor had spent some years in prison during the Cultural Revolution.
Like Pastor Fei, a lot of Chinese clergy were getting old. It was remarkable that they had survived so long. But with growth both in the number of churches and in the attendance at services, new leaders were urgently needed. The twelve seminaries in China had only 600 students enrolled, I was told—hardly adequate for future staffing of the thousands of pulpits.
As the trip reached its halfway point, I was beginning to understand the insights Sidney had shared with me about the challenge to churches in China. He jotted down some of those thoughts while we were in Nanjing:
“The principal obstacle to the spread of Christianity in China has, from the first, been that Christ has been presented as a white Westerner and Christianity as a foreign importation. . . .
“The great challenge for Christianity in China is: (1) to become thoroughly Chinese, and thus to become truly, universally Christian; (2) to
help fill the spiritual vacuum that has been created by the collapse of Chinese Communist ideology.”
From Nanjing we traveled to Shanghai by train, a journey of several hours. Shanghai is one of the world’s largest cities, with a population of over 12 million; and it has been the center of some of the nation’s major economic reforms. Our hosts from the Friendship Association in Shanghai met us with a large, luxurious limousine, the kind reserved for the highest government leaders. They were honoring us with their very finest, but we felt awkward going to our appointments in such a pretentious automobile. We asked them to please get a smaller car, which they kindly did.
I preached in two churches in the city, and at a meeting of pastors. I was impressed with the number of youth who were in the services. We also met with a number of civic leaders at a reception in the same room where the historic Shanghai Communiqué had been signed by President Nixon and Premier Chou En-lai in 1972, which opened the door to closer contacts between the United States and China. (Incidentally, as Nixon was going to the Beijing airport to leave China, he called me on the telephone. I was staying at a Holiday Inn in Vero Beach, Florida, and had been following his visit on television. T.W. and I were just leaving for an appointment when the White House switchboard rang and connected us. He said he wanted to call because he knew how much China meant to Ruth and me, and to say that he felt there had been a real breakthrough in our relationship with China.)
Another highlight was the opportunity to meet with Pastor Wang Mingdao, one of China’s best-known church leaders since the 1930s. He was well known even outside China for his steadfastness in the face of persecution. At one stage during the Cultural Revolution, he was given a life sentence; and he was still considered a nonperson by the authorities. None of the police officers or government officials traveling with us would accompany us to his place, but they were waiting for us after the visit.
Pastor Wang and his wife lived in a humble third-floor apartment on an out-of-the-way street. Old and thin, he was sitting on a metal chair, asleep, when we arrived, his head on his folded arms resting on the simple kitchen table.
When he awoke, I asked if he had a word from the Lord for us. He was silent for some time. “Be faithful, even to the point of death,” he finally said, “and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2:10). Certainly, this godly leader exemplified that verse. We stayed at least half an hour, and our conversation was almost completely about the Bible and spiritual things.
Our two-and-a-half-week visit did not make us experts on such a complex cultural and sociopolitical system as contemporary China. However, we tried to learn as much as we could during our days there. Whenever possible, I watched and listened and asked questions. As I told a group in Hong Kong immediately after the trip, one of the greatest things I learned was how much I did not know about China. As Sidney said repeatedly, anyone who pretended to be an authority on China was only showing his ignorance.
Since that memorable trip in 1988, I have returned to China twice, in both instances stopping over for a few days in Beijing before going on to North Korea. Both times (1992, 1994) I have been staggered by China’s explosive economic growth, with massive traffic jams and skyscrapers under construction. On each visit, my feeling about China’s strategic place in the future has been reinforced. We continue to pray for China, that it may become a spiritual power-house in the future.
It gives Ruth and me special joy that our younger son, Ned, has become deeply committed to China. He now heads a small organization based in the Seattle area called East Gates Ministries Inter-national, devoted to assisting the Church in China through training, literature, and Bible distribution. As I write this, East Gates has been given official permission to print several million Bibles at the Amity Printing Press in Nanjing, a joint project of the China Chris-tian Council and the United Bible Societies. These are earmarked for legal distribution to house churches throughout China—groups that have had no reliable legal source of Bibles in the past.
God is still at work in the ancient land of China, and for that we rejoice.
34
Through Unexpected Doors
North Korea 1992 and 1994
North Korea was the last place on earth we ever expected to go.
For one thing, the United States and North Korea were technically still at war. The Korean conflict had ended in 1953, but with only a cease-fire, not a peace treaty. That meant that the United States, as part of the United Nations contingent fighting on behalf of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), was still considered an enemy by North Korea, which also blamed the United States for dividing the Korean Peninsula after World War II.
It also meant that we had been in a state of war with North Korea longer than with any other nation in our history. The presence of American troops in South Korea only reinforced North Korea’s vehement hostility toward the United States—a view constantly repeated in North Korean propaganda. But, in fact, the danger of armed conflict was still very real. At the beginning of 1992, a few months before we went to Pyongyang, former President Richard Nixon called the heavily armed Korean border potentially the most dangerous place on earth.
A further problem was North Korea’s nonreligious ideology. Under its founder and leader, President Kim Il Sung, North Korea had developed its own distinctive ideological approach to Communism, called “the Philosophy of the Juche Idea.” The word juche means “self-reliance,” and their ideology stressed national self-reliance following a strict model of thoroughgoing socialism. As part of this philosophy, North Korea at one time had banned all religious activity and proclaimed itself the first completely atheistic nation on earth. It was probably the most closed country in the world at that time, not only to all religion but to Western visitors.
In the 1930s, under Japanese colonial rule, the northern part of Korea was noted for its large population of Christians and its many churches. Indeed, Pyongyang—as the most Christian city in Asia—was sometimes called “the Jerusalem of the East.” After the 1953 cease-fire, however, there were very few Christians left in North Korea. During the conflict, thousands of Christians lost their lives; many thousands more fled to the south. Of these refugees, a fair number became church leaders during South Korea’s explosive growth in Christianity. Although North Korea’s antireligious policies had eased in the intervening decades to the point that two small churches (one Catholic and one Protestant) had been built in Pyongyang with government permission in the late 1980s, we still had no reason to believe North Korea would ever welcome a Christian evangelist.
But still I remained interested in that small, isolated nation occupying the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. One reason was that it, like China, had played a major part in Ruth’s younger years. In 1933 Dr. and Mrs. Bell sent Ruth to Korea for high school in Pyongyang (then known as Pyeng Yang). Ruth joined her older sister, Rosa, who had gone to Pyongyang a year earlier; their other sister, Virginia, would follow them later.
At that time, the Pyeng Yang Foreign School, established and run by American missionaries, was considered one of the finest boarding schools in Asia, with a reputation for sending more candidates on to earn medical degrees and doctorates than any other boarding school of its type in the world. But in 1937, when the Jap-anese invaded China, the Bells were forced to leave briefly for the port city of Tsingtao; that was when Ruth left for the United States and Wheaton College.
In subsequent years, after our marriage, the conversation would often turn to North Korea, especially when Sandy Yates Gartrell, Helen Bigger Lopez-Fresquet, or other friends from Ruth’s high school days dropped by for a visit. A surprisingly large number of former missionaries to Korea and Americans born in Korea have settled in the Montreat area. In later years, Ruth also kept close ties with Korea through her sister and brother-in-law, Virginia and John Somerville, who served as Presbyterian missionaries in South Korea until their retirement. Their son Walter married a fine Christian girl whose father was originally from North Korea. Som
e of his relatives were still there. Tragically, he had not been able to have any contact with them because of the political situation.
Perhaps these connections explain why I could not get North Korea out of my mind or heart. It was far more than simply the personal challenge of going to a place where the Gospel was virtually unknown.
I had been to South Korea a number of times and had many friends there. In fact, some of our largest meetings have been there; in 1973 we drew around 500,000 a night, with more than 1 million in Yoido Plaza on the last day.
My Korean friends told me that millions of Koreans on both sides of the border were separated from their parents, brothers and sisters, even spouses; and on my visits to South Korea, I heard many such stories of separation. Unlike the East Germans and West Germans during the days of the Berlin Wall, these Koreans had been unable to have any contact at all with their relatives for decades. It was one of the most heartrending human tragedies on earth, although not well known by many Americans. Could a visit to the north do something to alleviate this problem, even in some small way? My approach had always been that of friendship rather than confrontation. It had worked in other parts of the world. Why not in North Korea?
All this was only in the back of my mind, with no specific plan, until Henry Holley and I were talking in Hong Kong a few days after the Crusade there in November 1990. He had worked for us in Asia for many years and had directed many of our Crusades there. He too felt a special closeness to Korea, partly from his time there as a master sergeant in the U.S. Marines. We were discussing a number of invitations we had in Asia.
“Where can we go next?” I asked Henry.
“You have been practically everywhere in the world, except one place,” he said to me, sharing a burden he’d had for many years. “This place I have prayed for because of my love of the region.”
I asked him where it was, and he said North Korea.