A Life Poured Out

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7

The child who was asked for. He was born on the fourth of November, 1903, in the coastal city of Swatow, in southern China, and given the name Ni Shu-tsu. His father, Ni Weng-hsiu, was an officer in the Imperial Customs Service; his grandfather, Ni Yu-cheng, had been among the earliest Chinese to be ordained as a Protestant preacher in Fukien province. The family was Christian, respectable and Methodist, and the boy was baptised as an infant by a Methodist bishop. His mother, Lin Ho-ping — Peace Lin — had borne two daughters and desperately wanted a son. In the manner of Hannah at Shiloh she vowed that if God gave her a boy she would give him back. God gave her a boy. It would be nearly eighteen years before either of them understood what the vow had cost. The child was brilliant. He read early, argued well, and swept the prizes at the mission school in Foochow where the family had returned to live. He was also, by his own later account, a thoroughly worldly young man — clever, ambitious, contemptuous of the religion of his parents, and privately determined to make a name in the world. Christianity he regarded as a sentimental encumbrance suited to women and the elderly.

April 1920. In the spring of 1920 a Chinese evangelist named Dora Yu came to Foochow to preach. Dora Yu had trained in medicine and abandoned it for the gospel; she was a Methodist, a woman of prayer, and she preached with a directness that cut. Peace Lin went to the meetings. What happened to her there was so thorough that she came home and did something no Chinese mother of that generation would ordinarily do: she apologised to her son for a wrong she had done him. It undid him. He went to hear the preacher for himself. On the evening of the twenty-ninth of April, 1920, alone in his room, seventeen years old, he surrendered to Jesus Christ. The change was immediate and total. He began at once to witness — to classmates, to teachers, to anyone within reach — and he drew up a list of some seventy friends whom he undertook to pray for, in some seasons every hour of the day. Before long he changed his name. Ni Shu-tsu became Ni To-sheng: the sound of the watchman’s rattle, the night-watch clapper struck in the darkness to rouse a sleeping town. In English he would be known for the rest of his life as Watchman Nee.

The teacher he needed. He went first to Shanghai to train under Dora Yu and was sent home again, having proved an undisciplined student. It was Dora Yu who then pointed him toward the woman who would shape him more than any other. Margaret E. Barber was an Englishwoman in her fifties who had come out with the Church Missionary Society, returned to England under a cloud of accusation she refused to defend herself against, and come back to China as an independent missionary answerable to no board and supported by no salary. She lived simply at White Teeth Rock, near Pagoda Anchorage on the Min River, and she took the brilliant young convert in hand. She was severe with him. She let him wait; she rebuked him; she declined to flatter a gift that everyone else was already praising. He would say afterwards that she taught him the cross by administering it. She also opened her bookshelves. Through Margaret Barber, Nee met the writers who would furnish his theology for life: the Brethren expositors — Darby, Mackintosh, Robert Govett, G. H. Pember, D. M. Panton; the Keswick and deeper-life authors — Andrew Murray, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Evan Roberts, F. B. Meyer; and the older mystics, above all Madame Guyon, whose little treatise on prayer he would translate into Chinese. In 1921 he was baptised by immersion, having concluded that his infant baptism was no baptism at all. Margaret Barber died in 1930 and left him her few possessions.

Ministry, illness, and the little flock. From 1922 he and a handful of friends began breaking bread together in Foochow, outside the denominational structures, as simply the church in that place. Others joined. The movement that grew from those meetings would be known to outsiders as the Little Flock, and to its own members as the Christian Assembly, or more plainly the church in whatever city it happened to be. By the time of his arrest thirty years later there were some four hundred such assemblies across China, and others in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. He began publishing almost at once. His periodicals — The Present Testimony and The Christian — carried his exposition to readers far beyond the reach of his voice. Then his health broke. From the middle of the 1920s he was gravely ill with tuberculosis, for long stretches unable to walk across a room, repeatedly given up by his doctors. It was in this condition, expecting to die, that he wrote his first major work. The Spiritual Man, three volumes on the threefold constitution of man, was published in 1928. He later said the labour of it had cost him more than it was worth, and cautioned readers against making a system out of what he had written — but the book established him. In 1927 the work moved to Shanghai, which became its centre.

Abroad. He travelled to the West twice. In 1933 he visited England and met the Exclusive Brethren, whose literature had formed him and whose exclusivism afterwards led them to break with him. He also spent time at Honor Oak in south London with T. Austin-Sparks, who became a friend. The second visit, in 1938 and 1939, was the more consequential. Speaking in England, Denmark and elsewhere in Europe on the eve of the war, he gave the series of addresses on Romans that were afterwards gathered, edited and published as The Normal Christian Life. It remains, by a wide margin, the book by which the English-speaking world knows him. In 1934 he had married Charity Chang, whom he had known since childhood; the marriage drew criticism from some quarters and cost him friendships.

The wilderness years. In 1942 the work suffered a rupture. Nee had become involved in a pharmaceutical business, the China Biological and Chemical Laboratories, founded with his brother, intending its profits to support the workers. The elders of the Shanghai assembly judged this unbecoming in a servant of God and asked him to cease ministering. He submitted. For roughly six years he did not break bread with the church he had raised up, and did not preach. Those years are variously interpreted. His defenders describe a humble submission to misguided brethren. Others, including some who knew him, believed his own conscience was involved. He himself said little. In 1948 he was restored to fellowship, and there followed the most remarkable period of his teaching ministry: the trainings for workers held on Kuling Mountain, near Foochow, in 1948 and 1949. Out of those sessions came Spiritual Authority, The Character of God’s Workman, and much else. He also called the believers to hand over — to place their homes, properties and livelihoods at the disposal of the Lord and the church. Many did.

The last chapter. The Communists took the mainland in 1949. Nee was in Hong Kong early in that year, safe, with every opportunity to remain. In February he decided to go back to Shanghai. He understood what he was choosing. For a time the churches continued; the Shanghai assembly still gathered thousands. Then the Three-Self Patriotic Movement was organised, and the pressure to submit the churches to state control became irresistible. Nee would not. He was arrested on the tenth of April, 1952. For four years the believers did not know where he was. In January 1956 he was denounced at a mass accusation meeting in Shanghai, before a crowd that included his own former co-workers, and an indictment of some two thousand pages was published against him. Later that year he was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. He was never released. When the fifteen years expired in 1967 he was simply kept. It is said that freedom was offered him more than once if he would lead a state-approved church, and that he refused every time. Only his wife was permitted to visit. Charity died on the seventh of November, 1971; he was not allowed to attend her funeral. Watchman Nee died on the thirtieth of May, 1972, at a labour farm in Guangde, in Anhwei province, sixty-eight years old, having spent twenty years in confinement. A grand-niece who came to collect his effects was given a scrap of paper found beneath his pillow, written in his own hand. Its substance was that Christ is the Son of God who died for the redemption of sinners and rose on the third day — and that he, Watchman Nee, died believing it. The watchman had kept his post until the morning.