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Return to "The BTJ Evangelistic Band II"
“I tell you the truth, unless a
kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But
if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it,
while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
John 12:24-25
In the 1920s God first told a group called the "Jesus Family" to
take the Gospel on foot all the way from China to Jerusalem.
Founded in 1921 in Shandong Province by a man named Jing Dianying,
the Jesus Family believed members should sell all their possessions and
distribute their wealth among the other family members. The group’s five-word
slogan encapsulated their commitment to Christ and their pattern of frugal
living: “Sacrifice, abandonment, poverty, suffering, death.”
The Jesus Family targeted towns and villages, preaching the
Gospel as they walked from one place to another. Their example of communal
living and their deep Christian love amazed many onlookers. It attracted those
searching for answers to life as well as those who were homeless, destitute and
despised. Many blind people and beggars joined the Jesus Family and found
eternal life in Christ.
As they continued to grow, the Jesus Family suffered terrible
hardships. Often when this mobile community entered a new town the entire
population came out to beat, scorn and humiliate them. The opposition didn’t
deter them, however, and when they preached the Gospel there always seemed to be
a few people willing to forsake all that they had to follow Jesus.
The Jesus Family was the first to have the Back to Jerusalem
vision. Their workers carried baskets of food and essentials as they walked on
foot across China. By the late 1940s there were some 20,000 Chinese believers
enlisted in more than 100 different Jesus Family groups throughout China,
enabling them to cover many different regions with the Gospel. Some believers
went to Manchuria, some to Inner Mongolia, others to southern China. All of
these groups considered themselves part of the Back to Jerusalem vision. They
all prayerfully and practically supported the main evangelistic band that was
heading west into the Muslim nations on foot, to establish the Kingdom of God in
all the territories along the way.
It seems that after a period of time the Jesus Family had lost
their direction in the Back to Jerusalem vision. This was probably due to the
fact that all the authority was invested in the one leader, Jing Dianying. The
vision had become extremely centralized and was not the vision of most of the
common believers.
By the end of the 1930s God had raised up a new generation of
believers who were willing to forsake everything in obedience to seeing this
call of God completed. They said, “Let’s rise to our feet and carry the Cross to
the nations where God is not known. Let’s go forth in Jesus Name, giving up
everything we have, even our very lives if necessary, so that the Name of Jesus
will be glorified among all the Gentiles.”
This is how the Northwest Spiritual Movement was birthed. Most of
the original leaders of this evangelistic group hailed from Shandong Province,
including the founder, Zhang Guquan.
Today’s Chinese believers interpret the split between the
Northwest Spiritual Movement and the Jesus Family in different ways. Some say
the split was a bad thing, while others believe the Lord had led them to do it
because the vision was floundering under the control of the Jesus Family leaders
and a fresh start had to be made.
The strategy of the Northwest Spiritual Movement was simply to
preach the Gospel, believing that Jesus would soon return. They did not spend
any effort on establishing local congregations, just on evangelism and soul
winning, yet God in His mercy still established many new believers and there was
much fruit that remains to this day.
You need to understand that this was not a large spiritual army
marching across the nation! The top leaders of this vision numbered just four or
five individuals, plus a few dozen other workers. Despite their small numbers
the Northwest Spiritual Movement was effective because their vision was focused.
They were like a sharp arrow head, while the new converts they left behind were
the shaft of the arrow.
They won people to Christ among many ethnic groups including
Muslim Uygurs, Hui and Kazaks.
In addition to the efforts of the Back to Jerusalem Evangelistic
Band and the Northwest Spirit Movement, several smaller initiatives were
launched in the 1940s by different Chinese church groups. Some reached into
Tibetan areas, others to the minorities of southwest China, still others into
the Muslim regions. Yet despite their different origins and sphere of work, it
seems all of these groups considered themselves part of the larger vision to
carry the Gospel back to Jerusalem.
After the end of World War II, Phyllis Thompson, a worker based
in Chongqing with the China Inland Mission, remarked:
The thing that has impressed me most has been the strange,
unaccountable urge of a number of different Chinese groups of Christians to
press forward in faith, taking the gospel towards the west. I know of at least
five different groups, quite unconnected with each other, who have left their
homes in east China and gone forth, leaving practically everything behind
them, to the west. Some are in Xikang [now western Sichuan], some in Gansu,
some right away in the great northwestern province of Xinjiang. It seems like
a movement of the Spirit which is irresistible. The striking thing is that
they are disconnected, and in most cases seem to know nothing about each
other. Yet all are convinced that the Lord is sending them to the western
borders to preach the gospel, and they are going with a strong sense of
urgency of the shortness of the time, and the imminence of the Lord’s return.
In the 1940s the Lord raised up a young man named Simon Zhao who
became the principle leader of the second generation of workers in the Back to
Jerusalem movement.
Although he was a young man in his late 20s, Simon Zhao was appointed the leader of preaching and evangelism in the Northwest
Spiritual Movement.
Born on June 1, 1918, Simon Zhao (whose original name was
Zhao Haizhen) was originally from Shenyang in Liaoning Province in northeast
China. His father died when Simon was a young boy, and his mother was forced to
raise the children alone. She was a beautiful woman. On several occasions the
village leader came to their home and tried to lure her to commit adultery with
him. He brought her expensive gifts but grew more and more frustrated as she
repulsed his advances. Finally, tired of her resistance, he raped her.
When little Simon found out what had happened to his beloved
mother he was furious. He told his mother that when he grew up he would become a
county leader so that he could bring the man to justice for the wrongs done to
her. His mother replied, “It’s no use. The county leaders are just as corrupt as
that evil village leader.”
“Then I will become higher than the county leaders!” Simon
exclaimed.
“It’s no use. The provincial leaders are just as corrupt as
the county leaders,” his mother replied.
“Then I will be a higher leader than the provincial leaders!”
“Again, son, it’s no use. The emperor is just the same.”
Simon was heartbroken and angry and asked his mother, “Then
who is more powerful than the emperor? Where can we go for justice?”
His mother replied, “Only God can grant justice, my son.”
“Then I will become a god!” the zealous little boy concluded.
The wound in Simon’s heart did not mend. In his teens he
pursued a career as a writer and used his skills to expose the village leader’s
crimes in a local newspaper. Yet his anger still burned.
Many years later, Simon Zhao met God. He found that he no
longer hated and sought revenge on the man who had violated his mother. His
goals in life had changed, and now all he wanted to do was preach the gospel and
make the glory of God known.
It was during a prayer meeting in Shenyang that the Lord
first gave Simon a vision. It was winter and very cold. Outside the house where
the believers prayed, the snowdrifts grew so high that the doors were blocked
and they could not leave. As three believers were praying over a map of China,
the Lord focused their thoughts on the northwest province of Xinjiang. They
placed their hands over that part of China on the map and prayed with great
authority. Before that day they had never seriously considered ministry in the
remote northwest.
Later, in Nanjing, Simon met other Christians who had
received exactly the same vision from God to take the gospel to Xinjiang and the
regions beyond. Among them was a young woman named Wen Muling, who later became
his wife. She was a fourth generation descendent of a Qing dynasty imperial
officer.
Three teams set out to join in the harvest. The first group
reached Xinjiang, and was followed by Simon Zhao’s group. Later a third group,
under the leadership of Zhu Congen from Zibo in Shandong Province, made their
way on foot into Xinjiang after the advent of Communism in China in 1949.
The group led by Simon Zhao and his wife left Nanjing and
travelled to Xinjiang via Shaanxi Province. For much of the way they went on
foot, but there were some areas such as the desert where it was impossible to
walk, and so they also travelled on horseback, camelback, and occasionally by
vehicle, all the time heading for the northwest border with the Soviet Union. On
the way they won many soldiers to faith in Christ, for it was a troubled time in
China’s history with civil
war and widespread internal chaos.
Eventually they reached Hami on the eastern edge
of Xinjiang and joined members of the North West [Spiritual Movement] who had
arrived there a year or two previously. Eager to plant the gospel on virgin
soil, Zhao headed south with five fellow workers to Hetian, a remote oasis town
in the far south of Xinjiang, in the winter of 1950. But two weeks after they
arrived the Public Security Bureau ordered them to leave. So they were forced to
move even further west to Kashgar, where in September 1949 the Band had set up a
preaching station at Shule.... They arrived in January 1950 to a chaotic
situation. The gospel compound had been taken over by armed soldiers who claimed
there had been a ‘counter-revolutionary incident.’ Uncle Simon did not know what
to make of it. But within a few days he was arrested and placed in prison.
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Every member of the Northwest Spiritual Movement was sentenced to prison, for various
lengths of time. The five leaders were given extremely harsh sentences – Simon
Zhao was the only one to see out his sentence alive. His wife was pregnant at
the time of their arrest, but soon after she suffered a miscarriage. In 1959 she
died in the women’s prison, but cruelly, Simon wasn’t told about it until 1973.
During the first few weeks and months in the Kashgar prison
labour camp, the guards tried to make Simon renounce his faith, but they soon
learned this would not work. They ordered him to stop praying and beat him every
time they found him doing so. He never stopped praying, but learned to do so in
secret when nobody was watching.
After some time the prison authorities thought he must have
changed because they never saw him praying, so they ordered the former writer to
pen a column for the prison newspaper, praising the transforming power of the
Communist system.
He commenced work on the article, which greatly pleased the
prison authorities. When they saw what he had written, however, they flew into a
rage and realized they had been tricked. His article consisted of a short poem
about the beauty of Jesus and a sketch of the cross.
The prison guards beat him by slamming a heavy wooden bench
on his back and kicked him mercilessly. The local authorities punished him by
extending his prison sentence for many more years and sending him to work in a
coal mine, where most prisoners died within six months because of the inhuman
conditions and backbreaking work. Every day he was required to meet a quota of
several tons of coal, a task humanly impossible for such a small and frail man.
Not only did he have to mine the coal, he also had to carry it out of the mine
in a basket tied to his back.
The prisoners were forced to work 14 hours a day, seven days
a week. The food was meagre and rancid. In the summer, there was sweltering
heat; in the harsh winter, temperatures were well below freezing. Simon Zhao
became a living miracle of God’s sustaining power. Hundreds of fellow prisoners
came to the coal mine, most of them physically stronger than Simon, only to die
within a few months of their arrival.
For years Simon discreetly witnessed to many of his fellow
prisoners, and some believed. There were a few other Christian pastors in the
labour camp with him, but the authorities placed them in separate cells and work
units, allowing Simon only fleeting moments of contact with them. For all the
years he remained in confinement, Simon was not allowed to receive any visitors.
He knew in his heart that nobody remembered him anyway in this remote Muslim
border town, thousands of miles from his home.
Except for the faithful presence of his Lord, who had
promised never to leave him or forsake him, Simon felt completely alone and
abandoned. Back in his home province of Liaoning on the opposite side of the
country, his relatives did not know whether he was dead or alive, and as the
years of silence stretched into decades, few people thought about or prayed for
him.
The Back to Jerusalem vision truly went underground. The seed
had died.
Simon later recalled how, during those harsh years, he would
look up at the stars and remember the vision God had given him and his
co-workers to take the gospel all the way back to Jerusalem on foot. He had
heard that his precious wife and unborn child were dead, but knew nothing about
what had happened to his co-workers. So in the early years of his imprisonment,
when the guards and his fellow prisoners weren’t watching, Simon often prayed,
“Lord, I will never be able to go back to Jerusalem, but I pray you will raise
up a new generation of Chinese believers who will complete the vision.” But over
time Simon Zhao lost the fire and passion for the Back to Jerusalem vision,
although he never denied the Lord Jesus who had given him that vision.
After many years of suffering in the coal mine Simon was
almost dead, so the prison authorities transferred him to a chemical factory in
another area of Xinjiang. Although this was a commercial factory, they used
prisoners as their main source of labour.
This new job was little better than the mine, for he was
daily exposed to toxic gases and poisonous chemicals. Every evening after work
he returned to the prison, where the beatings continued. Now, however, most of
them were at the hands of his fellow prisoners. The guards had devised a plan to
get the prisoners to vent their frustrations on each other, rewarding those who
reported on the behaviour of others. Being a hated Christian whom the
authorities had never been able to break, Simon Zhao was a particularly easy
target for brutal men.
Yet God had not forgotten him. On one occasion in the midst
of a severe winter, the prison guards refused to let Simon stay in the heated
cell block. They stripped him to his underwear and forced him to stand outside
in the snow. As they pushed him out the door they mocked him, saying, “You
believe in your God, so why don’t you pray to him and ask him to keep you warm!”
For the first few minutes the cold wind tore into his flesh
like a razor. Simon cried out to the Lord for mercy – and something amazing
happened. He felt a tremendous warmth, so much so that he soon had sweat
dripping off his body as though he were relaxing in a sauna! The snow around his
feet started to melt away from the warmth emanating from his body. He called out
to his cell mates inside and when they looked out the window they could scarcely
believe their eyes. Steam was rising from his body!
Yet such dramatic miracles were uncommon, and he suffered
terribly. Hundreds of times he was beaten mercilessly. The majority of the
prisoners were ethnic Uygurs, the predominant Muslim people in Xinjiang. The
Uygur prisoners were especially cruel to Simon because he was a hated Chinese
“pig eater”. He later described the way the Uygurs beat him as “the same way
they surround and pounce on a goat just before they kill it”.
Once he was beaten and kicked so severely that his skull was
fractured and he fell to the ground unconscious. While unconscious, he had a
vision in which the Lord spoke lovingly to him, “My child, I am with you. I
shall never leave you or forsake you.” Regaining consciousness at that moment,
he had no idea how long he had been out. He was dizzy and unsure of where he
was. He touched his head on the spot where his skull had been smashed and
discovered that the wound had miraculously healed, although there was dried
blood on that spot.
Simon Zhao was beaten for most of the thirty-one years he
spent in prison. It was only during the last several years – when he was an
elderly man in his sixties – that he wasn’t subjected to physical torture.
During those long years behind bars he wrote this poem:
I want to experience the
same pain and suffering
Of Jesus on the cross
The spear in his side, the
pain in his heart
I’d rather feel the pain of
shackles on my feet
Than ride through Egypt in Pharaoh’s chariot.
One day in 1981 the prison superintendent ordered Simon to
come to the main office. He walked down the corridor a little apprehensively,
wondering if he had managed to get himself into more trouble. He hoped something
hadn’t happened that would further extend his punishment.
The superintendent invited Simon to sit down and fumbled
through a thick file as he puffed on a cigarette. Finally he spoke, “The
government of the People’s Republic of China has decided to have mercy on you
and show you lenience for the crimes you have committed against our nation. I
have been authorized to release you. You are free to go.”
The man of God shuffled back to his cell dazed and numb. He
had never expected this day would come.
When he was first arrested in 1950, he was in the prime of
his life, an energetic man in his early 30s. His beautiful young wife was
expecting their first child. God had called them to take the gospel back to
Jerusalem and despite the dangers and many challenges, his life was rewarding
and exciting. Now, 31 years later, he was in his sixties, with white hair and a
white beard.
Simon walked out the prison gates into a completely different
China from the one he had known. He had missed all but the first few months of
Mao Zedong's reign, including Mao’s death in 1976. He had missed the insane
Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, when millions of people were killed by
the fanatical Red Guards. He was now an old man with little strength. His body
was damaged from decades of beatings, torture and hard work, and his face was
marked with deep lines revealing the struggle of more than three decades in the
lion’s den.
Nobody in the whole of China was waiting for him. Everyone he
knew 31 years earlier had either died or long forgotten about him. He had
nowhere to go and nobody to see. He didn’t have a clue what he should do. With
no money or friends, he could not even afford to catch a bus into the city.
The prison labour camp had been a part of his life for so
long that he decided to construct a makeshift hut just outside the entrance to
the prison. As he lay in this damp, cold hut, his mind sometimes wandered back
to his life as a young man and the call God had once given him. He had
faithfully tried to obey God, but it hadn't worked out. He hoped he would soon
die, for he knew that heaven was a much better place and the pain and confusion
he had experienced for so long would be removed forever.
For months he remained there, silent except for his daily
prayers of thanksgiving to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who had kept his
promise and never forsaken him during all those painful years. Without Jesus
Christ, Simon knew he would have died a thousand deaths. The living Christ had
kept him alive and sane, and had helped him to never renounce his faith in God.
Simon knew that no matter how lonely a person is in this world, Jesus will
always be there as “a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Prov.
18:24).
After some time local Christians in Kashgar learned about
Simon Zhao and heard his testimony. Out of respect they brought the old saint
food and a Bible and helped him however they could.
News spread
from church to church in Xinjiang about Simon, and soon the news was carried
back to other parts of China that a miracle man had been sustained by the power
of God during 31 years in prison for the sake of the gospel.
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Simon Zhao in 1988.
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Starting in the late 1960s, God poured his Spirit out on
Henan Province and many millions of people experienced God’s salvation there.
Henan became known as the centre of revival in China and was given the nickname
“the Galilee of China” – the place where Jesus’ disciples come from.
Many of the house church leaders in Henan had heard about the
original Back to Jerusalem workers in the 1940s. Our knowledge of the details of
those early workers was somewhat sketchy, but when we heard that one of the top
leaders was now out of prison, we were eager to meet him and learn from him.
Some of our co-workers were ministering in Kashgar. They met
Simon Zhao and sent us letters informing us of his story. Our church members in
Kashgar loved him like their own father and enjoyed very close fellowship with
him. He had been deprived of fellowship with other believers for decades, but
now the Lord gave him spiritual sons and daughters who deeply respected him.
Women from the church cooked for him, washed his clothes, and helped him however
they could. They treated him as they would an angel of God.
Finally a group of house church leaders caught trains and
buses all the way across China because we felt we had to meet Simon Zhao for
ourselves. After more than a week of travelling, we reached Kashgar and met a
broken, humble servant of God.
At that time we published a magazine which we used to
encourage believers in the house churches. Simon Zhao refused to write any
articles or share his testimony. We tried to show him that the current
generation of Chinese believers needed to learn how the Lord had taken him
through so many years of suffering. He always declined our offers, saying, “I
don’t want to have any attention focused on me.”
Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s, there
had been no active talk about taking the gospel Back to Jerusalem. Times were so
dark for believers in China that it took all of our energy and prayers just to
survive those years with our faith intact. But in the early 1990s, the Lord
showed us that it was important for Simon Zhao to come to Henan Province to
share his testimony with our house church Christians in order to inspire them to
carry on the vision God had given him almost fifty years before.
One sister
traveled by train and bus all the way to Kashgar to
prayerfully persuade him to reconsider. Every day she was away we prayed that
the Lord would grant her success. To start with, Simon Zhao was hesitant. He
said, “The Lord called me to go west back to Jerusalem and here in Xinjiang I am
at least on the way. Why should I travel back east again and go further away
from Jerusalem? Why don’t you leave me alone to die here in Kashgar?”
This sister
is very persistent in the Lord! She wouldn’t take no for an answer and followed
Uncle Simon wherever he went, repeatedly asking in a loving manner if he would
come back to Henan. She assured him that we had no intention of taking him away
from the front line of the battle. We only wanted to bring him back to where
there were thousands of new troops who needed training and equipping if the Back
to Jerusalem mission was to be rekindled in the life of the Chinese church.
She explained that his vision could be multiplied many
times over and that thousands of new recruits would be sent back to fight on the
front lines if he would just come and share his story.
Finally Simon Zhao realized this sister would not give him
any peace until he agreed to return to Henan Province with her. He started to
realize that it must be the Lord who had given this woman such stubborn
persistence! When he prayed about returning to eastern China, the Lord confirmed
that he should go by giving him a Scripture that was deeply personal and brought
healing after all the years of suffering and loneliness he had endured:
“Sing, O barren woman, you who never bore a child; burst into song, shout for
joy, you who were never in labour; because more are the children of the desolate
woman than of her who has a husband,” says the Lord. “Enlarge the place of your
tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords,
strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left;
your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities. Do
not be afraid; you will not suffer shame. Do not fear disgrace; you will not be
humiliated. You will forget the shame of your youth and remember no more the
reproach of your widowhood. For your Maker is your husband – the Lord Almighty
is his name – the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of
all the earth.” (Isa. 54:1–5)
We didn’t have any money to buy him a sleeping berth or even
a seat on the four-day train journey across China. He just found a spot on the
floor and curled up on a newspaper.
When he ministered to our churches in Henan it was very
powerful and a fire was lit in the heart of everyone who heard him. Many tears
flowed and thousands of believers were touched and received the vision for
missionary work. Even Simon Zhao’s physical appearance was unique and added to
his ministry. He looked like an ancient sage, with his long white beard and
white hair.
For many house church leaders the Back to Jerusalem vision
became very clear and God placed on us a heavy burden to see this vision
fulfilled.
* *
* * *
Simon Zhao finally went to be with the Lord on December 7,
2001. He was 83-years-old. He died in Pingdingshan, Henan Province, among
Christians who loved him.
His life was a remarkable one. Like Joseph, Simon started
with a dream from the Lord but before it came to fulfilment he was imprisoned
and his vision was put in the ground where it died while he silently suffered
unjust punishment for 31 years, remembered by no one but God.
Yet that was not the end of the story! Unbeknown to him, the
Lord was sowing this same vision in the hearts of many Christians in China.
After he was finally released from prison, God graciously gave him another
twenty years of ministry.
The house church Christians treated Simon Zhao with the
utmost respect in the Lord and honoured him as a prince in the house of God.
Before he died he came to realize that “God’s gifts and his call are
irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29).
Simon Zhao learned that the Lord always finishes what he
starts and is always faithful to fulfil his promises.
Notes:
Prayer letter of Miss Phyllis Thompson, March 3, 1949; cited in Tony Lambert,
“Back to Jerusalem: Origins of a Missionary Vision (Part II),” China Insight,
March-April 2003
[2]
Tony Lambert, "Back to Jerusalem: Uncle Simon," China Insight, May-June
2003
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