To China With Love
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was village. I then became pastor to the slums of inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a country parson and a teacher at a one teacher bush school out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for 13 years, I was a suburban minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
Thereafter, for more than 27 years, I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
The congregations of Wesley Mission are all committed to getting the Good News about Jesus Christ to as many people in the world as possible. For nearly 200 years our members have supported the spreading of God’s Word to every nation on earth.
We seek to do this by sending and supporting missionaries to continents like Africa and Asia, to lands like China, India and the Pacific Islands. In the 1820’s some intrepid missionaries went to the Maori’s of New Zealand and later to the cannibals of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Some died in Christian service. Others established schools and hospitals, dispensaries and health clinics. In the 1880’s some answered Hudson Taylor’s plea to go to China, and later others to India and Papua New Guinea.
Some became translators of the Bible and many gave money regularly to support those overseas workers. Church mission groups met to pray, write letters, parcel clothing and toilet requisites to send overseas. In Sunday school classes and Christian Endeavour groups, people met returning missionaries and kept contact by writing letters.
One current member of Wesley Mission learnt this care for missionary work in China as a girl the best part of seventy years ago. Her interest as a small child was to be fulfilled as a retired woman in 1980’s. Betty Bolton learnt of China in the 1930’s, and went there to smuggle Bibles over fifty years later.
As a volunteer Bible courier for the Revival Christian Church in Hong Kong where she was temporarily visiting, Betty Bolton carried up to forty-five Bibles each time she crossed into China. Every night, she received a piece of paper that set out her plans for the next day.
For Betty these trips were the fulfilment of a life-long ambition that started in a Christian Endeavour class in Newcastle when she was twelve years old.
She says, “As children we went to Sunday school and Christian Endeavour and I was the convenor of the missionary committee. I was commissioned to write to a Winifred Embery from Melbourne who was a missionary from the China Inland Mission in Yunan Province.”
The China Inland Mission is now known as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship.
Betty continues, “She wrote me three letters and in the first one she sent me photographs of the people, asking us to pray for them because, “they were persecuted when they give their hearts to Jesus.”
“At the bottom of that first letter she wrote, “perhaps God will send you to China Betty, to help in another way.” From that moment on, my heart warmed to China.
When the Japanese invaded Manchuria, Betty lost contact with her missionary friend, but she never forgot the Chinese people.
She says, “When World War Two broke out, I enlisted in the Army to help fight against the Japanese. I had a brother in Borneo and wanted to do what I could to help him. After I came out of the Army I married a man who had been widowed with a two day old baby, so I had an instant family as it were.”
“We were on a farm and I can remember some nights lying in bed thinking it would have been easier being a missionary to the heathen in China, as we used to call them.”
Betty moved back to Sydney in 1984 after the death of her husband. To help with her loneliness she got involved in volunteer work, and helped out at Wesley Mission and at International House at the University.
She says, “In 1987, I decided I wanted to see China, and so I went to Hong Kong with my daughter. After three days of shopping, I called into the YMCA to have a cup of tea and write a few letters. While I was sitting there a young man came in and we started talking. It turned out that he was a Christian and had just come back from Tibet and went in and out of China constantly. After we talked for two or more hours, he stunned me by asking me to take some Bibles into China!”
After telling her daughter about the meeting, both of them went to an address the young man had given them, where they found visas and Bibles waiting to be taken into China.
Betty says, “After thinking and reading about China for all those years, here I was at last, about to go into the country I had loved from a distance. On the fifth of September 1987, my daughter and I boarded a train and took our first package of Bibles into China.”
“We were a bit apprehensive because the Bible was not allowed to be imported into China, but when we pout our bags on the X-ray scanner we found that for some reason it didn’t work, so went through.”
On the plane back to Australia, Betty knew that she wanted to go back to China, but wasn’t sure when. For the next three years she thought about China and the great need for Bibles.
She says, “In September of 1989, I met Brother David, who was visiting Australia and whose book, ‘God’s Smuggler to China’, I had read. Meeting someone who knew China and had been there recently rekindled my interest and so I wrote to the Revival Christian Church that I had come in contact with three years before.”
Arriving in Hong Kong in January 1990, Betty went to the church and was asked if she wanted to go into China the very next day with a load of Bibles. She readily agreed and was able to obtain a three-month visa for multiple entry.
Betty says, “There was a daily schedule produced every night by about six o’clock which would list what you were to do the next day. It might just be to cross the border and deposit the Bibles at a hotel on the Chinese side or take a longer trip in by ferry.”
“All the Bibles taken across the border were left at the check-in counter of various hotels. They would then be collected by someone staying at the hotel who would re-pack them and then distribute them throughout country.”
Betty was mainly involved in “body ministry” which meant that the Bibles she took in were strapped to her body in specially made clothing.
“I am the original five-by-five pack horse”, she declares, “sometimes I could hardly walk, they were so heavy. Then we had what we called the “dummy” bag which was packed with touristy things.”
“When I first went across, I was big and brave until I had my first body search. I was taken into a room by a couple of girls who were very nice and they left me to take the Bibles out from under my clothing while one of the guards went through my bag.”
“After the Bibles are confiscated, they are placed in a calico bag, tied up and in a couple of days you are able to go back and collect them, after paying a small fine.”
Whilst the Chinese Government had no regulation about the importing or distribution of Bibles in their country, the Customs department did. They classified the Bible as “pornography—material that will corrupt the mind.”
Betty says, “On one of my trips into China, one of the people I was with prayed that the customs officers would be lethargic, ‘may they be tired Lord, so that they do not see us or what we are carrying.’ And when we got to the border that was exactly what the guards were doing, yawning and not really paying any attention to us at all.”
Betty is amazed that she fulfilled the wishes of a missionary who wrote to her fifty years previous, saying, “perhaps God will send you to China Betty, to help in another way.”
Betty had never met her missionary friend Wyn of the 1930’s. We wondered if Wyn Embery was still alive. We started to make enquiries of the whereabouts of this retired missionary from China.
We tracked Wyn down to her home in Queensland and flew her down for the program. We did not tell Betty what we were doing. On the set of our Turn ‘Round Australia program we commemorated the 100th anniversary of the coming to Australia of founder of the China Inland Mission, Hudson Taylor. Now known as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, they recruited 100 people as a result of Taylor’s initial visit. What happened next caused hundreds of people wrote to us to say how much they enjoyed the program.
I spoke of the Church’s task in supporting the spread of the Word of God overseas, of the story of J Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission, and then interviewed Betty, who as a young girl had been writing to a China Inland Mission missionary and who 50 years later went to China to smuggle Bibles.
Amazingly, Betty still has these original letters written by Wyn in 1930, and with the expressed hope that Betty would visit China one day. As Betty read from the letters, I secretly signalled Wyn who was standing hidden in the studio. As Betty read the letters, the lady who had written them 50 years earlier quietly came up and say down beside Betty. Betty nearly died!
It was a wonderful meeting of two wonderful women who loved the Lord and who were both committed to China.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one of the world’s great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world’s great churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.
