VI.   ALL MY PREACHERS BORN AGAIN THAT NIGHT

       When the Holy Spirit fell on us that night in Nanchang, all the Chinese preachers from my Fu River District had come in for the district conference.  The Kan River and Nanchang District pastors were there also, as well as the students and teachers of both high schools and the doctors and nurses of our Methodist Nanchang Hospital.

       Up to that time most of my pastor friends had not been born again, I fear, though I had worked with them for several years, and had prayed for them, and had talked and preached the New Birth.  But that night I think every one of them was born again, including Pastor Wang Shan-chih.  I had been his assistant pastor several years before, in the big institutional church in Nanchang.  He once confessed to me: “Mr. Schubert, I don't even know if there is a God.”  I exclaimed, “Why, Pastor Wang, how can you be a Methodist pastor when you don't even know if there is a God?”

       He replied, “I believed in God until I went to America.  But there I lost my faith while in Union Theological Seminary.  Later, when I was visiting in England during the war, I went to see Oxford University.  There I saw the pictures of the great preachers, and I thought, 'It is all empty.' But something said to me, 'No, anything that can produce men like this, there must be something to it'.”

         That was the extent of his theology: “There must be something to it.”  Someone asked me, “What did he preach?”  He preached Comparative Religion.  In his big institutional church, which he patterned after some he had seen in America, he had an English school (which I ran the year I was with him), a library, a reading room, and many social activities.  In that way he eased his conscience, but he wasn't able to preach any Gospel of salvation.