THE DOVE PERIOD V

Third Nanyang Campaign
1936

September 1936 saw Dr Sung leaving home for another campaign in Nanyang - destination Sarawak. Sarawak is situated on the northern part of the island of Borneo, whose greater southern portion is called Kalimantan, which are part and parcel of the sprawling Indonesian Archipelago. Sarawak today is incorporated into East Malaysia along with Sabah (formerly British North Borneo) and the free port of Labuan. In the nineteen-thirties Sarawak was a British protected state governed by Sir Rajah Brooke.

One of the chief cities of Sarawak is Sibu, but what is pertinent about this town is her Christian heritage, a herit­age somewhat akin to Plymouth in New England which was colonized by the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. Sibu was founded in 1901, the year John Sung was born, by Wong Nai Siong, a Methodist entrepreneur. With six hundred Christian settlers sailing in two junks from Foochow, his purpose was to provide a better livelihood to all Foochow Christians emi­grating to Southeast Asia who might choose Sibu's Christian Colony as their new home.

The founder of this Foochow Christian Colony in Sarawak being a devout man, he saw to it that services were held on the Lord's Day for the settlers. Indeed, the new-comers from Foochow were gathered together to a Thanksgiving Service the first Sunday, led by Bishop Frank Warne from Singapore, who simultaneously organized the same as a part of the Singapore District of the Methodist Malaysia Mission.

Though Sibu was almost all Christian in the thirties, it had degenerated in three decades to a nominal Christianity, not a little ^-of it a dead Christianity. And how dead could the Sibu Church become? According to Miss Leona Wu, Dr Sung's interpreter, a lay preacher there had asked her if Nicodemus meant Nico's mother. Now in Chinese philolo­gical construction, de is the equivalent of the English 's and mus which is mu in the Chinese character means mother. To confuse the Chinese mind further Nicodemus was told by our Lord that he needed a second birth. Now, if Nicodemus could not understand our Lord about the second birth, how could Nico's mother, who wasn't in the discussion between Jesus and Nicodemus anyway?

The circumstances leading to Dr Sung being invited to Sibu were the conversion of one of Sibu's sons at Malacca and of one of her daughters in Singapore. On fire for the Lord after hearing John Sung, they both returned to Sibu to rouse up the Church, so much so the Church leadership was obliged to invite the doctor for a revival campaign.

In a ten-day campaign from September 21st to October 1st, 1936 the old citadel of a dying Christianity fell to John Sung's assault. A total of one thousand five hundred and eighty-three persons were saved, an event never seen or heard of in Sarawak's hundred years' history (1841). There was not a Christian house that was not affected by the coming of God's messenger.

As we have narrated the story of Taiwan's Tai Po-fu, a spiritual grandson of John Sung through Lim Puay Hian, so Leslie Lyall tells of a Chinese living in London in whose heart the seeds of God's Word were sown by the Sibu Pentecost. At that campaign he was a little boy living with relatives who were not interested in the Gospel. But John Sung's dramatic preaching had left such an indelible im­pression on his young mind that when he came to England and heard the Gospel a second time, that seed planted in his heart in Sibu many years ago sprouted into life everlasting!

On top of the thousand five hundred conversions, Sibu's sacred statistics read: full-time consecrators: 100; Preaching Bands: 88, plus 38 for outlying regions. Sent to study theology in Nanking: 4. In spite of restrictions put on the Church by the Japanese regime during World War Two, the Preaching Bands which were the nucleus of a revived Church carried on to nurture the faith of the believers at a time when pastors were few.

From Sibu Dr Sung returned to Singapore en route to a consolidation ministry of the towns in Malaya he had visited the year before, beginning with Muar. Of late the Christians in Muar, practically all Presbyterians, were plagued by one Rev Lin Hong Pin from Shanghai. Incidentally this pastor Lin had a little church on a side street in Shanghai which was noted by this writer when he was in Shanghai as a student in 1946. Now, what he taught that ruffled the Church was that without a triple immersion, to Father, to Son and to Holy Spirit, practically no one could be saved. Moreover he preached on the Second Coming of Christ with date setting and forbade the saying of the Lord's Prayer.

So persuasive was his teaching that an independent Church at Rawang on the other side of the Muar River succumbed to it. Immediately a big concrete tank was built in the yard of the leading Elder's bungalow, and through this credulous elder, the whole Rawang Church (which was Presbyterian in background) was thrice immersed. Howev­er, after Rev Lin Hong Pin had left the Muar scene and World War Two had broken out, the new ritual of a thrice-repeated immersion was discarded. This of course was due partly to Dr Sung's corrective preaching, for he was not slow to join the fray whenever the Word of Truth was assailed or distorted. When this writer became moderator of the Rawang Church on the other side of the Muar River in the sixties, he was shown the big tank that Rev Lin Hong Pin built, but was now become a haven for breeding pet tortoises!

Having consolidated the faith of Muar believers, Dr Sung. revisited Kuala Lumpur the Malayan capital. From there he went to Klang, the port of Kuala Lumpur and from Klang he landed again on Penang, famous tourist island of Malaysia today. Why did he take this route? Because these towns and cities were on his way to his new destination, Burma, and it was but a forty-eight hour boat ride from Penang to Ran­goon, Burma's chief port and capital city. John Sung be­lieved in cost-effective evangelism, and the economic arrangement of time schedules.

Now Burma is a super-Buddhist country. The Christian Church there is strong particularly amongst the Karens, who were converted under Adoniram Judson (1814), pioneer of the American Baptists. It was by him that the Burmese Bible was translated.

Before the missionaries arrived, the Karens had a belief in a Creator and told a story somewhat similar to the Biblical account of man's fall into sin. They cherished also a story handed down from generation to generation of the loss of a sacred white book by their fathers and of a day when a white teacher would restore it to them. Thus when white mis­sionaries came to the Karens they were readily received.

Other tribes that came much under the attention of the Baptists were the Kachins, Chins, Shans, Lahus and Was, though the strongheaded Buddhist Burmese were the very first to be evangelized, with too little success.

John Sung was not sent to these tribes of Burma (though Lim Puay Hian was, in John Sung's steps). John Sung was invited by the overseas Chinese Church. When he came to hold a revival campaign this far end of China's "backyard," a totally different culture greeted him - not the three Chinese abundances of "happiness, longevity and sons" but of "crows, monks and pagodas." Like St Paul on Mars Hill faced with a pantheon of gods, how John Sung had sighed that the light of the Gospel should also shine into this dark land of countless pagodas, monks and crows.

Nevertheless his first job was to revive God's people now become degenerate, so with zeal and great boldness he lashed at the sins of the Chinese Church. Now the Chinese Church in Rangoon that invited him was without a pastor, for it had seceded from the Methodist Church, and was managed by a panel of twelve deacons. The Superintendent of the Methodist Church after inviting him once to preach at his Church tried to use him to bring back the secessionists but John Sung would not enter into any Church politics. "This one thing I do" (Phil 3: 13), he concentrated on saving souls and reviving the Church. As the crowds were limited so were the results - three hundred were converted and thirty Preaching Bands organized, plus one hundred and fifty letters asking for prayer received. Among those who came to the Lord were two sisters, now set on fire for God, who were instrumental in inviting Lim Puay Hian to follow up on John Sung's work. Through these two sisters Lim Puay Hian made Rangoon his new domicile, spending nearly a year in Burma before he left his family for Borneo. The big Sung and the small Sung seemed to cross one another's path quite frequently.

During the revival meetings in Rangoon a goodly number of Indians attended, bringing their sick with them. Though they couldn't understand Chinese, they believed the Christ John was uplifting and found healing as a result. "Look unto Me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth" (Isa 45:22). "Though you don't fully understand, you can be saved by looking to Jesus," concluded John Sung in his Burmese experience.

Returning from Rangoon to Singapore, Dr Sung con­ducted a ten-day "spiritual-nurture meeting" from Decem­ber 11th to 20th, 1936, in which members particularly of the Evangelistic League under Miss Leona Wu were taught three Books of Moses and three Books of the New Testa­ment. The writer can vividly remember the charts in full color that showed the Tabernacle in the Wilderness with details of its structure not without spiritual dimensions. Miss Leona Wu again served as interpreter. What drew Dr Sung's converts to him again and again was the rich, graduated Biblical contents not only of his sermons but also of his ever refreshing Bible studies. Truly he was an instructed scribe "which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old" (Matt 13:52). This basic Bible knowledge, particularly of the Old Testament, has served me a long way, even for a student of theology, and a pastor to this day. This is partly what William E. Schubert, John Sung's missionary friend, meant when he said, "I learned more from Dr Sung in three weeks than I learned in three years in theological seminary."

On the afternoon of December 22nd 1936 1 was one of hundreds who went to the wharf to say farewell to my beloved teacher. I can still see him finally coming out of the lounge to stand on the gangway, not in his flowing white Chinese gown, but in white shirtsleeves and white pants, to wave us goodbye. Tears freely flowed both ways, and how our triangular red and white banners with the Cross of Christ fluttered lugubriously in the breeze. Such a spectacle rarely seen in Singapore's history attracted a reporter of the Straits Times to publish this write-up, dated December 23rd, 1936:

"A young Chinese (he was 35 years then) stood in the lounge of the Italian liner Conte Verde in Singapore last night and brought tears to the eyes of more than 500 people. He was John Sung, the Chinese evangelist, who was return­ing to China after his second campaign for Christianity in Singapore. He was seen off by more than 1,000 excited Chinese, who paraded at the wharf waving flags and invaded the decks and saloons of the liner. Dr Sung addressed his followers briefly; they sang hymns and smiled cheerfully, but fully half of them were weeping, some silently and some emotionally. They were saying goodbye to a man who claims to have made thousands of Chinese converts of Christianity, to a man who was once locked in a mental asylum in the United States and who is now the `hot gospeller' of China and the Chinese.

"Sung is a man who puts himself and Christianity into the news by his unorthodox ways, which always annoy the orthodox. He has made whirlwind tours of Malaya and everywhere he has left behind bands of converts. I watched him last night aboard the Conte Verde. Around him were hundreds of Singapore Chinese - mostly working-class men and women with a fair sprinkling of young men and good-looking girls - and he turned the liner's lounge into an improvised mission hall.

"His supporters, who wore the badge (shaped like their triangular flag) and waved the flag of the Chinese Christian Evangelistic League, rarely took their eyes off him. He spoke but little and then usually an intimate word to someone near him. Then someone, moved by the occasion, burst into the first line of a hymn in Chinese (God will take care of you, Through everyday, o'er all the way ....) which was taken up by everybody. Stewards, travelers, dock officials and ship's officers looked on amazed. And most amazed of all, let it he said, were a number of Roman Catholic priests returning from Rome to their stations in the Far East. I noticed two nuns attracted by the waving of the flags bearing the insignia of the Cross go into the lounge; they seemed to wonder what it was all about and certainly never identified the young Dr Sung, who looked more like a tennis player than an evangelist."

Through days of toil when heart doth fail,

God will take care of you;

When dangers fierce your path assail,

God will take care of you…y-o-u…