Watchman Nee

Ni Tuosheng — known in English as Watchman Nee — was born in Swatow, in southern China, on November 4, 1903, and raised in Foochow. His grandfather had been one of the first Chinese Congregational ministers in the region. His mother had promised God, before he was born, that if she were given a son she would give him back. He was converted in 1920 at seventeen, under the preaching of Dora Yu, a Chinese evangelist. He never attended seminary. What he had instead was an enormous appetite for books — the Brethren writers, the Keswick teachers, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Madame Guyon, Andrew Murray — and a conviction that the church in China should not be a set of Western denominational branches but local churches, one to a city, led by Chinese believers. He began publishing in his twenties. The Spiritual Man, written while he was seriously ill with tuberculosis, ran to three volumes. Later came the material published as The Normal Christian Life, Sit, Walk, Stand, and The Release of the Spirit — much of it transcribed from his spoken messages by others. His theme was steady: the Christian life is not a man trying harder for Christ, but Christ living in the man, and the way in is the cross applied to the self. The movement that grew around him was called the Little Flock by outsiders; its members simply said "the church in" whatever city they were in. By the late 1940s there were hundreds of assemblies across China. Nee also trained workers and sent them out to plant. For a period he ran a pharmaceutical business whose profits supported the work — a decision some fellow believers criticized sharply, and one that cost him fellowship for a time. Then the door closed. After the Communist takeover in 1949, foreign missionaries left and Chinese Christians were pressed into the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement. Nee would not go in. He was arrested in Shanghai in April 1952. In 1956 he was tried, denounced in a mass campaign, and sentenced to fifteen years. He never came out. When the sentence expired in 1967 he was kept in custody. He was held at a labor farm in Anhui province. His wife, Charity Chang, died in 1971 after years of harassment. Nee died on June 1, 1972, alone. A relative who collected his few belongings was handed a scrap of paper found under his pillow, written in his shaking hand. It said, in substance: Christ is the Son of God who died for the redemption of sinners and was resurrected after three days. This is the greatest truth in the universe. I die because of my belief in Christ. He had spent twenty years in prison for a church that would not register, and the house churches he helped shape outlived every man who jailed him. Sources: Angus Kinnear, Against the Tide: The Story of Watchman Nee; Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life and Sit, Walk, Stand; Leslie Lyall, Three of China's Mighty Men; Tony Lambert, China's Christian Millions.