The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Watchman Nee
1903–1972Chinese
The Chinese teacher and church planter whose writings shaped the house churches, and who died in a labor camp after twenty years' imprisonment for refusing state control of the church.
Summary
- Lived 1903–1972, Chinese.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
- Hangs on The Martyrs.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived7 moments · 1930–today
- May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
- October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
- 1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
- 1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
- 1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
- July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Watchman Nee at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.
Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Left safety in America to go home to Hitler's Germany, and was hanged days before the camp was liberated.