Dan Ho-bang looked astonished. “You would teach our women the way?” he asked.
“Yes,” Lottie replied, “but I do not teach the men and the women in the same room. It would not be proper.”
Dan Ho-bang’s wife, Peling, spoke up. “I could weave a screen out of cornstalks,” she volunteered, pouring more tea for Lottie.
“Thank you,” Lottie said. “Tell anyone who wants to hear that I will explain the Jesus way tonight.”
Lottie spent the rest of the day preparing for the meeting. As soon as it got dark, Peling brought out dishes filled with bean oil. She floated wicks in the dishes to make candles. Dan Ho-bang brought the screen inside and positioned it across the room, and Lottie hung up her hymn banner. Soon everything was ready. All they needed now were the people.
Soon people began to stream into the house until there was barely enough room to sit. The men were on one side on the k’ang, the women and children were on the other side sitting on the dirt floor, and the screen divided the two groups. The women pushed their children to the front of the room close to Lottie, saying, “They will learn more quickly, and then they can teach us when you are gone.”
Lottie stood on the women’s side of the room and started to sing a hymn. She began with “Jesus Loves Me,” and she stopped after every line to explain its meaning. Then she invited the crowd to join in. They were very off-key, but Lottie was not worried. In fact, she was thrilled. Here was a group of people who were trying to grasp God’s love for them for the very first time.
Next Lottie taught the crowd a short prayer and read a passage from the Gospel of Matthew. The evening flew by, but no one wanted to go home. Long into the night the men and women shouted out questions, which Lottie did her best to answer. The crowd left the house only when Lottie was too hoarse to speak anymore.
The crowd the next night was even larger, and larger still the night after that. There was no more room in Dan Ho-bang’s house, so Lottie moved the meeting to an empty warehouse. She also sent a messenger back to Tengchow to fetch Martha Crawford, who had returned from furlough. Lottie needed help fast.
Thankfully, Martha came right away and set to work helping Lottie. Interest continued to grow in the Jesus way until twenty of the fifty families in Sha-ling were coming to hear Lottie and Martha every night and on Sunday mornings as well. There was too much work for two women to handle, so they called for Cicero Pruitt to come and help. Cicero came quickly, which relieved Lottie, as he could sit with the men and answer their questions directly.
Cicero had good news to tell Lottie. He had met a charming young Presbyterian missionary named Anna Seward, and they were going to be married early in the new year. Lottie was delighted. Once again there would be another American woman within one hundred miles of P’ingtu.
Eventually a new church in Sha-ling began to organize. Church members became distraught, however, when they learned that Lottie would be returning to Tengchow for a summer break and the Foreign Mission Board had not appointed anyone to replace her. Several of the new converts wrote letters to the board. One letter read: “I am a P’ingtu man. For more than ten years I have known of this doctrine but did not inquire into it. On having an opportunity to inquire, immediately I truly believed. I am deeply in earnest in learning, but there is no pastor here to teach. I earnestly look to the Venerable Board to send out more teachers.… The light of this mercy will shine everywhere, and gratitude will be without limit. I am looking for it as if, when the earth is dry, rain is longed for.”
Lottie herself began a desperate letter-writing campaign to the Foreign Mission Board, coining the slogan “Thirty Seed-sowers for North China” in the process.
Eventually Lottie received the news she had been waiting so long to hear. The Woman’s Missionary Union had taken up the challenge of organizing a Christmas offering. With tears in her eyes, Lottie read how Annie Armstrong, the newly elected president of the union, had handwritten one thousand letters to various Baptist women’s groups to plead for a serious consideration of the project. Annie also had sent out thirty thousand offering envelopes along with three thousand circulars outlining Lottie’s work in China. The Woman’s Missionary Union had set a goal of raising $2,000 to be used to send missionaries to China. When the money was counted, there was $3,315.26! As a result, three people—Fannie Knight and George Bostick and his wife—had been appointed and were already on their way to China. Laura Barton and Mary Thornton would be not too far behind them.
Lottie was overjoyed. At last more help was finally on the way. She eagerly awaited the arrival of the new missionaries.
Chapter 12
Persecution
It was July 1889, and Lottie was waiting anxiously in Tengchow for the arrival of her new assistant. Finally, one hot afternoon, a shentze pulled into the courtyard of the Little Crossroads, and Fannie Knight, a native of North Carolina, climbed out.
Lottie could only imagine what Fannie must be thinking as she viewed her new surroundings. China was still a dangerous mission field, and Lottie prayed that Fannie would be the kind of helper who could remain brave and joyful even while enduring difficult conditions. Soon the two of them would be headed for P’ingtu, where there was a steadily growing group of Christian converts. Lottie was convinced that eventually there would be a backlash against this group, and she and Fannie would most likely find themselves in the middle of it.
Fannie Knight was a slight young woman, though not as short as Lottie, with dark brown hair and a ready smile. Lottie liked her immediately. They stayed together in Tengchow at the Little Crossroads while Lottie helped Fannie to outfit herself in Chinese clothing and learn the basics of the Mandarin language.
Not long after Fannie came, the Bosticks arrived. And soon after them came Laura Barton. Lottie and Martha Crawford set about helping them adjust to the new world that would be their home. After two months, it was decided that Fannie would return to P’ingtu with Lottie, Laura would stay in Tengchow to help Martha, and the Bosticks would go to Hwanghsien to help Cicero Pruitt. When two of Lottie’s new converts walked all the way from P’ingtu to inquire about Lottie’s health and whereabouts, Lottie knew it was time to go “home” to help her new converts.
With the decision to return to P’ingtu, all thoughts of Lottie’s returning to the United States on furlough were put on hold, at least until Fannie had mastered the language and was able to carry on the work.
Together Lottie, Fannie, and the Bosticks traveled from Tengchow to Hwanghsien, where Cicero Pruitt greeted them. After enjoying Cicero’s hospitality for two days, Lottie and her new helper set out for P’ingtu.
When they arrived back in P’ingtu they found that six converts, two women and four men from Sha-ling, were ready to be baptized. Lottie sent for Cicero Pruitt, who baptized the new converts in a muddy pool just outside the village. From this beginning, the official Sha-ling Baptist Church was formed.
The two women who were baptized were in particular danger. They were both single and soon to be married. Marriage posed a special problem for Christian women because a new bride was expected to worship her husband’s ancestors either at their graves or beside stone tablets with the ancestors’ names engraved on them. Of course, a Christian could not worship dead people, and this refusal normally made the husband and his entire family very angry. They took it as the worst sign of disrespect.
For one of the women there was a happy ending to the marriage. The bride explained to her husband that she now believed in the foreign God, and the man and his mother accepted this new circumstance and did not force her into ancestral worship. Lottie spent a lot of time with the woman before the wedding and supplied her with Christian books to share with her husband. The woman continued to be a strong Christian all her life.
The second young bride was not so fortunate. Her mother-in-law taunted her mercilessly, first verbally and then physically. Eventually the mother-in-law became so angry with her daughter-in-law that she killed her. Lottie was saddened but not surprised. She began to prepare the group of new converts for more persecution.
It was not only women who were hated for their new religion. In Sha-ling there was an old man by the name of Li-Qin, who had been attracted to Christianity by the lively singing. After attending several of Lottie’s meetings, Li-Qin had become convinced that she was speaking the truth of the heavenly way. He stood up at the meeting and told everyone he wanted to become a Christian. It was then that his troubles began. Even though he was a man, he wanted to learn directly from Lottie, so he came privately to her house to talk. Lottie gave him a New Testament, which he treasured, even though he could not read a word of it. When he brought the New Testament home, his sons were very angry. They tried to take the book from their father, but he would not part with it. They hit him, spat on him, and locked him away in the storage room, but still he sang happily of the God who loved him.
This treatment of Li-Qin went on for several weeks, but whenever he had the opportunity, Li-Qin would escape and find Lottie. She encouraged him to endure persecution, assuring him that God could bring good out of any situation. This was not easy advice for Lottie to give. She was an American citizen, and China had signed treaty rights protecting not only American missionaries but also any Chinese person who became a Christian. The treaty stated that these Chinese Christians could not be persecuted or harmed for their decision to convert and that they had the right to protection. Lottie could have written a stern letter to the American consul in Chefoo requesting such protection, and indeed she seriously considered doing it. However, in the end she decided it would not be wise. The New Testament told countless stories about Christians who were persecuted for their faith, from John the Baptist, who was beheaded, to Stephen, who was stoned to death. Lottie decided it would be a mistake to call in soldiers from a powerful foreign country to force people into stopping their persecution of Christians. It would only confuse the local people and make them think that Christians used force if they did not get their way. Instead, Lottie encouraged Li-Qin to remain strong and pray for the people who were hurting him.
Soon Li-Qin reported to Lottie that his family was trying a new approach. Since he could not read, they had commissioned the family’s Confucianist scholar and Li-Qin’s nephew, Li Show-ting, to read the New Testament aloud to him. They were sure that this would show Li-Qin how foolish his new beliefs were and he would soon return to worshiping the family’s ancestors.
Li Show-ting set out to mock the teachings of Jesus with great gusto. He could hardly wait to point out all the mistakes and inconsistencies to his old uncle. However, Li Show-ting was in for a surprise. As he read aloud, he was held spellbound by what he read. It made so much sense to him, much more sense than anything he had heard from his Confucianist teacher. When he had finished reading to his uncle, Li Show-ting read on into the night alone.
By the next morning, Li Show-ting was standing in Lottie’s house asking her to explain what he had read. Lottie, of course, was delighted, and the more she talked to him, the more delighted she became. She could tell he was a brilliant young man who had been jolted into sincerely searching for the truth. Lottie explained what she could, but she was conscious of the fact that she was talking to a man. When Li Show-ting returned to her house day after day, she called for Cicero Pruitt to come and help her.
Before long, Li Show-ting was convinced he wanted to become a Christian like his uncle. He was baptized and welcomed into the stunned Sha-ling Baptist Church. Although Li-Qin had endured much pain and insult, the entire congregation could see the good that had come from his persecution. They would have been even more stunned if they could have seen into the future. Li Show-ting would go on to become a serious Bible scholar. He would travel all over North China preaching the gospel and baptizing those who believed. In his lifetime he would baptize over ten thousand people.
