Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission
Faith missions begin
Hudson Taylor is sitting on a beach at Brighton on Sunday, June 25, 1865, having just left a church service he could not continue attending.
He has been a missionary in China. He has returned to England broken in health and is watching China — a nation of four hundred million people, he calculates, with almost no Christian missionaries in its interior provinces — from a distance. The weight of it is destroying him.
At Brighton he makes a decision. He opens his Bible to the margin and writes: Prayed for twenty-four willing skillful laborers at Brighton, June 25, 1865.
The China Inland Mission is born on a beach in a Bible margin.
Taylor's approach is radical for the era: he will not take a salary, will not appeal for funds publicly, will trust God directly for provision, will recruit missionaries regardless of denomination, will require them to dress and live as Chinese people rather than as European colonists.
The last point is most controversial. Taylor wears Chinese clothes, speaks Chinese, travels by Chinese methods. He argues that the gospel does not require Western civilization as a precondition and that missionaries who bring both simultaneously confuse the package.
Over the next forty years the China Inland Mission sends over eight hundred missionaries. Taylor himself makes eleven trips to China. He dies in China in 1905.
The twenty-four he prayed for on the beach became eight hundred.
“God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply.”
— J. Hudson Taylor, c. 19th century
“My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.”
Taylor prayed for twenty-four and got eight hundred. He opened his Bible on a beach and wrote a prayer in the margin, and an organization was born that would send eight hundred missionaries and eventually plant thousands of churches.
God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply. This is not a prosperity formula. It is a description of the relationship between obedience and provision — the recognition that God does not commission work and then abandon the worker.
Taylor trusted this on a beach with nothing but a prayer in a margin. The trust was not naive. He had been to China. He had seen what the work cost. He trusted anyway.
What has God commissioned in your life that you have not yet trusted him to supply? And what would it mean to write the prayer in the margin and go?