Information on International Pilgrimages with Youth

March 4, 2003

Rev. Benjamin Broadbent

Colorado Springs, Colorado

It’s as dark as soy sauce on the top shelf of a closed cupboard. We’re riding in a small rented public bus that rattles along the partially-paved mountain road. A stream of red lanterns shows the course through the night. It drizzles constantly, like a fall day in Oregon, but this is Fujian province, just outside Shaowu City, at the start of spring. Our luggage fills the center of the bus like precious cargo in a ship’s hull. We are tired, wasted by a full day that included a one-hour flight from Shanghai to Wuyishan. It’s cold now in the bus. We lie about and twitch with the bumps in the road like fish tossed upon the beach.

Now it’s morning at the East Gate into old Shaowu City. We all read about this gate in a book about the first Congregational missionaries to Shaowu in the 1870’s. Once a small town in a rural area, it is now a city of 300,000. In 1950, the missionaries left, turning over a church, a school, farming space, and several houses to local people. The mission continued under local oversight until 1966 when the government closed churches during the Cultural Revolution. Christians began to worship openly again in 1978, the church was reopened in 1979, and in 1980, 100 members were registered. The Christian community has grown rapidly since. There are now 6000 Christians in Shaowu, 1600 belonging to the church we visited. Each Sunday, they hold three services, each attended by 1000 people.

On the front of the church, large red Chinese characters proclaim, “God loves people.” Some time spent with the people inside confirms it. We gather in a parlor around a long, dark wood table. It is so cold you can see your breath. Plates of oranges, bananas, and gargantuan grapefruit slices decorate the table. The local church folk are all smiling, overjoyed to have people come from so far to share in fellowship with them.

The church staff consists of a senior pastor, three associate pastors (all women), and a youth pastor. Someone asked them, “What do you do to reach out to people in the community and get them to come to church?” One of them replied, “Nothing. We serve the community the best way we know how. People are curious and come to see who we are and what we do.” Through their work, people are beginning to regard Christians as good people and positive contributors to the society. Christianity becomes attractive to people. As someone observed, “While in the United States, we have shepherds looking for sheep, in China there are sheep seeking a shepherd.” This is evidenced by the fact that around Shaowu there are 19 towns with 33 churches and one senior pastor among them.

The government officials were in town. We learned their presence was not to check up on the foreigners or the Christians, but to provide hospitality. It may seem hard to believe, given all our media tells us about religious intolerance in China, but there is a great deal of cooperation between government officials and religious groups. The government provides cheap land and tax breaks to churches. Why? Because they would much rather encourage religious groups who are willing to operate in the open than have cults develop. The Chinese, we have found, foster cooperation and openness with each other. Shaowu is proud of its religious diversity. It is home to a mosque and a Buddhist temple. It has also received awards for its cleanliness and its exhibition of high moral standards.

Now it’s the afternoon. The rain is starting to fall again, though it never really stopped. I’m walking along the street, trying not to get killed by the multiple forms of transportation that fill the roads. Most numerous are bicycles. People ride them while holding umbrellas. Sidewalk shops abound like booths at a county fair – seamstresses, bicycles repair, tin awnings, rice noodles, shoe boutiques, tea houses, and a large number of shops whose wares I can not decipher.

Now we are together in a courtyard. School children surround us and repeat, “Hello, hello,” smiling all the while, trying to catch the eye of the foreigner. We are bobbing in an ocean of children. Mickey Mouse and Pokemon backpacks. Waving hands. Like groups of children anywhere, there are the shy and the bold, the trusting and the unsure. Some play tag at the fringes. They are so excited, it’s as if they’ll riot and carry us down the street dancing and singing. They don’t want us to go, and yet what have we done?

Nothing, and that’s the point. On pilgrimage, we realize we do very little in life other than simply be. Life carries us along on its current and we, like leaves, bob and swirl and turn. We did nothing to deserve the welcome we received at the East Gate Church nor at the nearby schoolyard. We were simply and unavoidably ourselves and so were our hosts. To be a pilgrim is to know deeply that no person is entitled to anything. Anything we receive is free gift. God is the giver. How marvelous to be caught in God’s river.

They waited around an extra half an hour to see us. 50 or so elderly men and women (almost all women) sitting in pews at the Shaowu Church holding hymnals and singing. We recognized the first hymn. “What a friend we have in Jesus.” Indeed, what a friend he is who brings together people from different lands to share in one Life, and Abundant Life at that, empowering us through fellowship to reach out more and more to those who thirst for the Word of God, slaking our own thirst all the while.

At the old missionary house

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