Page 184 - Three Score Years & Ten
P. 184
“THREE SCORE YEARS AND TEN” MISSIONARY WORK IN CHINA
Amy Moore
verandah and into quite a good sized garden with flowers, vegetables and fruit trees all growing.
Upstairs were three rooms, a large size bedroom over each of the downstairs rooms, and in between
a much smaller room which later we used as a children’s room. The kitchen was another room
altogether across to the right of the front entrance to our house, and marked by a large size water
‘gang’ (jar or container) outside its door.
Our garden was not the end of the compound for we found that by going through a gate at the end of
the garden, we came into the school compound where for a number of years, a girls’ school had been
run by Miss Crystall with the help of Mrs. Chun who was now the headmistress. The girls appeared to
be orphans who had nobody responsible for them and whom the Church had rescued and placed in
the school. Support for the elder (who acted as Pastor), the gatekeeper, the Biblewoman Mrs. Hu, a
bookseller and the schoolmistress, as well as board for the schoolgirls, was all being paid by the
Mission. While we were in Shanghai we had been urged in interviews with the Directors to help the
Church to independence, so that within the next ten years they would become self supporting, self
governing and self propagating. Percy had the unenviable task of telling them that the Mission would
be gradually withdrawing support, and that the Church must gradually increase theirs for the workers
they wanted to go on employing. Not only that, but because it had been discovered that many of the
school girls were not orphans at all and had family who could support them, we would not continue to
pay for the school! The result was that parents who had been letting the Mission pay for the education
of their girls for many years, withdrew them altogether. The rest continued to be supported by the
decreasing Mission allowance, but because most of them were senior girls, we gradually found work
for them in Christian families or married them to Christian boys who were very glad to find girls who
had been given a good education and were also trained in household skills. I employed two of them
myself to help in the house, and they became close friends who later married Church boys and were
always available to go visiting with me or to help in meetings.
But all that was still in the future, and in the beginning I heard grumbles from Mrs. Chun who had
become my teacher, that these young missionaries didn’t have the ‘heart of love’ that the old ones, like
Miss Crystall had, whom she adored. We pressed on however, and the Church took its first real steps
to independence when Percy talked them into running the next Church Conference without asking for
help from the Mission. They were sure they couldn’t, as sometimes several hundreds of country
people came in for the best part of a week to live on the compound and join joyfully in the meetings.
Percy suggested they each bring what they could afford, whether it was wood for firing, or rice, or
vegetables or whatever, and all pool it to see how they got on. At the end of the week everybody had
been fed and they were really excited to find they had done it. That got them going, and by the time
we left Xixiang, some nine years later, they were completely independent and proud of it. When we all
had to leave China in 1951, and a communist government took over, our CIM Churches in Shaanxi
were all independent of western resources.
We settled in happily to our first home together, arranged the Mission furniture as we liked it, got out
our few pictures and put them up, my gum tree picture given to me by Uncle Percy to remind me of
happy times camping with him and Auntie Elsie at Mandurah, photos of both our families, and
anything else which made it our home. I felt that my early dreams of my own home with my own
husband and children were really coming true. It only needed the children now to complete our
happiness.
We both had language study to do still, so each day had to give time to that, but we gradually began to
fit into a pattern of work with the Church. Percy, who from the beginning had more understanding of
the language and the people than the rest of us new workers, gradually became involved in a very
acceptable Bible teaching ministry in many of the little country Churches and outstations which had no
184
Amy Moore
verandah and into quite a good sized garden with flowers, vegetables and fruit trees all growing.
Upstairs were three rooms, a large size bedroom over each of the downstairs rooms, and in between
a much smaller room which later we used as a children’s room. The kitchen was another room
altogether across to the right of the front entrance to our house, and marked by a large size water
‘gang’ (jar or container) outside its door.
Our garden was not the end of the compound for we found that by going through a gate at the end of
the garden, we came into the school compound where for a number of years, a girls’ school had been
run by Miss Crystall with the help of Mrs. Chun who was now the headmistress. The girls appeared to
be orphans who had nobody responsible for them and whom the Church had rescued and placed in
the school. Support for the elder (who acted as Pastor), the gatekeeper, the Biblewoman Mrs. Hu, a
bookseller and the schoolmistress, as well as board for the schoolgirls, was all being paid by the
Mission. While we were in Shanghai we had been urged in interviews with the Directors to help the
Church to independence, so that within the next ten years they would become self supporting, self
governing and self propagating. Percy had the unenviable task of telling them that the Mission would
be gradually withdrawing support, and that the Church must gradually increase theirs for the workers
they wanted to go on employing. Not only that, but because it had been discovered that many of the
school girls were not orphans at all and had family who could support them, we would not continue to
pay for the school! The result was that parents who had been letting the Mission pay for the education
of their girls for many years, withdrew them altogether. The rest continued to be supported by the
decreasing Mission allowance, but because most of them were senior girls, we gradually found work
for them in Christian families or married them to Christian boys who were very glad to find girls who
had been given a good education and were also trained in household skills. I employed two of them
myself to help in the house, and they became close friends who later married Church boys and were
always available to go visiting with me or to help in meetings.
But all that was still in the future, and in the beginning I heard grumbles from Mrs. Chun who had
become my teacher, that these young missionaries didn’t have the ‘heart of love’ that the old ones, like
Miss Crystall had, whom she adored. We pressed on however, and the Church took its first real steps
to independence when Percy talked them into running the next Church Conference without asking for
help from the Mission. They were sure they couldn’t, as sometimes several hundreds of country
people came in for the best part of a week to live on the compound and join joyfully in the meetings.
Percy suggested they each bring what they could afford, whether it was wood for firing, or rice, or
vegetables or whatever, and all pool it to see how they got on. At the end of the week everybody had
been fed and they were really excited to find they had done it. That got them going, and by the time
we left Xixiang, some nine years later, they were completely independent and proud of it. When we all
had to leave China in 1951, and a communist government took over, our CIM Churches in Shaanxi
were all independent of western resources.
We settled in happily to our first home together, arranged the Mission furniture as we liked it, got out
our few pictures and put them up, my gum tree picture given to me by Uncle Percy to remind me of
happy times camping with him and Auntie Elsie at Mandurah, photos of both our families, and
anything else which made it our home. I felt that my early dreams of my own home with my own
husband and children were really coming true. It only needed the children now to complete our
happiness.
We both had language study to do still, so each day had to give time to that, but we gradually began to
fit into a pattern of work with the Church. Percy, who from the beginning had more understanding of
the language and the people than the rest of us new workers, gradually became involved in a very
acceptable Bible teaching ministry in many of the little country Churches and outstations which had no
184
