Hudson Taylor and Inland China

Today's Reading

In 1853, a twenty-one-year-old Englishman named Hudson Taylor sailed for China. He had no university degree, no denominational support, and no guaranteed income. He had only a burning conviction that the millions of Chinese in the interior provinces — unreached by any missionary — needed the gospel, and that God would provide for those who went.

What Taylor found in China broke his heart. The existing missionary work was concentrated in the treaty ports along the coast — comfortable enclaves where Westerners lived in European-style houses and wore European clothing. The vast interior of China, with its hundreds of millions of people, was virtually untouched.

Taylor made a radical decision. He adopted Chinese dress, grew a queue (the traditional hairstyle), learned Mandarin, and moved inland. He was mocked by other missionaries and viewed with suspicion by the Chinese. He endured illness, poverty, the death of several of his children, and a nervous breakdown.

Biblical Connection

The compassion that drove Taylor was the same compassion that drove Jesus. "When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest'" (Matthew 9:36–38). Taylor read these words and took them personally. The crowds of inland China were the sheep without a shepherd.

Paul knew the cost of such a calling: "Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked... in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches" (2 Corinthians 11:24–28). Taylor's sufferings were not Pauline in degree, but they were Pauline in kind — the cost of taking the gospel where it had not yet gone.

Going Deeper

In 1865, Taylor founded the China Inland Mission (CIM) on principles that were revolutionary for the time. The mission would have no guaranteed salaries. Missionaries would never directly solicit funds — they would pray, and trust God to provide. They would adopt local dress and customs. They would work in the interior, not the coast. And they would accept missionaries from any denomination.

Taylor's motto was simple: "God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply" (Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret, Chapter 18).

By the time of Taylor's death in 1905, the CIM had grown to over 800 missionaries, working in every province of China. More than that, Taylor had established a model of missionary work that influenced every subsequent generation: identification with the people you serve, dependence on God rather than institutions, and willingness to go where no one else will go.

In his final years, broken in health but unbroken in faith, Taylor said: "When I cannot read, when I cannot think, when I cannot even pray, I can trust" (Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret, Chapter 25). That trust — not in strategy or resources but in the character of God — was the foundation on which the entire mission rested.