Friday 12 June, 2009

World
UK
Politics

Hudson Taylor, circa 1885

By Charles Gardner

The record 16% poll for the far-right British National Party in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, is a sad reflection of how the British public in general has turned in on itself.

Where now is the concern for the alien demanded by the Scriptures and which led one of Barnsley’s most famous sons, James Hudson Taylor, to found the China Inland Mission?

Taylor (1832-1905) spent over half-a-century in China and the society he began was responsible for bringing over 800 missionaries to the country. They established 125 schools and more than 300 centres – no other missionary since the Apostle Paul has had a wider vision and carried out a more systematic plan of evangelisation on such a broad geographical scale than Hudson Taylor.

Today the estimated number of Christians in China is around 100 million – almost twice the population of Britain – and much of this is due to the work of this extraordinary man from Barnsley.

The root problem of our society, which has seen so many including Christians vote BNP, is that we have become pre-occupied with our own concerns – selfish and insecure, and without God. And when things get tight, we turn on foreigners and others whose faces we consider do not fit, and they become useful scapegoats.

But Jesus taught us to love our neighbour and, when asked who our neighbour was, told the parable of the Good Samaritan who bound up the wounds of someone of another race while those who should have helped walked by on the other side of the road. Christians who vote BNP should beware lest, after Asians and other more obvious incomers, they become the next target for bigotry.

Yes, our leaders have been foolish in allowing immigrants to flood a once Christian nation with foreign gods and an alien culture. But we should have reached out to them with welcoming arms of love, which would have made the idea of their adopting our way of life much more attractive.

There were once two ladies in Hockley, Birmingham – Miss Reeve and Miss Fisher – who were hoping to go to India as missionaries, but prevented from doing so by the outbreak of World War II. However, their prayers were answered when, shortly after the war, India came to them through immigration and they duly built up a huge Sunday School movement among Asian children – at one time 800-strong – out of which grew a very lively and successful Pentecostal congregation.

We need to see the aliens among us as opportunities to show love, not as threats or burdens.

Ironically, with so many immigrants let into the country without too many questions being asked, the very country that ‘exported’ the Word of God to the rest of the world now goes out of its way to block it! For prominent Christian musician Don Francisco and a team of college-age missionaries were recently deported from Britain under new immigration rules that require religious workers to be sponsored by a licensed organisation and obtain visas to enter the country. This is all part of the mounting fierce opposition to Christianity in the UK today.

Africa is another place where British missionaries – David Livingstone being the most famous – have lived and died for the cause of Christ. Robert Moffat (1795-1883) translated the entire Bible – as well as Pilgrims Progress – into Setswana, the language of Botswana. Today millions upon millions in that once ‘dark continent’ are true disciples of Christ, and many are returning the favour granted their ancestors by bringing the gospel back to this country.

Among them is Angus Buchan, a farmer/preacher from KwaZulu-Natal of Scottish ancestry who is visiting the UK this weekend to lead a conference of men called Father and Sons on a Worcestershire farm. Part of a phenomenal revival of Christianity in South Africa, Buchan recently addressed a staggering 200,000 campers at the annual Mighty Men’s Conference on his Natal farm.

And in a stirring pre-conference message, his prayer coordinator Leon Vermeulen reminded supporters about great saints of the past both in the UK and South Africa. Among them was Andrew Murray (1828-1917), the most famous Christian figure in the history of South Africa who I am proud to say has a close connection with my family. His devotional writings still come off the presses – his 240 books have been translated into numerous languages and he was greatly used in the South African revival of 1860. He was the second child of Rev Andrew Murray Snr (1794-1866), a father figure of the South African branch of the Dutch Reformed Church who came out from Scotland in 1822 at the request of the scattered Afrikaners, having learnt their language in Holland – the DRC’s reformed theology hardly differed from that of many Scots.

My great-grandfather (also Charles) had the privilege of being brought up in the Murray parsonage after being tragically orphaned in the veldt following the murder of his father. He and his siblings were picked up by passing Afrikaners, who distributed them among Christian families in the Eastern Cape town of Graaff-Reinet. The children had been loaded onto an ox-wagon for a journey to Port Elizabeth to catch the boat for a return to Scotland because their father James, who had come out to the Cape to defend the new English settlers during the so-called Frontier Wars, had had enough of the hardships of the conditions which had already claimed two of his wives. But with his tragic death (the motive was presumably theft), James’s children were left to wander the veldt until compassionate Christians passed by.

The Gardner’s were English-speaking, but the Christian Afrikaners only saw wounded people who needed help. The Apostle James said: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress…”

So I say again, as with the Good Samaritan parable, we need to see the aliens among us as opportunities to show love, not as threats or burdens.

Photo: Public Domain