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I would highly recommend this book as an initial text on the history of Christian missions in China, an introduction to longer and more comprehensive works. As such, it is almost a “must read” for all those interested in how God used frail and faulty human instruments to establish what has been called “the Chinese church that will not die.”
Who said history wasn’t relevant? Though at first glance a biography of a largely-discredited independent German missionary who was born almost two centuries ago might seem to have little to do with our current situation, Jessie Lutz’s masterful narrative and analysis of the life and times of Karl Gützlaff provokes the question, Has anything changed?
“In the twentieth century, for the first time, there was in the world a universal religion – the Christian religion. . . . In country after country . . . it took root, not as a foreign import, but as the Church of the countries in which it dwells,” this author powerfully proclaims. Though the term is not used, this was the period when “World Christianity” fully came into being as the major development in Christian history and, perhaps, of all human history.
Campaigning for Christ is a heartening account of high caliber missionary service during a time when Christian mission work was especially difficult. Despite the challenges they faced, the Baehrs worked tirelessly to tell the story of Christ not just in China, but also in Japan, Taiwan and the United States.
As we study Chinese history from 1800-1950, we see two main dynamics happening in relation to foreigners and foreign missions in China. On the one hand, we see foreign imperialists forcing China to sign unequal treaties and taking advantage of an obviously weakened Chinese state, unable to defend itself. With these unequal treaties, we see an opening for foreign missions organizations that come into China on the coattails of the imperialists. On the other hand, we cannot ignore all the wonderful works that the foreign missionaries accomplish, including Bible translation, setting up schools, Universities, and the start of the modern day Christian church in China.
Missionaries have been criticized for a wide variety of reasons: In China, they came in with the European gunboats, which forced open the door to trade, including the import of opium. This led to one humiliation after another, and it was hard for Chinese to distinguish missionaries from their governments.
