John Sung (1901-1944) deserves to be better known, especially as historians realize evangelicalism’s influence extends well beyond the West.
Sung was born in the Fujian province of China to parents who converted from Buddhism to Christianity shortly before his birth. While still a child, Sung, worked alongside his father, who had become a Methodist pastor. The youngster distributed tracts and preached occasionally, earning the nickname “little pastor.” After graduating from high school, a wealthy benefactor offered to pay for his education at Ohio Wesleyan University. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, he moved on to the Ohio State University (Columbus) where he received the Ph.D. in chemistry in 1926.
Though he had opportunities to teach in the sciences, Sung decided to prepare for the ministry. Following a friend’s advice, he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Founded in the mid-nineteenth century, Union had by 1926 become the flagship seminary of liberal Christianity. Liberalism, sometimes called modernism, rejected notions like the verbal inspiration of the Bible and generally attempted to divest Christianity of any traces of the supernatural. Miracles, even the resurrection of Christ, were considered myths or fictional tales intended to support a moral lesson, such as the virtue of self-sacrifice. When Sung asked his friend to recommend a seminary, Union may have been mentioned due to its notoriety. Whatever prompted him to attend Union, it was a life-altering experience.
Recall that during these years many who embraced Christian orthodoxy and believed the Bible to be God-inspired were still reeling from the humiliation of the Scopes trial (1925), where conservative faith was held up to scorn as newspapers and radio reports told of rural bumpkins and conservative pundits attempting to challenge evolution. Those who continued to hold onto orthodoxy became the targets of acerbic journalists such as H. L. Mencken. In response, some Christians retreated into a sub-culture that distrusted higher education. Pastors warned their members not to allow their children to attend secular universities such as Ohio State. While orthodox seminaries existed, the level of distrust among Bible-believing Christians toward all graduate schools was so widespread, it’s likely many Christians Sung encountered would have had no idea how to advise the young scholar. (It would be two decades before evangelical scholars would establish schools where hard scholarship would challenge the claims of liberalism.)
In the liberal atmosphere of Union Seminary, Sung began to question his faith. Union professors told him the Bible was just another religious text, not God’s special revelation; they told him evangelism and conversion were unnecessary. The work of indigenous pastors like Sung’s father and of the missionaries scattered throughout China was considered presumptuous, unless their goal was simply to improve the material lot of people.
Disillusioned, Sung considered returning to his mother’s Buddhism and even began chanting Buddhist prayers. This, though his Chinese name Zhu En meant “God’s grace” and was given because he was the first child born after his mother’s conversion to Christianity. Of this period he would say, “My soul wandered in a wilderness. I could neither sleep nor eat. My faith was like a leaking, storm-driven ship without captain or compass. My heart was filled with the deepest unhappiness.”
Then Sung accepted an invitation to Calvary Baptist Church where he expected to hear a visiting scholar. Instead, he heard Uldine Utley (1909-1995). Utley was a young girl from Oklahoma who preached her first sermon at age eleven. Her preaching possessed such maturity that some of the most highly regarded American fundamentalists endorsed her ministry. John Roach Straton, regarded by some as “the Baptist pope,” was the pastor at Calvary Baptist. After hearing her at a Bible conference in Florida, Stratton invited her to preach at Calvary.
Ruth Tucker describes the impact hearing the fifteen-year-old evangelist had on the young seminarian.
“Like he had been, she was a ‘little preacher,’ and he was captivated by her message. He returned the following four nights to hear her, vowing that he would pray until God gave him the same power to preach that this girl had. His life was transformed, and in the weeks and months that followed, he spent his time reading the Bible and Christian biographies and testifying of his newly reclaimed faith. When he was given a gift of a globe by a stranger, he took is a sign from God that he would one day preach the gospel around the world. Instead of chanting Buddhist scriptures, he began singing hymns as he walked the halls of the seminary—behavior that was viewed by some of the seminary officials as a sign of mental instability.”
Tucker tells how seminary officials ordered Sung to undergo psychological testing and he was hospitalized for several months. The liberal disdain for heart-felt Christianity ran deep. Yet, during this period of hospitalization, Sung read through the Bible forty times. This, too, would be a life-altering exercise.
In 1927, Sung returned to China and began an evangelistic ministry. While he did not preach around the world, he did preach throughout China and Southeast Asia. Before his death from cancer and tuberculosis in 1944, he led fruitful revivals in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore. During a crusade in Java, Chinese merchants closed their shops so their workers could attend his meetings. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were still church leaders in Southeast Asia whose conversions occurred under his ministry. Because of his success and the strategy of never leaving an area without organizing the Christians into evangelistic bands, one biographer stated, “his ministry can rightly be described as apostolic, and he was possibly the most effective evangelist of the 20th century.” Irene Tay’s evaluation of Sung’s ministry agrees: “Sung is one of the greatest evangelists of the modern period of church history.”
Doubtless, Sung’s faith might have been rekindled through his own reading and reflection or through the ministry of evangelical scholars he could have heard in the New York area. Doubtless, he could have gone on to his powerful ministry without ever attending New York’s Calvary Baptist Church. But it happened as it happened. While Sung’s name is known to millions of Asian Christians (though not to as many Americans), the turning point in his pilgrimage came through the ministry of a teenage girl from Oklahoma whose name is also unknown to most Americans.
If ever events should tempt us to invoke the notion of God’s providence, certainly the story of John Sung’s return to faith qualifies. Here we have a young man who came half-way around the world to be trained as a scientist, a man who could have had a quiet life as an academic away from the poverty of his homeland, a nation where political turmoil was becoming a constant reality, but who instead chose to become a minister of the gospel. And in him, we have an ardent young Christian who sought to deepen his knowledge of God’s Word so he might more effectively preach that gospel, but who instead had his faith in that Word eroded by purveyors of doubt. Here we have a young scholar who heads off to what he believes will be a lecture from another scholar only to find himself listening to a young girl from Oklahoma, a girl who had not yet graduated from high school, a girl likely to have been unfamiliar with the periodic table and certainly unable to parse a Greek verb, a girl who never imagined her preaching might impact nations she would never visit. And do not forget this girl was invited to speak by a fundamentalist pastor who defied his fellow fundamentalists by allowing a woman to speak from his pulpit, a pastor who became an articulate defender of women preachers. The girl from Oklahoma and the precedent-defying pastor created the circumstance that would put John Sung back on the road to faith and to a powerful ministry.
You and I never know how our efforts to serve God’s Kingdom may impact people. And, by God’s grace, we don’t have to be speaking from a prestigious pulpit to make that impact.
For further reading:
Irene Tay, et al, “John Sung,” A Dictionary of Asian Christianity, S. W. Sunquist, ed. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2001.
Ruth A. Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions (second edition), Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984,2004..
Hwa Yung, “Sung Revivals in Southeast Asia,” A Dictionary of Asian Christianity, S. BIBLICAL. Sunquist, ed. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2001, p. 808.
