Hero in the Cesspool
China’s Chen Min Lin
by Carl Richardson
Like an enormous sleeping dragon, the Great Wall of China stretches over fifteen hundred miles from Mongolia in the west to the Yellow Sea in the east. From 12 to 40 feet wide – 20 to 50 feet high – the Great Wall is a monument to the fortress mentality of the people who built it 23 centuries ago.
There are one billion three hundred million Chinese; amazingly, over 900 million are under 35 years of age.
To gain some perspective on how vast a population lives inside mainland China, consider these astonishing facts:
* If one billion three hundred million people joined hands, they would circle the entire world twenty-nine times.
* It would take ninety-three years for that many people to pass through a single gate.
* If that many people were to stand three abreast in a pyramid fashion and stand on each other’s shoulders, they would reach past the moon.
After seizing power in 1949, Chairman Mao Tse Tung and his “gang of four” established a regime of absolute authority and seemed to take sadistic pleasure in targeting one group of people. Their crimes? Believing in God – refusing to renounce their faith as Christians – often at the cost of their own lives.
The only testimony China’s communist leaders wanted to hear stated was that Mao was “Savior”. The only “Bible” they wanted the people to read was Chairman Mao’s red book of communist propaganda.
Born in Shanghai and reared in this hard-line communist culture, Chen Min Lin eventually discovered a real Savior and a genuine book of truth. He was converted at age 19 and called as a pastor-evangelist. Chen recognized that China’s spiritual harvest was vast, and ripe, and white already unto harvest.
While pastoring three small rural house-churches, he was arrested and imprisoned for his third time in 1968 for the so-called “crime” of preaching the gospel. This time, he suffered in the squalid Chinese prisons for 18 years.
While languishing in prison, his wife died and his young son was killed, but his Chinese communist captors cruelly withheld the news from Pastor Chen.
The prison conditions were unspeakably horrid. And though he suffered, he certainly did not suffer alone. The communist government put ALL Christian ministers in prison in a brutal effort to choke off the rapidly growing Christian population, whom they saw as a threat to their power.
It was there in the Chinese prisons that he learned what true greatness is all about, he told me, as he watched his Christian brothers die one by one on racks in torture chambers. At times, he says, he also longed to die. He even prayed to die. But he was sustained and encouraged by the Christian martyrs in Chinese prisons – martyrs whom he called friends.
People don’t usually look for heroes in Chinese prisons.
But there are many heroes who emerged out of the pain, the squalor, the anonymity of these cruel cages.
As the years in the torturous Chinese prison slowly passed, Pastor Chen received an ominous assignment from his Chinese prison guards – to work in the prison camp’s cesspool. In those days, it was tantamount to a death sentence. He took precautions by coating his socks in rosin, resistant to the infectious water. And he prayed often for God’s protection of his life.
His first day in the cesspool was a nightmare.
“The stench was almost unbearable,” he says, “and I thought I would die before that first day ever ended.”
But the sickening stench that was so reprehensible to Pastor Chen was just as reprehensible to the Chinese prison guards.
As he went to his job of working in the cesspool on that second morning,
he noticed something that had escaped his attention the previous day; he was
completely alone. That had never happened in the crowded prison camp.
As he realized he had been given the blessing of solitude, he began to sing – softly at first. But then he realized this was something he had never been able to do since he was first thrown into prison many years earlier. He sang louder and louder and began to worship. As tears flowed, he found himself singing an old hymn he learned as a young convert years earlier in Shanghai. He found special and very personal meaning in the words of that old song.
I can almost hear him, as he worked alone in that putrid cesspool, singing unto the Lord, intermittently in English and Mandarin.
I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me;
And He tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share, as we tarry there.
None other has ever known.
When he finished singing each verse and chorus, he says that right there in that festering, rancid cesspool, he seemed to smell the fragrant aroma of the Rose of Sharon.
There, he says, in that awful darkness, he seemed to see the dazzling splendor of the Bright and Morning Star.
There, in that cesspool, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, the Holy Spirit transformed that dark cesspool of death into a beautiful garden of life and light.
Finally, after eighteen long years, Chen Min Lin was released from the Chinese prison camp.
Immediately upon his release from prison, Pastor Chen sent word to the small villages near Shanghai where he had pastored three small house- churches 18 years earlier, that he was coming home – at last.
He couldn’t help but wonder, after the Cultural Revolution in China in the late sixties and early seventies, if there would be ANY Christians at all who remained in those villages and who would be there to meet his train.
After three days and nights of exhausting travel, he arrived at the train station and was joyously reunited with a few of the people from his three small house-church congregations.
It was 5:30 a.m. when they left the train station so that the Christian elders of the three small house-churches could present Pastor Chen to his flock – now assembled in a secluded area just outside of town. To his utter astonishment, Pastor Chen was greeted by more than 5,000 born-again Christians who had gathered to welcome him home.
“How? – uh – What? – uh – Who? – uh ....” Words failed Pastor Chen as he tried vainly to express his feelings. And his questions.
Mercifully – finally – words came.
“When I went to prison we had only 100 Christians in three small house- churches. Now, there are thousands! How did this happen? Who did this miraculous work? Who taught all these people? Who was their pastor?”
Chen Min Lin, AKA George Chen
“The Holy Ghost was our pastor and teacher, Pastor Chen,” the three church elders answered earnestly.
It was then that Pastor Chen covered his face with his hands, slowly sank to his knees, and repented that he had not fully trusted the keeping power and the teaching power of the Holy Spirit. Unashamedly, he wept openly.
The assembled thousands joined with him in a period of spontaneous and prolonged weeping and worshipping.
The colding dawn of that early November morning was suddenly warmed by the Presence of the Holy Spirit upon those 5,000 responsive Chinese believers.
Hail to the hero in the cesspool of that Chinese prison camp.
Hail to Chen Min Lin, now known as Pastor George Chen, who is still very much involved in ministry by
planting new house-churches throughout his beloved China, in overseeing the
construction of new ministry training center churches, new schools, new medical
clinics, and in the distribution of thousands of Chinese-language Bibles to some
of the millions of Chinese Christians who have never before owned their own
Bible – until now.
Pastor Chen and thousands of others like him in China are examples OF the believer, and examples TO the believers.
For you and me, the implications are clear. If Pastor Chen and others are willing to do all that they are doing for the Lord under such adversity, shouldn’t you and I be willing to do more than we are doing?
To these saints of sacrifice, at the judgment of rewards Jesus will say, “Well done, good and faithful servants. Enter in to the joys of your Lord.”
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Hero in the Cesspool To support George Chen and other frontline ministers around the world, click here or write to: Beyond Borders, PO Box 1000 |