Builders of the Chinese Church: Pioneer Protestant Missionaries and Chinese Church Leaders (Studies in Chinese Christianity) by G. Wright Doyle

Author:G. Wright Doyle [Doyle, G. Wright]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781630878818
Publisher: Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2015-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

417. Pfister, “Rethinking Mission,” 211.

418. At the time of his death, the CIM had 828 missionaries; there were 1152 Chinese workers, 18,625 baptized Chinese Christians, 418 churches, 1424 mission stations, and 150 schools.

6

William A. P. Martin

Pioneer of Progress in China

G. Wright Doyle

“Early in the morning of April 10, 1850, we were startled by the cry of ‘Pirate! Pirate!’ from our Dutch cabin-boy; but instead of those freebooters, so dreaded in the China seas, we were boarded by a pilot, who soon brought the good ship ‘Lantao’ to anchor in the harbor of Hong Kong, after a voyage of one hundred and thirty-four days from Boston—a voyage which may now be made in one fifth of the time.”419 With that light-hearted beginning, W. A. P. Martin’s long and illustrious career as an American missionary in China commenced. When he died, he was honored both by his fellow missionaries and by scholars and officials in China for his remarkably influential sixty-six years as a “pioneer of progress” in China.420

Early Years

William Alexander Parsons Martin was born on April 10, 1827, in Livonia, Indiana, the son of an evangelical Presbyterian pastor, William Martin, whose “example of sacrificial labor to bring religious progress to Indiana’s frontier was not lost on his son, who later integrated his many activities in education, science, and diplomacy with aggressive evangelism.”421 Not only did the frontier pastor engage in the usual activities of a Christian minister, but he also promoted education, believing it essential for the total wellbeing of settlers in the expanding frontier. He taught both his children and the children of others at his home, using a broad curriculum that included both the natural sciences and biblical and religious studies.

Martin and his siblings were not unaware of happenings around the world, or of the growing American missionary enterprise. His sister went to South Africa as a missionary, and he and his brothers were named after missionaries. His names derived from his uncle William Alexander, who served in the Sandwich Islands, and Levi Parsons, a missionary to the Jews in Palestine. His own “interest in China was first awakened in 1839 by the boom of British cannon battering down her outer walls,”422 during the First Opium War, one in a series of conflicts in which western powers forced open the gates of China to commerce, diplomacy, and the spread of Christianity.

Though brought up in a disciplined and godly home, he did not experience any dramatic conversion, or at least did not refer to one in later years. Perhaps this absence of an emotional encounter with God through faith in Christ points toward his later almost total focus on intellectual apprehension of truth—and thus the necessity of education; the absence of what might be called a “devotional” tone in his writings; a very marked self-confidence; and a strong reluctance to admit that he might be wrong.

He and his brother Samuel went to Indiana University at Bloomington in 1843. By that time, the university was essentially secular in character.

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