It was my very first training seminar with Langham Preaching. April 2009. We were based at the OMF Guest House in Chiangmai, Thailand. As I wandered the property, I came across this striking quotation on one of the walls:

So striking, in fact, that I stopped to take its photo!

But is it really true? Is this what the Lord requires of us?

In a world oriented towards leaving a legacy, living to be forgotten appears odd. In a celebrity culture, and with social media platforms helping us accumulate ‘likes’ and ‘followers’, it sounds downright silly. To be honest, at times I have wondered whether, taken on its own, ‘live so that you will be forgotten’ is an accurate reflection of the flow of Scripture. It would make a great proposition for a formal debate! However, when the sentence is finished—’and Christ will be remembered’—the debate is settled for me. That makes sense.

Anyhow, in the years that followed, this sentence would not let me go. I tracked down three little booklets and devoured them. The more I learned about him, the more I liked this guy Dixon Hoste. His leadership and spirituality was shifting from being inspirational to becoming truly aspirational for me.

Some months after that trip to Chiangmai in 2009, I started travelling to Hong Kong for seminars. Here began my friendship with Patrick Fung, one of the trainers and the author of that first booklet. He was a successor to Hoste as General Director of the OMF, formerly known as the China Inland Mission (CIM).

As the years passed by and we continued to work together, it was no great surprise to hear that Patrick had completed a PhD, during the pandemic, on Hoste. I got my hands on the book as soon as possible and read it on a trip to Phoenix earlier this month, at which Patrick was one of the speakers.

So, who is Dixon Hoste, I hear you ask?

He followed Hudson Taylor as the leader of the China Inland Mission. Like, Taylor, he served in the role for 35 years. Hoste had been converted under DL Moody’s ministry and, as part of the so-called Cambridge Seven (and the one to live the longest), he responded to God’s call to go to China. He stepped into the leadership role against the backdrop of the Boxer Uprising, during which 58 CIM missionaries and 21 children were killed.

Fascinatingly, especially when thinking of this sentence with which he is identified, it appears that he never kept a diary. So he did kinda live to be forgotten—while also making it more difficult for researchers to tell his story! But Patrick has done so well, with such a readable PhD…

While Hoste may have lived to be forgotten, there are things that I want to remember about his life.

A Quiet Character

Patrick describes Hoste as “a quiet character” (3), with a “low-key posture” (22, 192); an “unassuming” (59) way; a “gentle character and submissive manner” (184); and as “the quietest and shyest of the Cambridge Seven, (preferring) to remain in the background” (188). He did not stand out. Just read what his pastor wrote, when Hoste applied to CIM (taken from the first booklet, p15):

Not exactly standing out as a transformational leader, is he?

Years ago, I remember another of Hoste’s successors, JO Sanders, writing about the ‘reluctant leader’. I wonder if Hoste was on his mind? I wonder, too, if this feature in Hoste’s character shaped some of the convictions he expresses in those booklets. For example, the importance of reading peoples’ personalities, adjusting our way with each of them—and then drawing that variety into leadership and maximising the benefits of such diversity. Afterall, it is not just those with flashy charisma who are needed, as Hoste’s own story demonstrates.

A Different Leader

At just 40 years of age, Hoste was thrust into CIM’s leadership, after the leading candidate was killed in the Boxer Uprising and the one deputizing for Hudson Taylor (who was seriously ill in Switzerland at the time) was surprisingly overlooked. It is interesting that the decision on his successor was solely Hudson Taylor’s to make, a policy that Hoste was to change.

Following a founder-leader who served for 35 years will always invite comparisons.

While Taylor provided visionary leadership so that the Chinese church could be indigenous, Hoste provided executive leadership in implementing the details of these indigenous principles (118).

The shift from ‘visionary’ to ‘executive’ leadership, with a focus on implementation makes sense—and is reminiscent of the shift from church-planter to church-establisher with local church pastoral leaders. We find Hoste devoting himself to things like policy development and change management. And, as it turned out, there was plenty of visionary leadership going on. ‘The ‘Forward Movement’ succeeded in mobilizing a new generation of missionaries. ‘A Statement of Policy’, in the late 1920s, introduced “a complete reversal in the role of CIM missionaries” (129)—helping the Chinese church rather than being helped by it.

This shift in focus was accompanied by a shift in style.

Under Taylor’s leadership decision-making … was much more centralized and directive. However, during Hoste’s leadership, even though he had to make many critical decisions, his style was mostly consensual … He made every effort to seek the ‘intelligent and cordial concurrence of all those concerned’ (190-191).

A Faithful Friend

This phrase is used to describe Hoste near the beginning (24) and near the end (180) of the book. It seems appropriate as such friendship frames his life in China. It started with him being assigned to work for ten years alongside Pastor Hsi. “Hoste chose to play second fiddle to Hsi” (47). Their friendship was tested. They were different personalties. And yet, just before he died, Pastor Hsi described their friendship in this way:

We mutually help one another, without any distinction of native or foreign; because the Lord has made us one (56).

A tender moment in the book is the inclusion of Pastor Hsi’s letter to Hoste’s father when he was unwell (47-51). Patrick exegetes the letter and finds evidence of the deep friendship that had developed. It is easy to see how the convictions and character forged in this early individual friendship were writ large when Hoste became the General Director, with his “long term commitment as a faithful friend in developing the indigenous Chinese church” (180).

A Master Metaphor

The need for CIM to move from having ‘controlling-hands’ to having ‘helping-hands’ emerges often in the book. Hudson Taylor had earlier used the imagery of ‘scaffolding’ to describe the role of CIM as it awaited the emergence of the permanent ‘building’, the Chinese church.

For me, this part of the story left me wanting a wee bit more. Surely, this talk of friendship suggests one more stage in the hand-metaphor: from controlling-hands to helping-hands to joining-hands?

As it turned out, the intention behind ‘helping-hands’ becomes misunderstood. In later years, voices in the Chinese church considered that ‘helping hands’—the shift to being ‘advisors’, rather than ‘rulers’—often left them feeling that CIM had withdrawn, becoming “inexplicably” (160) and “unsympathetically aloof” (177). Chinese leaders wanted CIM to be “standing shoulder to shoulder with them rather than standing aside”(160). As a later Director was to articulate,

… what the Chinese church needed was CIM men and women who, in the warm spirit of fellowship, would stand with the Chinese believers (160).

Goodness me. ‘Shoulder to shoulder’? ‘Stand with’?

“Go on, just say it!”. Joining hands.

Maybe I feel it more keenly because I keep bumping into this theme of friendship. From the early 20th century address by India’s first bishop, VS Azariah, at the 1910 Edinburgh Conference to the early 21st century book by Mekdes Haddis, an Ethiopian immigrant to the USA, the place of friendship keeps popping up. It lies behind that mutuality and oneness expressed by Pastor Hsi before he died. Joining-hands is more than helping-hands, in a similar way to how friendship is deeper than partnership.

An Indigenous Church

So much of Hoste’s life flows into this one…

Even before he started as Director, it was his desire to see the Chinese church ‘come to the front’. The “Three Selfs”—self-supporting, self-propagating, self-governing—had been around for some decades, as a foundation for indigeneity. Hudson Taylor himself was committed to them. But there was a challenge, as there often is with those at the visionary end of the leadership spectrum. Taylor “practised the indigenous principles far more than he articulated or formulated them (95)”—and then, more widely, it is said that CIM missionaries may have been familiar with the principles, but “not many were actively practising them” (95).

“No specific strategies had been developed to achieve this goal” (92)—and this becomes Hoste’s vocation.

Hoste went beyond Taylor’s vision of the rapid evangelization of the inlands of China and grasped the importance of the urgent indigenization of the Chinese church (87).

For Hoste, it was like any living organism: “If you have a living thing, it will grow; and grow after the order of its own life” (55). This is what he nurtured. His life’s purpose was not just about Christ being remembered, but also “the Chinese church (being) remembered” (181). And in ‘coming to the front’, the Chinese church began “bearing responsibilities, and growing into leadership” (150).

In time this indigenization led on to a fuller contextualisation and the “embracing of a gospel that is for the Chinese” (146). For example, the ‘Wordless book’ so loved by the missionaries, with its various colours representing different aspects of the gospel story, needed to be contextualised. The colour red may symbolise death in that book, but “red is the symbol of good fortune in Chinese culture” (147) … !

A Sovereign God

Truth be told, that focus on ‘all-out indigenization’ in the late 1920s revealed “that both CIM and the Chinese church were not quite ready” (148) for it. It took another twenty years. Hoste, with his policies and changes, laid a foundation for what God, in his sovereignty, had in mind as a way to reach this goal: the Communist takeover. I grew up on the narrative that went something like this: ‘kick out all the missionaries and watch the church grow!’. However it was more subtle. As a CIM leader (Arnold Lea) was to write in 1951:

The CIM has been gradually coming to and more recently effecting the healthy independence of the churches. Now in a remarkable way, an atheistic government is completing this movement (as quoted on 172, emphasis mine).

It brings those exilic times to mind, with Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, doesn’t it? And even further back to Joseph at the time of the Pharoahs: “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen 50.20). As the missionaries headed for the ‘Exit’ signs, the Chinese church was coming to the front, ready to lead. It was the end point of the trajectory on which they had been travelling, but just twenty years later than planned. Hoste’s longing had become a reality, but not in a way which he had expected.

I kinda knew a bit about God’s sovereignty in this part of the story, but not in a much earlier part, back with the Boxer Uprising. During this time—with multiple missionary organisations, not just CIM—there was a massive loss of life and destruction of property. It was reasonable for these organisations to seek some ‘indemnity’ from the Chinese authorities in order to help restore what had been lost. Many chose to do so. However, under Hoste’s leadership—actually, one of his first decisions as leader—CIM decided not make a claim, nor to accept compensation, even if it was offered.

The CIM, under Hoste’s leadership, decided that whatever other foreign powers might do in this matter, it would be well for the CIM, taking a more Christlike course, to gladly suffer even the loss of all things that the gospel might not be hindered (78).

There was a huge cost, and risk, in making such a decision—as they entrusted themselves to God, in his sovereignty and providence. However there was a different attitude at work with those in the Chinese church that had suffered, for whom they worked to see compensation given. Now was the time for solidarity…

(Hoste) was convinced that the CIM was not helping the Chinese church to receive compensation because it worked under the CIM but because the Chinese church had suffered, independently, at the hands of the Boxers (87).

Oh yes, Hoste may have lived to be forgotten—but I am grateful for Patrick Fung’s book as it helps me remember Hoste and to learn from him. I trust it can be so for you as well.

nice chatting

Paul