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PART FOUR: From the golden light within: Ch'ëa's creative embodiment of a Chinese Christian way
In spite of the political risks in continuing his connections with the Hong Kong Chinese Christians and their foreign missionary associates, Ch'ëa returned to Hong Kong with a convert responding to his own preaching in May, 1857. To claim that Ch'ëa's arrival was unexpected is a facile understatement. Hostilities had forced many Chinese to leave Hong Kong because of Qing official threats of punishment hanging over the heads of their relatives in Guangdong and elsewhere. In addition, earlier that year in January an attempt at poisoning the expatriate community in Hong Kong through seasoning the daily bread with arsenic had been attempted, failing only because the amount of arsenic was too much, causing vomiting rather than fatalities.2 These political and terrorist realities put the colony on a state of high alert. Somehow Ch'ea and Kot A-Yuk, the new convert, passed through the opposing military lines without being stopped. And this was not the only time Ch'ea returned. Each year in the following three years he returned at least once, carrying reports that his "apostolic ministry" was influencing a larger and larger number of self-conscious converts in the district of Poklo. Adopting a pattern of “itinerant ministry” in various parts of the district, preaching and teaching from the materials he had been given in Hong Kong and sharing with his contacts in Poklo and neighbourhood villages what he had experienced in Hong Kong among Chinese Christians there, Ch'ea initiated what Legge and others considered to be a "spontaneous Christian agency," "as genuine as it is unique."
›,53
Sometime in late 1859, after Legge had returned from a brief furlough in England and Scotland with his new wife, Hannah Mary (1821-1882),54 and their children (two daughters from the widower James Legge's first marriage and a step-daughter from his new wife's first marriage), the Chinese congregation at Union Chapel agreed to support Ch'ea for three months as their travelling evangelist in the area. In April, 1860, John Chalmers and Ho Tsun-sheen made a missionary tour in the Poklo district, baptizing 44 converts prepared by Ch'ea and others who had become active in
55
202
PART FOUR: From the golden light within: Ch'ëa's creative embodiment of a Chinese Christian way
In spite of the political risks in continuing his connections with the Hong Kong Chinese Christians and their foreign missionary associates, Ch'ëa returned to Hong Kong with a convert responding to his own preaching in May, 1857. To claim that Ch'ëa's arrival was unexpected is a facile understatement. Hostilities had forced many Chinese to leave Hong Kong because of Qing official threats of punishment hanging over the heads of their relatives in Guangdong and elsewhere. In addition, earlier that year in January an attempt at poisoning the expatriate community in Hong Kong through seasoning the daily bread with arsenic had been attempted, failing only because the amount of arsenic was too much, causing vomiting rather than fatalities.2 These political and terrorist realities put the colony on a state of high alert. Somehow Ch'ea and Kot A-Yuk, the new convert, passed through the opposing military lines without being stopped. And this was not the only time Ch'ea returned. Each year in the following three years he returned at least once, carrying reports that his "apostolic ministry" was influencing a larger and larger number of self-conscious converts in the district of Poklo. Adopting a pattern of “itinerant ministry” in various parts of the district, preaching and teaching from the materials he had been given in Hong Kong and sharing with his contacts in Poklo and neighbourhood villages what he had experienced in Hong Kong among Chinese Christians there, Ch'ea initiated what Legge and others considered to be a "spontaneous Christian agency," "as genuine as it is unique."
›,53
Sometime in late 1859, after Legge had returned from a brief furlough in England and Scotland with his new wife, Hannah Mary (1821-1882),54 and their children (two daughters from the widower James Legge's first marriage and a step-daughter from his new wife's first marriage), the Chinese congregation at Union Chapel agreed to support Ch'ea for three months as their travelling evangelist in the area. In April, 1860, John Chalmers and Ho Tsun- sheen made a missionary tour in the Poklo district, baptizing 44 converts prepared by Ch'ea and others who had become active in
55
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