The Fu-Chau Meeting by W. C. Hankins

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 9, 1916

The Fu-Chau Meeting

By W. C. Hankins

W. C. HANKINS

As there is no foreign worker in Fu-chau, China, we have thought best to hold a general meeting there several times each year, thereby keeping in touch with the work, and also keeping the points of our faith constantly before the people. One meeting was held in the spring, one the last of June, and we have just finished holding another during the latter part of October.

My wife and I arrived in Fu-chau the twelfth of October. Since our last visit a new work has been opened up in the village of Sin-chiu, about eight miles from the city of Fu-chau, and there was a call for us to hold a few meetings with that company. Accompanied by Elder Keh, we hired some chairs and went out to this village for a few days’ meeting. We found it to be in a very beautiful location near the banks of a river, and surrounded by mountains. Fields of sugar cane, and a very sweet-scented flowering shrub, whose flowers are picked to mix with tea leaves, surrounded the village, so that it is one of the prettiest Chinese villages we were ever in. If it had had the same sanitary arrangements that are found in every small place in the homeland, it would have been an ideal location.

The chapel is in a rented building at the edge of the village. A good school of more than twenty nice-looking boys occupied part of the compound, while another school was carried on in another part of the village, with nearly as many more. The teachers in these schools are Adventists, and the schools are almost

self-supporting, the mission paying only sixty dollars a year wages for one of the three teachers.

A Sabbath school of fifty-nine members, with an average attendance of over fifty, has been organized here, of whom six men had been baptized at the previous Fu-chau meeting. At the close of our service Sabbath afternoon we all went down to the river, and there nine others were buried with their Lord in baptism. As there are now fifteen members and a number of interested ones, we have decided to organize a church here in the near future.

From Sin-chiu we returned to Fu-chau. We first held a few meetings with our own church members, and then began an eight days’ meeting for all who would attend. Big posters were pasted up in the city, and we had a good attendance. Our chapel was generally quite well filled, the attendance averaging about one hundred and fifty. Friday afternoon we took a long chair ride to the river, where nineteen persons were baptized.

One of the candidates for baptism is an old, white-haired blind man. His story is quite an interesting one. He is a well-educated heathen, and in his younger days was very devoted to the worship of idols. One day, while worshiping the idols, he went blind. From that time he never worshiped the idols again, but began seeking after the true God. When our chapel was opened in Fu-chau, he heard of the new doctrine and came to listen. He has a wife and three children, one boy and one girl being old enough to be in school; but the necessity of making a living forbids their entering school unless they can get help. It would take only forty dollars gold a year to put these two children through school and pay all necessary expenses. This man is not a beggar, but makes a scanty living by rolling pills in a medicine shop. I understand, however, that he earns less than twenty-five dollars gold a year. That is rather scanty living for five persons, even in China.

Our Chinese brethren do not leave all the giving to be done by the brethren in other lands. Brother Keh told us many stories of how the brethren helped their poor out of their own slender substance, and it made our hearts ache when he told us of some who were themselves quite poor, who would yet help those poorer than they. During the meeting nearly six hundred dollars Mexican was pledged toward the building of the boys’ school and a chapel in the city of Fu-chau. We have succeeded in securing a specially favorable location in the heart of the city. The old temple buildings on this land can easily be remodeled to serve as school and chapel. It will take about three thousand dollars gold to build a school that will accommodate two hundred pupils, and a church that will seat five or six hundred people. There are now more than one hundred baptized church members in the Fu-chau district, and over one hundred boys enrolled in our school, of whom eighty-six are boarding pupils. The school has already outgrown our present quarters, and we need the money at once with which to build the new school.

Now is the time for us to push the work in this important center. Fu-chau is the second largest city in South China, and we have a splendid interest there which will grow if we but foster it. We need, however, to show the people that we have come to stay, and nothing else will do this so well as some good, substantial buildings. The angels of God have gone before us to open the way. Pray for us, that the Spirit of God may rest upon us and our Chinese workers, that we may be endued with power to follow where God leads the way.

Kulangsu, Amoy.