- Do you think that Daring Missionaries are people who lived in the bygone era?
- Do you think that we need an organizational backing to do missionary work?
- Are you of the opinion that a lone woman cannot do missionary work in a remote land?
If so, you are mistaken. God uses a willing heart to accomplish his work. Be the change you want to see around you. Preaching can be best accomplished by actions rather than from the Pulpit. If you have love and a mind to serve, you can be a missionary for Christ. Remember this famous quote and the great lesson it teaches us.
The Opposite of Patience is not Impatience but Unbelief
Jackie Pullinger
Born in the year 1944, the British missionary to Hong Kong and founder of the St Stephen’s Society, Jacqueline Bryony Lucy ‘Jackie’ Pullinger was an ex-student of the Royal College of Music. She was too young and unqualified to be accepted by some of the missionary societies to which she applied, while others did not want musicians; but she still felt drawn by God into missionary work. ‘Trust me and I will lead you,’ God had said.
Following the advice of a missionary friend, Jackie just went; she took a one-way ticket to China and disembarked from the boat at Hong Kong. Having spent nearly all her money on travel, she needed to find a job. She was doing some music teaching, not full time, but enough to feed her and pay for accommodation. Then she found a part-time teaching job at a mission school in the Walled City of Kowloon and played the harmonium at the Sunday services. Kowloon Walled City was an ungoverned, densely populated settlement.
When Jackie arrived in 1966, she opened a youth club for the Walled City’s teenage gang members; and she did more – she also helped them find jobs, went with them to court and became involved in helping their families. When news of her willingness spread, other people in the city began to approach her as well. Her hope was that by ‘walking the extra mile’ she might be able to show them something about Jesus.
“The desperately poor are not going to come to us to hear the Good news. We have to go to them.”
Jackie
Encouraged by two Chinese Christians, Jackie experienced a baptism of the Holy Spirit and received the gift of speaking in tongues. There was nothing emotional about it, and it was six weeks before she began to notice that something remarkable was happening – now that she let God have a hand in her prayers, Chinese youngsters began coming to Christ.
To provide for the new converts, Jackie started a weekly Bible study at the Mission and on Sundays took them along to the evening service. Then she started her own worship services on a Sunday morning. Later, she began a Saturday evening prayer meeting which attracted a wide range of Christians and proved to be the ‘powerhouse‘ behind her ministry.
Much of her outreach was directed towards the Triad gangs who controlled life in the Walled City. Jackie’s first contact with a Triad gang came the night after her youth club had been broken into and vandalised and the 14K Triad leader, Goko, sent his ‘fight-fixer’ to guard the club against further trouble. Opium addict Winsom stationed himself at the club door each night but did not enter into the club. He used to listen to the talks Jackie gave to the gang members and one night he prayed with Jackie, he was immediately baptised in the Spirit and began to speak in tongues. He was the first junkie Jackie saw painlessly set free by the power of God. After ten years, Goko, the Triad leader finally admitted his own need to change and agreed to trust Jesus.
Jackie’s mission is not only to the Triads, however; she works among the poor and the destitute, street sleepers, prostitutes and drug addicts. She looks for the ‘poor in spirit and body’, to show them that they are loved and can find new life and hope. Most of them are addicts and she has led many of them to Christ. She quoted, “God wants us to have soft hearts and hard feet. The trouble with so many of us is that we have hard hearts and soft feet.”
Her next step was to provide a home and family environment in which ex-addicts could avoid the temptations of going back to their old ways, and instead begin to grow in their Christian life. When word got around that addicts could receive a power enabling them to kick drugs painlessly, there was a constant queue to be admitted to the boys’ home and two further homes were set up to cope with the demand.
In order to establish an official body through which to operate, Jackie founded the Society of Stephen(SOS). A full-time worker, an ex-nun, was brought in to supervise the homes, and Jackie gave more time to work in the City. Helpers of many nationalities came alongside her as the project developed. Some of the ‘Stephen’ boys welcomed the newcomers, gave them practical support and prayed with them. It encouraged Jackie and she appreciated the true meaning of the phrase ‘the body of Christ’.
By 1979 the drug problem in the Walled City had become less serious and Jackie started to work at Tuen Mun refugee camp, caring for thousands of refugees who had fled from Vietnam. She assisted a missionary doctor, Donald Dale, who opened a clinic at the camp and held daily classes for anyone who wanted to learn English or receive Bible teaching. In the early 1980s, however, the drug problem worsened, and once again she felt it necessary to give more time to the Walled City.
Over the years God has wonderfully provided for the work and Jackie has at times been amazed to see how income has grown as her ‘family’ increased; gifts of money and in-kind have come in, often anonymously. Jackie’s mission to the Walled City continued for a time until it was demolished and the land made into a park. She served the inhabitants of the Walled City for over twenty-five years but her ministry has expanded far beyond it’s bound: while some of her boys have taken the work to other parts of Hong Kong and to nearby Macau, she has travelled to many parts of the world to give her testimony of God’s grace.
We’re going to feel stupid for eternity if we waste this life.
Jackie Pullinger
When Jackie Pullinger was a little girl, she thought the mission field was a huge green field with a mud hut in the middle. The mission field turned out to be very different. It was a vast, lawless slum in the middle of Hong Kong. There was no field; there wasn’t any grass there at all. There was slime and smells and gangs and drugs and poverty and crime. But there was love too.
Bibliography
Hanks, Geoffrey, 70 Great Christians
Howat, Irene, Ten Girls Who Changed The World
During the entire reading of this EPISODE, I was just reminded about the bibliography of Ruth E. Siemens, Founder of GO(Global Opportunities –now Global Intent who had the similar testimony of Jackie Pullinger.Such EPISODES do really energise us.According to Ruth Siemens …:”Tentmakers are missions-motivated Christians who support themselves in secular work as they do cross-cultural evangelism on the job and in free time. They may be business entrepreneurs, salaried professionals, paid employees, expenses-paid voluntary workers, or Christians in professional exchange, funded research, internship or study abroad programs. They can serve at little or no cost to the church. Regular missionaries, on the other hand, receive donor support channeled through a mission agency or church. They are perceived as religious workers even if they use skills like nursing or teaching, because they work under the auspices of Christian institutions. In between these two equally excellent ministry models are hybrids–all of them valid as long as they are open and honest. Some tentmakers supplement a low salary with modest donor gifts, and some missionaries take part-time work in a secular institution like a school or university, for extra support or for contact with non-believers. Mission agencies second some of their personnel to enhance their organizational credibility.”
Kudos to ADMN brother and his TEAM for bringing this brave lady missionary member into light.