Everyone has held on to a diploma, a title, or an achievement as proof of their own worth. It is hard to imagine letting go of that without fearing there would be little of yourself left. The story of Song Shangjie, baptized in the West as John Sung, begins exactly with that question, asked in the middle of the ocean.
Born on September 27, 1901, in Putian, in Fujian province, China, he was the son of a Methodist pastor and, still a boy, preached to his classmates, which earned him the nickname little pastor. In 1920 he sailed for the United States, where he chose to study chemistry, not theology.
He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University and completed his doctorate in chemistry at Ohio State University in 1926, in only six years. With a promising future as a scientist ahead of him, he entered Union Theological Seminary in New York to fulfill an old promise to study theology.
On February 10, 1927, at an evangelistic meeting, he experienced a conversion he described as a new birth. His fervor unsettled the seminary’s leaders, who had him committed to a psychiatric hospital near New York for several months. There, he read the entire Bible dozens of times before being released, with help from the Chinese consulate.
Returning to China in November 1927, he threw his diplomas and medals into the sea, keeping only the doctoral certificate for his father, and began wearing a simple peasant robe. It was a clear sign: from then on, he would live only for the gospel.
He preached first in Fujian, joined the Bethel Evangelistic Band starting in 1931, and, already independent, traveled through China and Southeast Asia between 1935 and 1940. He used charts, dramatizations, and even a small coffin as a symbol of sin, in a direct style that also drew criticism.
That pace exacted a heavy price. Fistulas contracted during his student years required several surgeries, and he was away from home almost the entire year, absent even at the birth of his own children. In his final years, intestinal tuberculosis forced him to preach lying down, until he died near Beijing at age 42.
He himself wrote in his diary that without great tribulation there is no great illumination. His life is not a model of balance, but a reminder that God uses tired and imperfect vessels to set whole churches ablaze, today as in twentieth century China.
