An unbroken chain of faith and calling

About ten years ago I went to Bali to attend the CCCOWE conference, a summit on evangelism and church missions for the Chinese diaspora. It was awesome. I got to try Kopi Luwak coffee (it tasted exactly like any other coffee). I heard Christopher Wright give the keynote talks. I read both The Mission Of God (well, more like skimmed and cherry-picked passages) and The Mission Of God’s People, and they’ve deeply shaped my missiology and ecclesiology. And I met the Reverend J. Hudson Taylor. The fifth.

James Hudson Taylor V (apparently nicknamed JT) was the great, great grandson of the legendary Hudson Taylor, British missionary to China and founder of China Inland Mission, which is today called OMF International. For almost two hundred years, the Taylor family has been serving the Chinese people through an unbroken line of descendents, each of whom bore the name of their patriarch. The Taylor I met and briefly chatted with served as the main interpreter at the conference and it would be an understatement to call both his English and Chinese excellent; his on-the-spot translations were elegant and lyrical. I had never heard anyone master idiom in two cultures the way he did. 

I didn’t fully appreciate at the time what an astounding confluence of luck, intense discipleship, and divine providence it was to witness a family like the Taylors. First of all, how in the modern world did each of them manage to marry and have a son?? No celibacy or infertility or striking out with the ladies. And secondly, for each subsequent descendent to so fully embrace the family mission, to love the Lord and to love two peoples, and to dutifully play their part in this multigenerational work of evangelism. An unbroken chain of faith and calling.

My parents came to visit from the United States earlier this week. They came to play with my daughter and to meet my 1-year-old son for the first time. The last few days have been some of the most joyful times in recent memory. Watching my dad play with his granddaughter or make his grandson laugh. Having my mom teach Abby how to write her name in Chinese. Reading the Gospel of Mark in Chinese with my dad. My heart is so full.

I asked my dad what he remembered about his father, who died when he was quite young. The family history of the Shihs is shrouded in mystery. My dad said even after lengthy conversations with his eldest sister he still didn’t learn much more. He knew that despite him growing up in abject poverty, his grandfather was some kind of wealthy factory owner. However his own father was not business-savvy/did not possess good character/made a series of poor financial decisions/made friends with some bad influences/had a family falling out or something like that, we’re not quite sure but either way the family wealth did not pass down. My dad grew up taking care of his little sister while his mother and all his older siblings had to go out to work. 

I didn’t know that about my great grandfather. For most of my life I had just assumed that the Shihs experienced generations of poverty until Stone Shih came along and pulled himself up by his bootstraps by emigrating with his wife to the United States to earn a graduate degree and create a career in software engineering. I guess our family’s worldly fortunes have gone up and down through the years, rather than the American-dream “each new generation having more” sort of story. 

My family was introduced to Christianity when I was 7 years old. Dad didn’t want his children to grow up ignorant of the mother tongue. A college mate told him about a local Chinese church only a five minute drive from us that ran a very inexpensive Chinese school on Saturdays. The Chinese textbooks had this fictional character, 王大中, that went on various adventures, such as visiting the 百货公司 to 买吹风机. Today, I can write about 40-50 characters (10 of which are just numbers), and I can maybe recognize two or three times as many. I can hold a conversation in Chinese for ten minutes before my vocabulary fails me. All this is to say that both my parents and I agree that Chinese school did not turn out for me the way we had hoped. But one of the teachers invited us to Sunday worship. And because of that today the Shihs belong to the Lord. 

My dad often says that because he grew up without a dad, he never knew what it looked like to be a dad himself. He had no one to teach him, no one to model, no one to subconsciously imitate. He’s fond of saying that when he started going to church, he didn’t just meet his savior, he met his Father as well. And he frequently talks about learning to be a dad by watching the other Christian dads in church. 

When I got married, I said to him in my speech, “To me you are a perfect dad.” I meant every word, and I still do. It took me a long time to fully appreciate the seriousness of the qualifier “to me”. Dad made many mistakes. Did wrong by me and Andrew countless times. He always sought to raise us as best as he can to love Jesus. But he was learning even as he was teaching.

For 36 years my dad had to figure life out alone. He was without hope and without God in the world. And then he became a newborn. As an adult he was a spiritual baby. He had to figure out Christian parenting. The wisdom that came along with the faith came a little bit late for us. He struggled to connect with his two impetuous, headstrong, boorish, but wildly emotional boys. Even today, the project of undoing all those errors is ongoing. 

I am a second-generation Christian. I’ve been going to church for as long as I remember, but because of the youthfulness of my parents’ faith I had to figure some stuff out much later than I would have liked. Did you know that it’s okay to be angry or sad?

Lately I’ve been reciting the Lord’s Prayer each night with Abby before going to bed. A few weeks ago, on a silly whim, I thought it’d be nice to teach it to her in biblical Greek. She loved it and now we’ve been doing the Lord’s Prayer alternating nights in Greek and English. Imagine that! In two generations our family went from godless to doing original language Bible reading at the age of three. 

    

One thing both I and my father have been feeling lately is inexpressible gratitude. Our dream is coming true. That’s what this trip has laid out starkly for us to see. The getting better. The brick-by-brick laying of a spiritual heritage. Roots stretching back generations of being children of God and gospel workers. An unbroken chain of faith and calling. God willing my children will have spiritual blessings and fortitude in their faith identity that my father and I never had. Their parents will be better equipped to help them come of age. They will not just be loved. They will be nurtured. They will have their emotional needs met. They will be catechized. They will be given purpose, rather than having to invent it for themselves. They will be sure of their inviolable dignity as God’s children. They will be anchored in a world increasingly bereft of anything true or weighty or absolute. 

They will love others. They will embrace their calling to serve and give and sacrifice. They will respond when the Lord bids them come and die. They will lead and comfort and give hope.

The greatest gift I’ve ever been given is Christian parents. And I will pass this gift onto my children. And like a fine wine or a Stradivarius violin, this gift will mature and strengthen and deepen over time. I’m all about building that generational wealth.