Brother

In August, news came of the death of Samuel Lam. We talk a great deal about saints in the Anglican church and often think of them as characters in ancient history, but Samuel Lam was a modern-day saint whom we  were privileged to meet in 1989 on a surreptitious one day visit from Hong Kong to Guanzhou, better known here as Canton. Down a bustling alley with overstrung washing lines, we found a plain door, opening on a staircase. Upstairs were small rooms filled with pews, and a table where hymn books were being hand-produced. This was Pastor Lam’s church. He shared his story and his rise to world attention via a scrapbook.

During the Chinese Communist regime of Mao-Tse Tung, Pastor Lam was prepared to be a martyr for his Christian faith, spending years in labour camps for refusing to allow his house church to merge with the government-controlled ‘Three-Self’ church. He became the secret pastor to hundreds of fellow inmates.

Born in 1929, he was imprisoned from 1955 to 1957 because of his evangelism. He was arrested again in 1958 for ‘anti-revolutionary’ activity and spent 20 years in jail. Throughout that time he didn’t know when he would be released. He worked under extremely difficult conditions in a coal mine until he was badly injured by a runaway truck. He was then made the Camp barber, and used the opportunity to whisper to each prisoner in his chair about the love of God and Jesus the Saviour.  Despite the death of his wife while in prison and harsh treatment by prison authorities, Samuel Lam never lost his faith. After his release he began to teach English. His first three pupils gave their lives to Christ, and seven years later he had baptised 900 people, 300 of whom became missionaries all over China. The church building was closed time and again and yet his story received such publicity in the West (including from the American president and Billy Graham, whose gift to Brother Lam I am holding) that raids on the church were halted, and also because the authorities realised that increased pressure seemed to result amazingly in even greater church growth. Today his church, presumably in the same tiny and basic wooden building we saw, has 4000 members with multiple services throughout the week. It is still unregistered but is now tolerated by the authorities.

However Pastor Lam regularly warned that the church in China should not become complacent, that at any moment the authorities might clamp down and believers be arrested.  “I pray that we will receive the strength to stand firm.” he said.