Hudson Taylor: Missionary Story for Kids, 51 Years in China

The Englishman walking through the streets of Shanghai in 1855 was a scandal to every other Englishman in the city. He had traded his black suit for a Chinese scholar’s robe. He had dyed his hair and braided it into a queue down his back. He ate with chopsticks, sat on the floor, and bowed the way his neighbors bowed. The other foreigners laughed at him in their clubs. Hudson Taylor had decided something they had not: if anything about him was going to offend people, it would be the gospel itself, and never his trousers.

Children understand this story instantly, because children know what it is to want to belong. Hudson Taylor became as Chinese as an Englishman could become, for the same reason Paul said he had become all things to all people, that by all means he might save some. It cost him the respect of his countrymen. He decided the trade was excellent.

The apprenticeship of trust

Before China, God trained Hudson Taylor in a strange school: the school of not asking. As a young medical student in Hull, he decided that if he could not trust God to move his forgetful employer to pay his wages, he could hardly trust God to feed him in China, where there would be no employer at all. So he practiced. He told his needs to no one but God, gave away his last coin to a desperate family, and watched provision arrive again and again, once in a package containing exactly twice what he had given away the night before.

It sounds reckless. It was rehearsal. Every act of trust was a training run for a mission that would one day feed hundreds of workers with no fundraising committee, no advertisements, and no debts. Faith, Hudson learned, is a muscle. He went to the gym for years.

The decision on Brighton beach

By 1865 Taylor was back in England, his health broken from his first years in China, and he could not sleep. He had seen the map. The gospel had touched China’s coast, but eleven inland provinces, holding hundreds of millions of people, had no missionary at all. The numbers ground at him so badly that one Sunday, unable to bear a comfortable church service, he walked out onto the beach at Brighton.

On that sand he surrendered the argument he had been having with God for months. He was afraid to ask for missionaries because missionaries might die. On the beach it struck him that if God was giving the orders, the outcomes belonged to God too. He wrote a prayer in the margin of his Bible: for twenty-four willing, skillful workers. Then he opened a bank account for the new mission with all the money it had, ten pounds. The China Inland Mission was born with one prayer and ten pounds, and by the time Taylor died in China in 1905, it had more than 800 missionaries serving across the inland provinces.

He summed up his whole economics in one sentence: God’s work, done in God’s way, will never lack God’s supply.

Ten facts for the dinner table

1. Hudson Taylor was born over his father’s pharmacy in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in 1832.
2. He learned medicine so he could heal bodies while telling people about Jesus.
3. He sailed five months to reach Shanghai in 1854, surviving a near-shipwreck on the way.
4. He wore Chinese dress and a braided queue when nearly no other missionary would.
5. He never asked anyone for money. He told God, and only God, what the mission needed.
6. The China Inland Mission began with a prayer for 24 workers and ten pounds in the bank.
7. He insisted missionaries live inland, among the people, not in comfortable port cities.
8. He welcomed single women and working-class believers as missionaries when other agencies would not.
9. By his death in 1905, more than 800 CIM missionaries served across China.
10. George Müller of Bristol, the orphanage builder, sent support to Taylor’s missionaries for years. The heroes knew each other.

Read it aloud: the five-minute version

Once there was a boy in Yorkshire who grew up over a pharmacy, and when he decided God wanted him in China, he began training in a funny way: he practiced trusting. He would not remind his boss about his wages. He told only God. When the money came, sometimes at the last minute, sometimes in ways that made him laugh out loud, he wrote it all down so he would remember. Then he sailed to China, five months on the ocean. When he got there he looked at the other English missionaries in their stiff black suits and made a decision that shocked everyone: he would dress like his Chinese neighbors, eat like them, and bow like them, so that nothing about him would get in the way of the story he came to tell. Years later, sick and sad, he stood on a beach in England thinking about the millions of people deep inside China who had never heard of Jesus even once. On that beach he asked God for twenty-four brave helpers. He got them, and then hundreds more. He called his big idea the China Inland Mission, and its rule was simple: go deeper in, trust God for everything, and never make the gospel wear an English suit. If you ever wonder whether you can trust God for big things, do what Hudson did. Start trusting him for small ones, today, and write down what happens.

Talk about it

• Why did it matter so much that Hudson dressed like his neighbors?
• Hudson practiced trusting God with small things before big ones. What is a small trust our family could practice this week?
• He was afraid the missionaries he prayed for might suffer. What changed his mind on the beach?

Pray together

Father, you supplied everything Hudson Taylor needed because the work was yours. Teach us the difference between our work and yours. Train our trust the way you trained his, in small things first. And for every people still as unreached as inland China was, raise up workers, and let some of them come from this table. Amen.

The inland provinces have been reached. Thousands of other peoples have not. Your family can meet one of them every month through a Wonder Letter, the way Hudson met China: one person, one story, one prayer at a time.

God’s work still does not lack God’s supply.