God is proclaiming His Name among the nations through His family, His church. He promises that in this way He will “fill the earth with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14). Sometimes – as at Pentecost – He works through many coming to faith via a Gospel call. Other times He works through the tragedy of martyrdom, as His followers show that He is worth more than life itself.
There have been millions of such martyrs over the centuries. Here is the story of two from the 1930s with a tenuous but genuine link to our local church.
John and Betty Stam met at Moody Bible Institute in the 1920s. Betty had grown up in China as the daughter of missionaries. Sensing a call, John left a promising career to prepare for the field. Betty graduated a year before John and left for China, having been accepted by China inland Mission. Though they desired to marry, they delayed engagement, not knowing if John too would be accepted by CIM.
He was – and proved to be an adept student of the language and a passionate witness for Jesus. He preached a sermon in Chinese less than a year after entering the country. John and Betty then married in October 1933. Betty gave birth to their daughter Helen Priscilla the following September.
At the time Mao Tse Tung’s communist forces were rebelling against the nationalist government. By early December 1934 the communists were near the Stams’ residence. John and Betty made plans to evacuate if necessary, but the rebel army arrived much sooner than anticipated. John responded to their banging on the door by inviting them in and offering tea. That initially calmed the situation. The rebels told John to write a letter to his superiors demanding a ransom – he communicated their request, concluding the letter by saying, “As for us, may God be glorified whether by life or by death.”
The letter was never sent. Evidently, the communist general found out that the nationalist forces were approaching rapidly. The following day John, Betty, and Helen Priscilla were taken 17 miles away and imprisoned in an abandoned farmhouse. By this point certain that they were to be killed, John and Betty hid their three-month-old daughter as well as they could, placing extra diapers and ten dollars near her.
At 10am December 8, the communists proclaimed, “Come and see the foreign devils killed!” They then stripped John and Betty to their underwear and marched them through the town. A shopkeeper who pleaded for their lives was killed. The rebels then forced Betty to watch while they nearly beheaded John. They then did the same to Betty.
What about Helen Priscilla? Some townspeople had pleaded for the baby’s life. We don’t know whether those pleas were effective or somehow in the excitement of the executions the communists forgot about her. But in any event, God sustained her through more than 24 hours alone in that house. A man named Lo Ke-chou then found her. He brought her with the bodies of her parents miles away to safety. On December 14 at long last John and Betty’s families in the US received the hoped-for telegram: “Stam baby safe.”
Five years previously, Frank Houghton of China Inland Mission had written the words we sang a few weeks ago – words that apply to the testimony of the Stams:
We bear the torch that, flaming,
Fell from the hands of those
Who gave their lives proclaiming
That Jesus died and rose;
Ours is the same commission,
The same glad message ours;
Fired by the same ambition,
To Thee we yield our powers.
O Father who sustained them,
O Spirit who inspired,
Saviour, whose love constrained them
To toil with zeal untired,
From cowardice defend us,
From lethargy awake!
Forth on Thine errands send us
To labour for Thy sake.
What is the link to Desiring God Community Church?
The first few years we held Perspectives on the World Christian Movement courses in Charlotte, one of our speakers was Pete Stam who lived in Wilmington. Then in his late 80s, Pete had served as a missionary in the Congo and for decades as Executive Director of Africa Inland Mission. We had several long conversations, and I much enjoyed getting to know him. John Stam was a brother of Pete’s father. Only 10 years younger than John, Pete was seventeen when he heard the news of the martyrdom of his aunt and uncle in China. He knew his cousin Helen Priscilla well.
Our God is at work, in life and in death. His power is overwhelming. His love cannot be stopped. His victory is certain. As Frank Houghton wrote, may we realize that we share the same commission, that we have the same glad message, and that the same Lord empowers us to complete the task He has given to us, His church. May we share the Stams’ certainty that Jesus is Lord, and that He is worth more than all the world has to offer.
[By Coty Pinckney. You can read more about John and Betty Stam at this link.]
