Border Agents I have known: Helen Gilkerson

This post on Helen Gilkerson is the first in a monthly series of snapshots of people who’ve served heroically in some sort of borderland, who I have known personally or whose life has somehow impacted me. I call them Border Agents because they have chosen to live and serve in the borderlands of life – agents of a higher calling.

When Kim and I moved to Hsinchu, Taiwan, with our first two toddlers in tow and a third child on the way, Helen Gilkerson was among the first to greet us. And she, nearing 80, already had plans for us.

She quickly informed me that I was to drive her to the Friday pastors’ prayer meeting across town. She’d been going for years, even helped start it. She’d walk, hop on the back of a passing motorcycle, whatever it took to get to a two-hour prayer meeting in the heat of the day.

As I struggled to follow the prayers of the saints gathered around that table, in the heat and humidity and fasting the noon hour, it was all I could do to keep awake. I was barely out of language school and the elder Beijing-born brother sitting next to me, sounded like he had marbles in his mouth. I’d come to understand the R-infested sounds of northern Mainlanders, but that would be in the next chapter of my life.

As it was, these faithful believers that gathered were in earnest, none more so than Helen, the only other foreigner present. They, like her, knew that prayer was the key for whatever had to happen in that city. And they – and I – rarely missed one of those Friday gatherings.

Hsinchu was an industrial community of some 300,000 people halfway between Taipei and Taichung, home to two major universities and a strategic hi-tech zone. It was also home to a significant number of Hakka Chinese, a minority group better known in Taiwan and Southeast China than elsewhere, and one of the least evangelized people groups in Asia. Our daughter, Hope, was born there, in the clinic of a Hakka doctor.

And it was here that Helen had moved four decades earlier. As a teenager, Helen had felt called to Tibet, but Tibet had closed its borders to foreigners before she could get there. She had already consecrated her life for God, so though it took till age forty, she finally left her home in Los Angeles for what she knew as the island of Formosa, better known today as Taiwan.

That was 1951, not long after Chiang Kai-shek, had fled to Taiwan in the wake of defeat in the Chinese Civil War. The island’s stability was in question and there were few other foreigners around at the time. But Helen was determined to stay.

That was the kind of person she was. Deceptively soft-spoken and modest, she had an iron will and never met a stranger. My wife and I shared her adopted hometown for barely two years in the early 1990s. But it didn’t take long for her to leave her mark forever on our lives. By then, Helen had long become a household name among local believers, local authorities, and foreigners who also called Hsinchu home.

I mention the local authorities because whenever I had to go to the police precinct that handled foreigner matters such as registration, they inevitably asked me if I was a friend of Helen’s, always a good thing to admit. They held her in highest esteem, not least for being the longest residing Westerner ever in that city, which only a handful of foreigners had ever called home.

Helen was, if nothing else, a woman of faith, tenacity, energy, joy, and godly ambition. When Kim and I met her, she spoke little of what she had accomplished. She was much more excited for what God had placed on our hearts and ever lifting up prayers she had been praying for years. It was always moving forward by faith with Helen. And the end of those years of steady-as-she-goes effort in Hsinchu?

As I wrote in my book, Night Shift: Crossing the Cultural Line for the Kingdom, Helen died with some dreams fulfilled and others not yet. But her life and her prayers were not in vain, for she had lived a life long consecrated fully to God. As with those heroes of Hebrews 11, she died full of faith for what she had not yet seen come to pass.

We were there for Helen’s eightieth birthday, a highly honored event in Chinese culture. Her congregation threw a party for her and many of those who had come to Christ during her ministry returned to celebrate. The speaker for the day was the Reverend Daniel Tai. The most well-known and influential of her converts, Pastor Tai had launched the prayer mountain movement in Taiwan.

Perhaps Helen’s greatest fruitfulness came, at least by human observation, in her seventies. For years, she had prayed for a nearby boarding school for rural Hakka girls. After Helen had lived in the city for thirty years, girls from the school started dropping by her home, just to meet the foreigner. As Helen told me, she’d finely become one of those approachable older people – in a culture where age is highly respected. Out of these encounters over the next decade, more than one hundred Hakka girls became followers of Jesus and were baptized in water.

Other than a handful of years when Helen returned to California to care for her aging mother, she rarely left Taiwan. As she once wrote in a letter home concerning April 18, 1951, the day she arrived in Taipei, “The Lord said to me, ‘This is your land and these are your people.’” A year and a half after her arrival, “the Lord said, ‘I want you in Hsinchu.’” She and a co-worker, Addie Gordon, promptly moved to their new city, began student work, and founded Berachah Church.

In addition to that Taiwanese-speaking church, Helen also helped found the Hsinchu International Fellowship, an English-language international church for which I served briefly as pastor. Like Helen, we were involved with local Mandarin- and Taiwanese-speaking congregations on Sunday mornings. We then gathered in the evening for a service in English, especially helpful for internationals who worked in the city’s hi-tech park and welcoming to local Taiwanese who had some level of English ability.

In 1994, our family left Taiwan, bidding a sad farewell to Helen. Two years later, I visited Taipei and spent a day in Hsinchu. After that, we remained in touch by sporadic letter until no more arrived. Then one day, word came that she had gone to meet her Master.

In her final years, she lived with the pastor who had taken her place and his family in a new high rise across from the church where she herself had resided for so many years. Daily at 4:20 am, she rose to open the church building for believers who gathered with her for prayer. Her last year was spent in a local hospital, where, until she became bedfast, she went about the floors in her wheelchair, testifying of the goodness of Jesus. Till the last, she continued to redeem the time memorizing Scripture, a lifelong practice.

In November 2003, at the age of ninety, she died and was buried in a section of a Christian cemetery designated for ministers and missionaries, there for her body to remain in her beloved Taiwan until the resurrection.

Helen Gilkerson was an unlikely Border Agent. She had heard God say that she was to leave all that had been home to her to find a new home in the unfamiliar. I’m not just speaking of her moving to Taiwan, as big an adjustment as that must have been. In Taiwan, she found herself among the minority Hakka. Quite aware of Western and Chinese limitations on women in leadership in her day, she pushed gender-confining boundaries to fulfill her calling. She also crossed the cultural line of faith, immersing herself in a world that knew little of her beloved Jesus. Until her last breath, she remained a committed Border Agent.

This series on “Border Agents I have known” will be appearing monthly for the next several months. If you want to be notified of the additional posts in this series or other posts in “On a Journey in the Borderlands”, you can subscribe for free at this Contact page. For resources on references used in this article, see the Resource page.