In this series on “Border Agents I have known,” I’ve used one basic rule: they have to have died already. That way I know, to the best of my ability, that they remain exemplary models. I remember the reaction of my pastor when Tim Keller passed away last year: “Thank God he died scandal-free.”
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Keller, he was a pastor in New York City. He died of cancer at the too-young age of 72. As long as we are alive, we run the risk of going off the moral or theological rails and bringing shame on our faith. My pastor friend was off-handedly referencing the scandalous stories of recent church leaders whose sins found them out after they were no longer living and after they had lost all opportunity to repent.
I never met Keller in person, only through some of his writings. Someday I may write about great thinkers I’ve come to know through their writings, great communicators of the faith like Keller.
But this series is about people I have actually met. In person.
It is also about people who worked in the borderlands of life. In a very real sense, Keller was such a border agent. He worked the boundary world between faith and secularism, a prophetic voice in our age.
Such was the case with Pastor X. I am keeping his name anonymous because there is little degree of separation between his story and the work of friends currently in creative access situations. I met Pastor X only once through a mutual friend. The pastor was in his 90s, twice my age at the time. His voice was low. I needed help understanding him occasionally because I couldn’t follow his accent and mixed dialect. He was still pastoring and so we met in his church office. He kept up his work until the day he died.
The mutual friend in this story was another border agent, who had spent years engaged in work on the Tibetan plateau. Pastor X’s church was on the edge of that vast highland in a city that by then numbered over a million people. But prior to this he had been incarcerated deep and higher up in the plateau for years.
The Tibetan plateau could swallow Alaska and Texas combined with room for a few smaller states to spare. Known as the roof of the world, its average elevation exceeds 15,000 feet above sea level. I’ve been to some of the lower elevations of the plateau, perhaps only approaching that average, and have experienced the headaches and exhaustion from being unaccustomed to oxygen deprivation. People do live on the plateau, usually in the lower elevations, but much of the region is a vast world populated by a relative handful of Tibetan nomads.
The Chinese gulag of the ‘50s and ‘60s was scattered across the nation, with some prisons built in those empty spaces on the plateau. In the highlands prisons, there was no need for fencing or walls. Anyone who tried to escape the prison camp could not possibly survive the vast and forbidding distances to the relative safety of civilization.
It was here that Pastor X had been sentenced to hard labor. He had been leading a church in that city on the edge of the plateau when a new regime came to power and systematically worked to wipe out all religious expression. He then spent years in that God-forsaken prison, his faith never wavering.
Then for some incomprehensible reason, the authorities suddenly released him, apologized to him for treating him as they had, and gave him back his church property. Pastor X returned to a city quite unlike what he had left. Liberation, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution had taken their toll on the faithful.
For those who had known him before he disappeared, it must have been like in Acts 12 when Peter was released from prison by an angel in the stealth of night. The believers were incredulous, and Peter’s hapless guards were executed the next morning. But surprising as Pastor X’s release must have been to his fellow believers, he was released in broad daylight with full approval of those in power.
Because of the way in which he had been released, with official apology even, he became somewhat untouchable. He fearlessly dove into rebuilding the church and carrying on the work of preaching and pastoring in full view. Not that he didn’t use wisdom; there were new Pharaohs in power who didn’t know Joseph. But he had learned that, live or die, he was ever in the hands of God.
HNK photo: Tibetan Sheepherder; I had just bought his slingshot (a souvenir for my kids) for a small sum for me and a huge bonus for him
As I sat listening to Pastor X, trying to grasp the meaning of the words through his thick dialect, I noticed he kept his hand on a box filled with index-sized cards. As he fingered the cards, he explained that each one of these cards carried information on those who had been baptized.
How many people had he baptized? “Over three thousand,” he replied.
In much of Asia, baptism is THE sign to the world that a person has become a believer. People may believe, appropriately, that salvation comes when a prayer of confession is made, but a line is crossed when they are baptized, whether it is by immersion or some other form. They have been signed, sealed, and delivered, and there is no going back.
By crossing a line, I don’t mean only a line of faith. I also mean a line in that culture, in that society. From then on, they are marked persons. Becoming a Christian, being baptized even, is not usually that earth-shaking in our Western world. You don’t lose your job. You don’t necessarily get turned down for promotions or lose your access to educational opportunities or housing. You may find your family avoiding you, even writing you off, but you can slide into other relationships.
Many younger believers where Pastor X lived have not been to prison, few have died in recent years for their faith. But even today, there is still a huge price to pay for announcing you are a follower of Jesus Christ. And getting baptized means you can no longer blend in.
I looked at that box of cards. It was only a portion of all the cards he had on file. I looked at him, his face weathered from years of hard prison labor and labor for the gospel. I saw a man who was not defiant. Rather he had the quiet confidence of one whose humble faith is so anchored in Christ that nothing can dislodge him from his absolute allegiance to his Savior.
We talked for only an hour or so, from what I recall. And then we parted. I never saw him again. But his example of fierce devotion stayed with me through many complicated situations and difficult hours as I endeavored to live out my faith and calling in his land.
Dressed in the simple garb of his day, he was not sharing his story to gain recognition. He had no use for human acclaim. He only shared out of respect for our mutual friend who had come to pay him a visit. He’d gained nothing of worldly goods. His life was simple, his comfort found in the joy of serving his Master.
The hardship of living where Pastor X lived – the climate, the altitude – were not hardships to him. That was his homeland, after all. But by continuing to declare his faith – before prison, in the Gulag, and publicly for years after – he chose to serve in a borderland between the comforts that blending in could have afforded him and the darkness of human depravity, all for the sake of redeeming those who were alienated from the gospel.
If there had been any scandal in his life, it was only the scandal of the gospel. To have died in prison would have brought him no shame, for in dying he could have brought glory to God. That he had been set free from the Gulag was also no shame, for in living he brought glory to God and brought God’s glory to well more than 3,000 others.
This story is not a composite, nor is it embellished. Only names and other identifying factors have been hidden to protect those whose work is ongoing.
More stories are planned for this series on “Border Agents I have known.” If you missed the first two stories, you can find them here and here. If you want to be notified when new stories are posted, please be sure to subscribe – for free.