There are few stories as inspiring as well-written missionary biographies. Sometimes, however, books about missionaries are like the too-often produced Christian movies that are weak in writing, acting, and directing and amount to little more than hagiographies. They do poor justice to mere mortals who spend their lives challenging darkness and oppression.
How delightful, then, when many years ago I discovered Courtney Anderson’s To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson (now out of print). Here was a story I could embrace – honest as the day is long about the struggles, both internal and external, that Judson endured. Judson, who served in Burma (Myanmar) in the early 1800s, was the first foreign missionary from North America.
I had a personal interest in Judson’s story because a great-great-great-something uncle of mine was Judson’s printer in Burma. When you have a connection, you take interest in the story even if the storytelling is weak. Such was not a problem with Anderson’s book, however. In fact, it set the standard high for all missionary biographies I have read since.
I come by my knowledge of the ups and downs of missionary life honestly. A son and father of MKs (missionary kids), I am related to numerous cross-cultural missionaries. I have seen them up close and personal. Missionaries, passionate as they can be, do go through a lot of challenges and are not always saintly. As a Chinese Communist official once told me, missionaries did 80% good and 20% bad. He wasn’t far off the mark.
Whether or not you are a missionary, there is much to learn from a good missionary biography. How God can work through imperfect people to transform lives and bring light and hope. How inadequate methods can produce much that is good, yet better methods produce better still. How people from the most ordinary of backgrounds can live lives that are extraordinary, just by being faithful to their calling and going wherever it takes them.
A good part of my family’s history has been lived out in Asia, not far from where Judson devoted his life. Along the way some wonderful people have come into our lives, including Robert and Evelyn Bolton.
As rookie missionaries in Taiwan, my wife and I served with the Boltons, who were then in their final years before retirement. Bob had grown up with my mother, MKs both who went through the Chinese Civil War and the Japanese invasion together in the Yunnan highlands. For four generations, our families have interconnected both in Asia and the US. When I hear the stories of the Bolton family, I hear my own family’s stories in parallel form.
The Boltons were part of an extended missionary family. Eve was the daughter of Swedish missionaries in South Africa. Bob’s parents had been missionaries in Southwest China, his father from England, his mother from the US. His mother had followed her sister from Pennsylvania Dutch country and she, too, had married an Englishman. The first of all these folks to arrive in Asia was Bob’s Aunt Mary.
Leaving the US for China as a young single woman more than a century ago, Mary Buchwalter met and married Alfred Lewer from the UK. When that joyful relationship was tragically cut short, she stayed on and continued to live a page-turning life in the rugged mountains of the Himalayas.
I say “page-turning” because her story is now in book form. And it really is her story, told in first person. She’d shared her memories late in life with a niece, Bob’s sister, Elsie, who left the notes when she too passed on. Bob and Eve’s daughter, Joy Kelly, has just finished putting them together in book form – Someone Must Go: Mary Buchwalter Lewer.
Four generations of women from Mary to Elsie to Joy to Joy’s daughter, Victoria, have had a hand in producing this book. It’s quite a tale of how all this came together, but the story they tell is even better. A few months ago, Joy invited me to write a foreword for the book, which I was honored to do. I’ll let you read what I wrote when you get the book. My intent in the foreword was to place Mary’s story in its larger context.
Mary and Alfred had worked among the Lisu, an ethnic group in China. Originally from eastern Tibet, the Lisu are now scattered in southwest China, Myanmar, Thailand, and India. Strikingly, 80% of the Lisu are Christians today.
The Lewers were but two of the many missionaries who served among the Lisu. Collectively these missionaries promoted education, agriculture, health care, and especially Jesus. They helped create the Lisu written language and did much to assist the Lisu in adjusting to a modern world that was crowding in upon them, overwhelming them with outside empires and ideologies.
To survive, they had to adapt. By adapting, they have remained a distinct people group. As I write in my foreword, “Some might argue that they lost their culture when Christianity arrived. I submit that Jesus redeemed their culture and strengthened their spirit.”
This is not the first book this Bolton clan has produced about their work among the Lisu. Leonard, Bob’s father, had passed on a treasure trove of materials that Bob and Elsie collected for a book that was published in 1984. Recently Joy updated and republished China Call: Miracles among the Lisu.
Joy tells me she is working to bring back yet another book, this one about her maternal grandfather, the legendary missionary Fred Burke. I look forward to it, knowing that I’ll probably recommend it as readily as I do Someone Must Go and China Call.
Stories that are passed down from one generation to the next have a profound impact on society, linking our lives and reminding us that we are not alone, nor are we the products of our own selves. When we struggle, we are not the first to do so. When we go out and do great things, we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before.
As you read the true stories Joy brings to life, you may not identify with names and places as readily as I have. After all, a picture of my mother as a little girl is in Someone Must Go. But I sense you too will identify with the joys and the pains, the highlights and the agonies Mary experienced. Because Mary lived life like we all do. She just did it all – births and deaths and everything in between – in the context of a cross-cultural life lived for God.
You can order these biographies online at Amazon by clicking on these links:
Someone Must Go (paperback): https://a.co/d/0e9yD7s9
Someone Must Go (Kindle): https://a.co/d/08eQ0vI9
China Call (paperback): https://a.co/d/00ZTWX39
China Call (Kindle): https://a.co/d/0hm9BZQ4
I review books and comment on living in the lands between cultures at On a Journey in the Borderlands. To keep up with what I am writing, be sure to sign up here for free to receive my occasional emails and monthly newsletters direct to your email inbox.