王载 · 1898 – 1975 · Chinese
Leland Wang was born in 1898 in Fuzhou, Fujian, into the family of a naval officer. His Chinese name was Wang Zai (王载), and he took the English name Leland Wang. In 1915 he entered the Yantai Naval School, and after graduating he served as first officer of the warship Jiangzhen (江贞); he married in 1916. In 1920 he was baptised and came to faith, and resolved to serve full time; in 1921 he left the navy and returned home. With the somewhat younger Watchman Nee (倪柝声), Wang Zhi (王峙), Miao Shaoxun (缪绍训) and others he began private meetings in Fuzhou, putting forward the indigenous church principle of “organizing the church according to the Bible and leaving the denominational structures of Western churches.” He was one of the earliest founders of the “Local Church” movement (the Christian Assembly, commonly called the “Little Flock”).
In 1928, at the request of R. A. Jaffray (翟辅民), he made his first preaching journey to Nanyang (Southeast Asia) that winter, travelling to Singapore, Malaya, Java and elsewhere. In 1929 he and Jaffray and others founded the Nanyang Evangelistic Band, with its headquarters at Wuzhou in Guangxi, which was renamed the Chinese Foreign Missionary Union the same year, moving the Chinese church from “receiving missions” to “sending missions.” It specifically sent Chinese preachers to serve overseas Chinese communities across Nanyang (Vietnam, Indonesia and elsewhere). It was one of the earliest overseas mission agencies in history organized independently by Chinese.
In the 1930s he worked together with Andrew Gih (计志文) and John Sung (宋尚节) in revival campaigns on many occasions, and from 1934 he travelled as an independent evangelist through overseas Chinese communities around the world. During the War of Resistance against Japan he travelled through Nanyang raising relief funds for the war effort. From then on he travelled to preach in Nanyang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the United States and Canada, Europe and elsewhere, and in his last years he settled in California in the United States, where he continued to lead the Chinese Foreign Missionary Union and edited the Overseas Chinese Evangelism Monthly [Huaqiao Budao Yuekan].
He was called “the Moody of China.” He stressed that the gospel is simple and powerful and that Chinese Christians must not shirk the work of missions. He died of illness in a hospital in California on December 13, 1975. His mission theology, his indigenous church principles and his vision for the evangelization of overseas Chinese in Nanyang deeply shaped the 20th-century Chinese evangelical movement.