Leslie T. Lyall

Losing His Father at Five

Leslie T. Lyall (赖恩融) was born in 1905 in Chester, in north-west England. His father was a well-known Scottish missionary. As a young child he often went with his father to revival meetings in the United States and Australia, and saw with his own eyes many lives changed; the seed of faith was sown then. But when he was five, his father fell ill and died suddenly. His mother later married Arthur Watts, founder of Kingsmead School, and he spent most of his childhood at that school. His mother carried on his father's vision. She taught him carefully from his early years, strengthened his faith with the stories of many missionaries, and awakened in him a desire for mission. He decided to follow Christ at the age of twelve. After graduating from St Lawrence College he went on to the University of Cambridge, where he threw himself into student ministry; that experience of fellowship laid the groundwork for his later work among university students in China. Besides his parents' influence, the stories of Hudson Taylor and the "Cambridge Seven" also shaped him deeply. Late in life he wrote: "When I was still a small child, God put in me a heart that loves China, and up to now, at eighty-three, this love has never lessened."

One of the Two Hundred

In 1929, to advance indigenous churches and the training of local preachers, the China Inland Mission decided to recruit two hundred university-educated believers with theological training from Western countries to join its missionary force. Lyall answered without hesitation. That same year he set out from London with four other young men, and after a month and a half reached Shanghai. Following six months of training at the language school in Anqing, he was posted to the Chefoo School in Yantai, Shandong, a school set up specifically for missionaries' children, which Hudson Taylor had founded in 1881; Herbert Hudson Taylor had also helped to found it and taught there for many years. He served there for sixteen months, teaching and caring for the children, and there he met his future wife, Kathryn Judd (祝美兰), a granddaughter of the China Inland Mission missionary Judd (祝康宁).

Revival in Shanxi

In 1932 he moved to Shanxi, working mainly among children and young people. Every Sunday he taught a Bible class for about thirty boys, and at times he went to nearby public schools and villages to preach the gospel to teachers, students, farmers and even army officers. While in Shanxi he worked alongside the Bethel Band led by Pastor Andrew Gih and with John Sung, which brought revival to the churches of Shanxi. While serving at the Hoste Middle School (何斯特中学) in Hongtong he came to know Pastor Yang Shaotang (杨绍唐), and the two became spiritual partners and co-workers; later, in times of hardship and exhaustion, he received much support from Pastor Yang.

In Occupied Territory During the War

In 1936 he returned to Britain on furlough, and that same year went to the United States to marry Kathryn Judd. The following year the couple returned to China together, only to meet the full outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan. They were first sent to Huolu in Hebei, already under Japanese occupation, where they visited churches in the area, bringing encouragement and spiritual care to believers; they were then transferred to Shanxi. The journey was full of danger: their elder daughter was only one year old, and his wife was six months pregnant. In 1939 Japanese forces launched renewed attacks in Shanxi, and his wife gave birth to their second child during an air raid. In the occupied areas of both Hebei and Shanxi he showed great courage, repeatedly arguing firmly with the Japanese army and protecting believers and churches. In the winter of 1939 the family was sent to Anshun in Guizhou. Although that part of the southwestern hinterland was untouched by fighting, life there grew harder because of the flood of migrants. Yet he saw an opportunity for the gospel in it: when the war ended and the migrants went home, the seed of the gospel could be carried to every part of China. He rented shops where people lived crowded together to use as gospel outposts, and carried out street evangelism.

Recording the Chinese Church in Writing

In 1951 the China Inland Mission withdrew entirely from mainland China. That same year it was renamed the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF), moved its headquarters to Singapore, and extended its work to all of Southeast Asia. Lyall continued to serve with it for thirteen years and played an important part in the mission's transition, recruiting and training new missionaries and developing literature work. He never forgot the church in China; he kept following it and kept praying for it. Most valuable of all, he recorded in detail through his writing what he had seen and heard in China and the later development of the Chinese church: Come Wind, Come Weather (1960), A Passion for the Impossible (1965), Red Sky at Night (1969) and The Phoenix Rises (1992). These books became valuable sources for later study of the Chinese church. To Western readers he was one of the most important "China watchers" of his time. He died in Britain in 1996, at the age of ninety-one.