海春深 · 1887 – 1962 · American
George Kaufelt Harris was born in 1887 in Winona, Minnesota, in the United States. After training at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, he joined the China Inland Mission in 1916 and was posted to Xining, Qinghai (then part of Gansu), in northwest China, where many Muslims lived. Within the missionary landscape of China at the time, this was a remote post that few sought.
Around 1917 Samuel Zwemer, called "the Apostle to Islam," visited China and encouraged missionaries there to bring the gospel to China's Muslims. The visit changed Harris's direction: he became one of the very few missionaries in China who took a real interest in Islam and concentrated on mission to Muslims. For the next thirty years he kept walking this little-travelled road.
Between 1925 and 1946 he wrote a number of articles for The Moslem World. In 1927 he helped found the Society of Friends of Moslems in China, linking people scattered in various places who had some concern for work among Muslims. In 1946 he wrote How to Lead Moslems to Christ, with a preface by Zwemer. The book was originally prepared as a handbook for missionaries in China, and it followed the conciliatory approach of Lewis Bevan Jones.
What he valued most was preparing suitable literature for China. He deliberately refused a polemical style of writing: rather than trying to refute the other side, he tried to present the gospel in a way that could take root in the cultural soil of Chinese Islam. In one article in The Moslem World he wrote about secret Christians in Tibet who were "still Muslims outwardly." He also translated the works of Lilias Trotter into Chinese. He died in 1962. Among the people in this database, he represents a road that the fewest have taken and on which results are hardest to see.