Victor Guy Plymire

For the Sake of a Door

Victor Guy Plymire was born in 1881 in Loganville, Pennsylvania, in the United States. He trained at the Missionary Training Institute in Nyack, New York, and was ordained by the Christian and Missionary Alliance. In 1908 he set out for northwest China, and his purpose in going there was clear: to gain a route into Tibet. Tibet was then closed to foreigners, and missionaries could only approach it little by little from its edges.

Sixteen Years of Waiting

He waited sixteen full years before he baptised the first Tibetan believer. The number is worth pausing over: from 1908 to 1924, for sixteen years he kept travelling, preaching and waiting, without seeing a single person come to faith. Another person in this database, James Gilmour (季雅各), the "Apostle of Mongolia," saw no converts in his first four years and gained his first convert only in his fourteenth year—the two men's situations were strikingly alike. In mission narratives that value results, years like these can hardly be written up as a "success story."

A Different Mission, the Same Plateau

In 1920 he returned to the United States, and after that he joined the Pentecostal movement. In 1922 he returned to Tibet as a missionary of the Assemblies of God—the mission had changed, but the field had not. In the long years of service that followed, he travelled great distances preaching in Tibetan regions, facing hardships far beyond what most people could imagine: bitter cold, thin air, the language barrier, and bandits and snowstorms along the road. He also lost several close family members one after another.

Until the Door Closed

He remained a missionary until 1949, the year the door to missions closed and he was forced to leave China. Counting from his first journey west in 1908, he spent forty years on this plateau. He died in 1956. His book Pioneering in Tibet records those years. Among the people in this database, only a handful gave their lives to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau—Albert Shelton (史德文) died in Kham, Susie Rijnhart lost her husband and young son on the way to Lhasa, and Annie Royle Taylor (安妮·泰勒) became what is generally regarded as the first Western woman to travel deep into the interior of Tibet—and Plymire was the one who stayed the longest.