David Howard Adeney

David Howard Adeney (November 3, 1911 – May 11, 1994), Chinese name Ai Deli (艾得理), was a missionary sent to China by the British China Inland Mission, the first Far East regional general secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES), and the founder of the Discipleship Training Centre (DTC) in Singapore.

Life

Adeney was born in 1911 into a devout Christian family in Bedford, England. His father was a minister who worked as a missionary among the Jews in Romania, while his mother stayed in England to care for their four sons. All four brothers later became missionaries. Adeney attended Monkton Combe School in Somerset, and in 1933 graduated from Queens' College, Cambridge, where he read theology and history.

Influenced by the biographies of Hudson Taylor and the Cambridge Seven, Adeney was already convinced by the time he finished high school that God was calling him to mission work in China. After graduating from Cambridge, he studied for another year at the China Inland Mission training centre in London, and in the autumn of 1934 he sailed for China. After six months of language training in Anqing, he went to rural Henan to do village evangelism. In 1936 Adeney began living permanently in Fangcheng County. In the spring of 1938 he married Ruth Temple, a missionary from the United States, in Fangcheng County. In 1941 the Adeney family left Henan for furlough in the United States; soon afterwards the Pacific War broke out, and Adeney had to remain in the West. In 1943 he returned to England to take charge of the China Inland Mission's prayer ministry.

When the Second World War ended in 1945, Adeney was able to return to China. Working with Calvin Chao (赵君影), he founded a Christian student union in Chongqing, which drew many refugee university students to become Christians, and many Christian leaders later emerged from among them. In 1950, when missionaries were expelled from China, Adeney joined InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) in the United States. In 1956 he arrived in Hong Kong to serve as the first Far East regional general secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. In 1968 he founded the Discipleship Training Centre in Singapore to train Asian Christian leaders. In 1976 Adeney retired and moved to Berkeley, California, where he also started the "Watch over China" (守望中华) prayer effort. In 1979, when OMF International (the new name of the China Inland Mission after its withdrawal from mainland China) set up its China Ministries department in Hong Kong, Adeney was the convener of the North American branch. In the winter of 1991, at the age of 80, while speaking at a winter camp for Chinese Canadians, he slipped and was injured in the snow.

In May 1994 Adeney died of illness at his home in Berkeley, California, and was buried at nearby China Hill.

Bibliography

• David Adeney: The Unchanging Commission (1955)
• David Adeney: China: The Church's Long March (1985)