翟辅民 · 1873 – 1945 · Canadian
Robert A. Jaffray was born in 1873 in Toronto, Canada, into a publishing family; his father was the owner of the Toronto Globe (today's The Globe and Mail). After graduating from university he declined to take over the newspaper business and entered missionary training, and in 1897 he was sent by the American Christian and Missionary Alliance to Wuzhou, Guangxi, China. From then on he served in South China for more than thirty years and made Wuzhou the headquarters of the Alliance's South China work.
For many years he led the Alliance Bible School at Wuzhou (建道书院; founded at Wuzhou in 1899, the forerunner of today's Alliance Bible Seminary in Hong Kong) as its principal and a teacher, and wrote teaching materials and Bible correspondence courses. He laid special stress on training Chinese preachers, and required every Chinese co-worker sent out to be able to preach in three languages (Cantonese, Mandarin, and the indigenous language of the destination). He was chief editor of The Bible Magazine (圣经报), one of the earliest indigenous evangelical monthlies in South China.
In the 1910s he began to turn his attention to Southeast Asia, personally opening work in Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaya and the Philippines. In 1916 he was elected superintendent of the Alliance's Vietnam field; in 1928, after travelling through the Dutch East Indies, he organized the Chinese Foreign Missionary Union, which used Makassar as its base for opening work across the islands of Indonesia. He advocated that “Chinese send Chinese,” mobilizing Chinese churches in Hong Kong, Malaya, Java and elsewhere as bases for mission. From 1932 he was based in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), living at Balikpapan and coordinating mission across the archipelago.
When the Japanese occupied Sulawesi in 1942, he chose not to evacuate with other Westerners and was interned by the Japanese in a camp in Sulawesi. On July 29, 1945, he died of disease and starvation in an internment camp in the Toraja highlands, at the age of 71. The Alliance and Chinese churches at home and abroad honour him as “the father of mission to Southeast Asia,” and his model of sending influenced twentieth-century Chinese missiology.