史文明 · 1906 – 1934 · American
Betty Stam (Elisabeth Alden Scott Stam) was born on February 22, 1906, in Albion, Michigan, USA, and was taken to China by her parents as an infant. Her father, Charles Ernest Scott (史文德), was a missionary of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern Presbyterian) stationed in Shandong. She grew up in Qingdao, Shandong, and at school age attended the school for foreign children at Tongzhou, Hebei. In 1923 she returned to the United States with her parents, first entering Wilson College in Pennsylvania and, after graduating, Moody Bible Institute, where she resolved to return to China and give her life to missions. In 1931 she was accepted by the China Inland Mission and went back to China; after studying Mandarin in Shanghai she was assigned to Anhui.
In October 1933 she married John Stam (师达能), a young co-worker in the same mission, in Jinan, with her father, Charles Ernest Scott, officiating. After the wedding the couple were assigned to preach in Xuancheng, Wuhu and Jingde in southern Anhui. On September 11, 1934, their daughter Helen (Helen Priscilla) was born in Wuhu, and in November the family moved to the county town of Jingde, Anhui, to take charge of the China Inland Mission's Jingde station.
On 6 December 1934, Red Army guerrillas of Fang Zhimin's (方志敏) forces passing through Jingde captured the couple and demanded a ransom. On the evening of 7 December the couple hid three-month-old Helen in a sleeping bag inside the room, with money pinned to her clothes. On the morning of 8 December she was taken with her husband to a small hill outside the town of Miaoshou and beheaded, aged only 28. On 9 December, after the Red Army had withdrawn, Evangelist C. K. Lo (罗传道), who had arranged to come and work with the Stams, returned to Miaoshou and, following a faint crying, found Helen; his family carried her by way of Xuancheng to the China Inland Mission at Wuhu, from where she was handed over to her maternal grandparents, missionaries in Jinan.
In a letter to the mission written a few months before her martyrdom, she said: "We came here knowing full well that there were many hardships ahead; we will still trust the Lord." Her letters home and photographs from before her martyrdom spread widely through American Christian periodicals, and together with the martyrdom of her husband, John Stam, they are regarded as a landmark event in the revival of North American overseas missions in the 1930s.