John Birch

Life and Ministry

John Birch was born at Landour in north India in AD 1918, the son of American Presbyterian missionary parents, raised in Macon, Georgia, after the family's return, and educated at Mercer University and the Bible Baptist Seminary at Fort Worth. Ordained as an independent Baptist missionary, he sailed for China in AD 1940 and worked under the Fundamentalist Baptist Mission at Shangrao in Jiangxi, learning the Mandarin and Hangzhou dialects and itinerating among the rural churches. After Pearl Harbor he sheltered the Doolittle Raid aviators in April AD 1942 and was commissioned by the United States Army Air Forces as a chaplain-intelligence officer attached to the Fourteenth Air Force under Claire Chennault, in which capacity he served four years behind Japanese lines while continuing his preaching ministry whenever possible.

Circumstances of Death

On 25 August AD 1945, ten days after the Japanese surrender, Birch was leading a small American-Chinese intelligence patrol on the railway line near Huangkou in northern Anhui to assess the postwar disposition of Japanese arms. The patrol was halted by a unit of Chinese Communist forces under the command of a Lieutenant Tung, who demanded that they disarm and submit to detention as spies. Birch refused to surrender his sidearm and his men, arguing in fluent Mandarin that the war was over and that they were Allied officers. Tung's troops shot him in the leg, beat him, and bayoneted him to death; his bound body was found by villagers and recovered by an American mission the following week. He was the first American intelligence officer killed by Chinese Communist forces, and the controversial political society that later took his name is no part of his missionary witness.

Legacy

Birch's letters home, preserved in the Mercer University archives, record a man whose first vocation was the preaching of the Lord Jesus to the Chinese countryside and whose military service he understood as a wartime accommodation. His witness is that the gospel knows no national boundary: the Georgia Baptist who had carried tracts down the Jiangxi roads died on a railway in Anhui still arguing in the language of the people he had come to serve. The mission churches he had pastored at Shangrao continued through the long persecution that followed, in the keeping of the Lord he had named at every village.