Watchman Nee

Life and Ministry

Nee Shu-tsu was born at Swatow (Shantou) in AD 1903 to a Methodist family of mixed Cantonese and Foochow ancestry, converted at seventeen under the preaching of Dora Yu, took the name Watchman (To-sheng — He Who Sounds the Watchman's Rattle) from the Old Testament office, and gathered the first of the Little Flock (Christian Assemblies) congregations at Foochow in AD 1926. By AD 1949 the indigenous Chinese house-church network he had organized — independent of the Western missionary boards, Brethren in ecclesiology, and conservative in doctrine — numbered some seven hundred local assemblies across mainland China, the largest indigenous Protestant movement in modern Chinese history. His major writings — The Spiritual Man, The Normal Christian Life, Sit Walk Stand — were translated through the post-war decades into thirty languages and are still in print.

Circumstances of Death

Watchman Nee was arrested at Manchester station in Shanghai in April AD 1952 on his return from a teaching tour of Hong Kong, accused of espionage, financial impropriety, and counter-revolutionary activity. He was tried in absentia by the Shanghai Three-Self Patriotic Movement-supervised tribunal in January AD 1956 and sentenced to fifteen years of labor reform; the sentence was repeatedly extended without further trial, and he remained in the labor reform camps of Anhui and Anqing through the twenty years that followed. Forbidden visitors except by his immediate family, denied medical care for tuberculosis and heart disease, repeatedly pressured to recant his ecclesiology, he held to his confession of the Lord Jesus and his Brethren reading of the New Testament church until his death of cardiac failure in the camp infirmary on 30 May AD 1972 at sixty-nine. The note found beneath his pillow read: Christ is the Son of God, who died for the redemption of sinners and was resurrected after three days. This is the greatest truth in the universe. I die because of my belief in Christ. Watchman Nee.

Legacy

Watchman Nee is venerated by the global Chinese Protestant Church and by the indigenous Little Flock assemblies as a confessor-martyr: he was not killed by execution but was kept in the labor camps for twenty years for refusing to recant, dying of the prison as Velychkovsky died of his. His witness, in the note under the pillow, is the gospel reduced to its irreducible kernel: Christ is the Son of God, who died for sinners and rose, and this is the greatest truth in the universe. The Chinese house churches of the twenty-first century, now estimated at sixty to one hundred million believers, count him among their founding fathers in faith.