The first half of this century was an epic period in the long sweep of Chinese history—the era of the Republic, the warlords, the fighting between Nationalists and Communists, the Long March, the Japanese invasion, the Communist victory of 1949—and Methodist missionaries were eyewitnesses. Now, in the service of history, the firsthand accounts of what those missionaries saw and did are being faithfully preserved in tape-recorded interviews.

The program is called the United Methodist China Mission Oral History Project, an effort of the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) through its United Methodist China Program. The interviews will be transcribed and printed for the use of scholars and anyone else interested in history, China, Christian missions, or the Methodist presence there, according to Diane J. Allen, a missionary who has been serving in the United Methodist China Program since 1987. Allen, who became a China Program Associate in 1992, currently lives in the United Kingdom, where she is at work on the oral history project.

By the time the project is finished three to five years from now, interviews with more than 80 former China missionaries and six to eight of their Chinese colleagues will have been taped and transcribed. The colleagues include pastors, a physician, and others who worked closely with the missionaries.

Along with the transcripts, the tapes themselves will be available, as will any photographs or other documents the missionaries may have donated to the oral history project.

The process of interviewing started in the 1980s. The list, which contained nearly 100 names, took in people who had been in China as early as 1914 and as late as 1952. By 1949, most of the missionaries had left China amid tensions that arose after the Communist takeover. The tensions grew worse with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, because China backed North Korea, while the United States and its United Nations allies backed the non-Communist South.

"One of the things that prompted the oral history project was a realization that these missionaries were leaving us, were dying," said Allen. It was also felt that the missionaries represented a distinct era in the history of mission in China that had virtually drawn to a close and should therefore be documented while there was still time.

Three people set about locating the missionaries and taping face-to-face interviews with them. Ruth and Carlisle Phillips, a couple who had been missionaries in China during the 1940s, did many of the interviews during the mid-1980s. Other interviews were done by the Reverend Ewing W. ("Bud") Carroll, Jr.

Their combined efforts produced 50 to 60 taped interviews. Allen herself has added another 17 interviews to the total during the 1990s. Thus far, little has been transcribed, since the first priority has been to find the missionaries while they are still with us and capture their recollections on tape.

By about 1997, Allen was starting to worry. She thought, "These tapes are getting brittle from being done more than 15 years ago. Hundreds of hours of work, not to mention thousands of dollars, would go down the drain if they began to deteriorate."

That's when she conveyed her concern to Dr. David Wu, Assistant General Secretary for Congregational Mission Initiatives in the Board's Evangelization and Church Growth program area. At the time, Dr. Wu served as Assistant General Secretary for Connectional Relations in the GBGM's Mission Contexts and Relationships program area, and the China Program came under his jurisdiction. He gave Allen the go-ahead to start transcribing.

Now, Allen faces two colossal tasks before the project can be wrapped up. One is to find and interview about 10 more missionaries who are still alive. The other is to transcribe, edit, and index what may run to 500 hours of tape recordings, a process she predicts will take 10,000 hours.

Why so long? Because the job calls for turning out two transcripts of each interview. "That's just painstaking, as you can imagine," said Allen. One will be a verbatim transcript, including editor's indications of when the speaker falters, laughs, and so on. A second transcript will be edited to read smoothly. An index will be provided for each interview to show what topics it contains, and there will be a master index for the entire project as well. The transcripts will be bound.

Currently, the tapes and related paperwork are stored in about 20 gray cardboard boxes in a vault of the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History in Madison, New Jersey. Allen also has some materials with her in England.

Besides being a means of preserving history, Allen believes, the transcripts will hold lessons from the past that can help show the way to make mission more effective.

"We know that the church in China is one of the fastest growing churches in the world today," said Allen. "How did we help or how did we hinder that? In fact, one of the questions I ask [in interviewing missionaries] is, 'Knowing what you know now, would you do anything differently?' When we learn from how we did mission in the past, ultimately it might have a bearing on how we respond to new horizons in mission in the future."

March 15, 1999

See also: A Tale of Bandits in the Warlord Era (from the China History Project)