1900 - Emily Whitchurch

June 30, 1900

Xiaoyi, Shanxi

Emily Whitchurch.

In the late 19th century, the China Inland Mission afforded many young single women the opportunity to pursue their missionary dreams. Most other missions only appointed married couples to the ministry, but Hudson Taylor and the other leaders of the CIM believed single women had a lot to offer China. Many proved effective in sharing the gospel with Chinese women, and in roles such as teaching, nursing, and taking care of orphans. Taylor was criticized for allowing so many single women into the mission, criticisms that were exacerbated when many of the single women were killed during the Boxer Rebellion.

When she was 16-years-old, Emily Whitchurch attended a meeting in England where Hudson Taylor spoke on the needs of China. It “was God’s call to her, and, with the loving, glad, childlike obedience which always characterised her life, she responded.”[1] Emily reached Shanghai in April 1884, and was sent to Yantai (then Chefoo) in Shandong Province for the first few years to learn Chinese and help teach at the school for missionary children. Although she fulfilled her ministry with skill and dedication, Whitchurch’s heart lay among the hundreds of millions of Chinese living in the interior provinces who had never heard the good news. In the autumn of 1887 she was released from her work in Shandong and made her way to Xiaoyi in Shanxi Province. For the next 13 years she laboured tirelessly in the Lord’s harvest, enjoying just one trip home to England in 1894. A friend said,

“God has graciously owned and blessed her service of love; and the many precious souls saved, demons cast out, sick ones healed, opium smokers reclaimed, testify how mightily God can use one yielded life. Her trust in God was uniformly simple and strong, which made her like a sunbeam to everyone round her. She enjoyed trusting and serving Him.”[2]

Emily Whitchurch’s methods were simple and effective. Eva French recalled how

“In the mornings and evenings she would gather the opium patients around her to teach them the passages of Scriptures. Those who had been in the Opium Refuge some days would repeat all they had learnt before, and then she would carefully explain the meaning to them…. It was touching to see elderly men, young men and children, coming in at all times of the day to repeat their lesson.”[3]

The summer of 1900 arrived, and with it the Boxer onslaught that was to leave thousands of Christians dead across north China. Emily Whitchurch and her close friend Edith Searell were “were massacred on June 30 with great barbarity.”[4]

1. Broomhall, Martyred Missionaries of the China Inland Mission, 26.
2. Broomhall, Martyred Missionaries of the China Inland Mission, 26.
3. Broomhall, Martyred Missionaries of the China Inland Mission, 27.
4. Edwards, Fire and Sword in Shansi, 272.