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THE FIRST PENTECOSTAL MISSIONARIES to Hong Kong were convinced God had already endowed one of them the supernatural power to speak Chinese. They expected the Holy Spirit would soon give the same ability to other team members. They quickly discovered that no one in Hong Kong understood the “Chinese speaker.” No supernatural gift enabled the others to communicate intelligibly with Chinese speakers either. That is where Mok Lai Chi stepped in. He became their translator.

Mok was the son of Christian parents who procured him a good education. Considering himself dull, he worked doubly hard to learn, graduating at the top of his class and becoming a civil service employee, criminologist, and interpreter. As a side business, he made perfumes. Finding himself surrounded by wickedness and worldly companions, he grieved. After five years in governmental employ, he gave up financial security, left the civil service, founded a school, and devoted himself to educating youth. 

This entire time, he had been a member of a Congregational Church founded by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM). But despite his persistent efforts through Sunday school and YMCA activities, lives seemed unchanged. Worse yet, church leaders squelched his enthusiasm for worship. He was hungry for effective Christianity. The Pentecostal messages spoke to him.

Soon he was more than a translator. On this day, 10 November 1907, he, too, spoke in tongues. The future of Chinese Christianity changed in that moment. Although Mok would continue to translate for American Pentecostals, he became a Pentecostal leader in his own right. The Congregational Church rejected tongues speaking and so Mok led out a group that formed its own assembly. 

In 1908, working with American missionary T. J. McIntosh, Mok became founding editor of Wuxunjie zhenlibao (Pentecostal Truths). The paper charged no subscription, relying on Mok’s income and voluntary donations to cover costs. Published in Chinese, with a page in English, it reached not only Hong Kong but the mainland. At its peak Mok printed about 8,000 copies per issue. Small as its circulation was, it had an outsized impact, inspiring church leaders throughout China, not least the founders of the True Jesus Church that still flourishes (although it drifted into a non-trinitarian theology). To this day, many Chinese house churches show Pentecostal influences. Even if they do not speak in tongues, they tend to worship with exuberance, and to pray expecting healing and supernatural empowerment to witness boldly in the face of persecution.

Mok gave up his school and moved his own family of ten to the slums because that is where he saw the greatest need. (Later he reopened the school to support his family.) Nightly services drew one hundred and fifty listeners. Teams took Gospel tracts throughout the region. By the end of 1909 the mission had also dispatched a team of five to northern China. Meanwhile, Mok reported miraculous healings in answer to prayer, including cases of beri-beri, dysentery, and tuberculosis. 

While spreading the Gospel, the Hong Kong Pentecostal Mission also engaged in much practical work. For instance, it offered free kindergarten, free education to girls, Bible classes for Christian workers, and hospitality for visiting Christian workers. It also appealed for justice for slum dwellers whose landlords gouged them with oppressive rents. 

Mok’s paper ceased publication in 1917. He died nine years later in Hong Kong, but the work he started branched and was still going strong in the twenty-first century.

—Dan Graves

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For more on Chinese Christianity, read Christian History #98, How the Church in China Survived and Thrived in the 20th Century

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