Ü-Tsang དབུས་གཙང་
The early missionaries to Tibet could never have imagined the positive reputation now enjoyed by Tibetan Buddhists in the Western world. Indeed, many politicians, Hollywood actors, and other celebrities regard the Dalai Lama as their hero. As a result of this newfound status, many Westerners, including even some professing Christians, respond with disgust when they hear of anyone trying to lead Tibetans to Jesus Christ.
Tibetan society itself faces an interesting and volatile future because China is poised to name the next Dalai Lama when the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, dies. He was 84 years old at the time of writing this book. In 2019, the Chinese government adopted a hardline stance against the Dalai Lama’s succession plans, threatening to appoint its own handpicked replacement who is sympathetic to the Communist Party, as it did when appointing the Eleventh Panchen Lama in 1989.
Tibetan monks appear fascinated by a Bible story comic book
VOM Canada
The Dalai Lama immediately pushed back against the Chinese threat, saying his successor may be “found” in India after his death, before adding:
In the future, in case you see two Dalai Lamas come, one from here, in a free country, and one chosen by the Chinese, then nobody will trust, nobody will respect the one installed by China. So that’s an additional problem for the Chinese.1
In the 2010s, some pro-Tibetan independence activists began to target Christians more aggressively, using political connections to shut down their work in countries like Nepal, India, and Bhutan, while in China they spent much time and money warning Tibetans about the supposed threat that Christianity posed to their culture.
As a result of this additional pressure, Christians who desire to share the love of Christ with Tibetans on the Chinese side of the Himalayas face threats from several different sources. They are threatened by Communist officials who don’t want Christianity to spread in the area; they are opposed by Tibetan lamas who fear a loss of power if their people embrace the gospel; and more recently, they have been attacked and exposed by pro-Tibetan Westerners who are skilled at identifying Christian workers among the Tibetans.
The Western media has occasionally joined the chorus of hostility against Christian efforts to reach Tibet. In 2013, the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom published an extensive article, detailing strategies employed by undercover missionaries in Qinghai Province. In part, the article stated:
Tibet is the K2 of the Evangelical Christian world—missionaries see it as a formidable yet crucial undertaking, a last spiritual frontier. Of the 400 foreigners living in Xining, most are missionaries . . .
Techniques have become more sophisticated over the past few decades. Some [foreign evangelists], like Chris and Sarah, have secured long-term Chinese visas by opening coffee shops, boutiques, restaurants and guesthouses. Others are charity-minded doctors and aid workers. Evangelical organizations brainstorm new ways to make the Christian gospel accessible to Tibetans, such as screening Christian films in Tibetan dialects.2
Evidence of flourishing Christian fellowships in Tibet emerged with news that a house church meeting in Lhasa was targeted by the authorities in October 2011. Pastor Song Xinkuan and ten other missionaries from Henan Province were arrested and their property was seized. Other believers were fined and harassed.
Upset at the treatment meted out to them, the house church Christians took the extraordinary step of launching legal action against the police persecution. They claimed that as no registered Three-Self churches are permitted in Tibet, their rights to exercise their religious beliefs had been illegally infringed. A Christian lawyer, Zhang Kai, was engaged and a lawsuit was filed on Pastor Song’s behalf.
Remarkably, on April 6, 2012, the People’s Court handed a victory to the Christians. The seized property was returned, compensation was paid, and the police officers involved in the incident were reprimanded.
As more Chinese Christians spread throughout Tibet to share the gospel, problems inevitably arose. A severe blow occurred in January 2014 when a Han missionary named Dong Chunhua, a native of Shandong Province, suddenly went missing while traveling in a remote part of western Tibet. Song Xinkuan was the last person to see Dong alive. He remarked: “Dong has been detained by the police before. In addition, his home has been searched. Dong has spread the gospel in more than 70 Tibetan counties.”3
While the battle raged on for the heart and soul of Tibet, other reports surfaced of Tibetan Christians in various locations. In 2015, the Chinese government banned Tibetan Christians from meeting in their church building in Ngari Prefecture, after the believers refused to heed advice to meet privately rather than in public.4
Amdo ཨ་མདོོ་
The year 2012 sadly saw the retirement of an unsung hero of Christian work among the Tibetans, when Bill Conrad, the grandson of the great pioneer missionaries William and Jessie Christie, retired from his long service as the head of GANSU, INC. (an acronym standing for “Gaining A New Sight for Unseeing In China”).
Conrad, who graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1961 and later specialized in ophthalmology, established GANSU, INC. in 1990, and for the next 22 years he and his wife Peggy worked tirelessly among the poorest of people, including Tibetans in Gansu and Qinghai, conducting thousands of cataract surgeries from modified pop-up camper trailers which traveled into the most remote grasslands of the Amdo region.
Often accompanied by foreign doctors who volunteered their time and expertise, GANSU, INC. performed a total of 6,543 successful eye surgeries in western China, with many needy Tibetans benefiting from their labor of love.
Countless stories of changed lives occurred over the years as Jesus Christ was proclaimed through word and deed to various Tibetan people groups. On one occasion, an elderly nomad woman sought help because she had been going blind for several years, and Conrad’s team found that she had cataracts in both eyes. She received treatment, and the next day she came to her post-operative checkup unaided, sporting a huge smile.
Conrad took a photo of the woman’s beaming face and showed it to her. He recalled:
Dr. Bill Conrad, surrounded by trainee eye doctors in 1990
William C. Conrad
She began to laugh, uncontrollably, with embarrassment at her funny appearance. But then—almost as though a light was turned on as she realized she was seeing that picture with her own eyes—she began to weep, again uncontrollably. There was not a dry eye among any of us, either.5
An Amdo woman regains her sight, and laughs uncontrollably after seeing a picture of her own “toothless” appearance. She then began to weep when she realized her eyesight had been restored
William C. Conrad
William Christie had first arrived in Tibetan areas of Gansu in 1892, and with his grandson’s retirement in 2012, the one family had served the people of Gansu over a span of 120 years. Fittingly, Bill Conrad noted:
The GANSU, INC. project, which had started as an “extension” of the Christie mission service from 1892–1924, came to its ending (a full circle) after 22 years of medical service in three provinces of China at exactly the same place (Lintao) that the Christie family ended their service in China 88 years before!6
God’s love for the heartbroken
Several major natural disasters struck the Amdo region in the first decade of the twenty-first century, chief among them being the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which officially killed 106,000 people and injured another 375,000. Although the quake was centered in areas inhabited by the Qiang and Jiarong ethnic groups, a great many Tibetans were also affected by the initial 8.5 quake and its hundreds of aftershocks. As many as 11 million of the 15 million people living in the immediate area were left homeless. Chinese and foreign Christians were quick to respond with practical help for the devastated victims.
Two years later, the 2010 Yushu earthquake in Qinghai Province also provided many opportunities to display the love of Christ, and many Tibetans heard the gospel for the first time. One report said:
The immediate objective was to help the victims heal from their physical and emotional wounds, and to care for the Buddhist monks, some of whom refused to live in their temples after the quake because they feared the potential devastation from aftershocks. Instead, they asked if they could receive aid from the Christian team. This has led to opportunities to evangelize a number of them.7
Kham ཁམས་
The southernmost Tibetan subgroup in China lives in and around the city of Shangri-La (formerly Zhongdian) in northern Yunnan Province.8
A Han evangelist moved to Shangri-La to reach out to Tibetans with the gospel in the 2000s. After experiencing many setbacks, his ministry finally broke through, and by the mid-2010s, he had established between eight and ten Tibetan fellowships in the area.
Although most Christian ministries were tight-lipped about their activities in the sensitive region, a few were quite open, updating supporters with progress on their Tibetan work in their newsletters. One mission reported in December 2011:
Part of the town of Larung Ga in the Kham region. More than 40,000 Tibetans were crammed into this remote town, literally stacked on top of one another, until the Chinese authorities bulldozed most of the unique structures in 2016
For the past nine years, two teams of workers have preached to Tibetans and slowly raised up some churches numbering a few dozen believers in total. In February that number doubled. In April it doubled again. Through the summer a steady stream of Tibetans has continued to come to Christ. There are now hundreds of Christian Tibetans where ten years ago there were none.9
A young Tibetan woman named Naomi had fallen from a tree and lost one of her legs when she was a child. Her family took the accident as a bad omen and sent her to become a Buddhist nun. The longer she studied in the nunnery, however, the more she felt her gods were powerless to help her. Then Naomi heard about Jesus Christ for the first time; she knew she had found the truth, and dedicated her life to Him.
When her family discovered she had become a Christian, Naomi’s life was threatened, and she was ostracized from her relatives and friends. Despite these painful experiences, she was able to say through her tears, “I will never leave God, because He is so good and real to me.”10
The members of another covert mission group saw a Tibetan monk come to faith in Christ in the early stages of their work. He became a solid believer, left the monastery and married, and he and his wife planted at least five churches among the Tibetan people. In the early years of the decade, the ministry’s newsletter reported the following snippets of progress from their Tibetan work:
Our Tibetan church leaders held a Christmas party for the first time and 130 Tibetans showed up. All had fun, all heard the gospel (some for the very first time), and eight Tibetans gave their lives to Christ. Praise the Lord!11
I was talking to our main Tibetan leader the other day, and he shared with me that another monk has come to Christ. He befriended the man on a bus, shared the gospel with him, and the man made Jesus Christ his personal Savior. Glory to God! This fellow was a monk for 13 years. He spent eight of those years in India learning under the Dalai Lama, and the rest in China wasting his life in a monastery. We are believing God will multiply our efforts by raising this man up to proclaim the gospel among his own people.12
I just got back from our Tibetan work where we trained 25 Tibetans. There the Holy Spirit was poured out in a great way. Among our students was a new brother in the Lord who had suffered with sickness in his body for the last six years. After receiving prayer, God healed him and made an everlasting impression on his life.13
In 2012, the same ministry later revealed: “We have sent 50 Tibetan evangelists out to preach the gospel. They have so far seen 38 Tibetans give their lives to Christ.”14
False reports
Reports of breakthroughs among Tibetans are always received as welcome news in the Christian world, but false or exaggerated claims can damage the cause of Christ. In 2016, a report by an organization called Asian Access spread throughout the world, claiming that 200,000 Tibetans, including 62 Buddhist monks, had decided to follow Jesus Christ.15
While the wildly optimistic numbers cited in the report no doubt reflect an inflated view of good things that were taking place at the time—especially in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquakes—no credible field workers believed the account or could locate the supposed 200,000 Tibetan converts. Nevertheless, the story was circulated by high-profile television preachers in the United States, and many believers rejoiced at what they thought was a massive breakthrough for the gospel in Tibet.16
Christians long for the day when Tibetans will be saved by the tens of thousands, but the kingdom of God does not benefit from exaggerated and misleading claims that have little or no basis in truth.
Notes
1 Yonden Lhatoo, “China and the Dalai Lama Play Endgame for Tibet, and It’s Going to Be an Unholy Mess,” South China Morning Post (March 30, 2019).
2 Jonathan Kaiman, “Going Undercover: The Evangelists Taking Jesus to Tibet,” The Guardian (February 21, 2013).
3 “Authorities’ Involvement Suspected in Disappearance of Tibetan Missionary,” China Aid (February 6, 2014). No further news has been cited as to Dong Chunhua’s fate.
4 See “Tibetan Officials Ban Christians from Meeting in Their Church Building,” China Aid (September 1, 2015).
5 After his retirement, Conrad wrote a book detailing his experiences in China. See William C. Conrad, Sent to Open Eyes: Physical and Spiritual Sight for West China’s Blind (Abbotsford, WI: Life Sentence Publishing, 2014).
6 Conrad, Sent to Open Eyes, p. 542.
7 David Wang with Georgina Sam, Christian China and the Light of the World: Miraculous Stories from China’s Great Awakening (Ventura, CA: Regal, 2013), p. 100.
8 The Chinese government changed the name of the town in 2001 in a bid to attract tourists by promoting it as the location of the fictional Shangri-La depicted in James Hilton’s famous 1933 novel.
9 On Target (December 2011).
10 On Target (December 2011).
11 Frontier Harvest Ministries (January 2011).
12 Frontier Harvest Ministries (May 2011).
13 Frontier Harvest Ministries (December 2011).
14 Frontier Harvest Ministries (December 2012).
15 Hazel Torres, “What Showing God’s Love Can Do: 200,000 Tibetans, Including 62 Buddhist Monks, Decide to Follow Jesus,” Christian Today (June 21, 2016).
16 While the basis for the report was that Christian outreach to earthquake victims had resulted in this supposed mass turning to Christ, it should be noted that most of the people affected by the Sichuan quakes were not Tibetans, but members of the Han Chinese, Qiang, and other ethnic groups.