John Pollock > Quotes

“At that time an average of three hundred people were kidnapped every night in the regions of the SPM North Kiangsu Mission”
― John Pollock

“Rosa, Ruth, and five-year-old MaiMai had prayed hard for a boy because as good Chinese they were sorry for their parents being saddled with girls; and they were abashed to discover that their parents had prayed for another girl.”
― John Pollock

“Never before in all North Kiangsu had a child been recovered without a ransom ... The next Sunday, as Mrs. Billy Graham often told the story to her own children, Ruth saw ' Mr. Kao Er and his wife stand up in the church to give public thanks to God for what he had done. Mr. Kao was carrying the little boy who still couldn't walk, and his wife was carrying the little girl. And they stood up before the whole congregation to give God the glory.

The Billy Graham children would then pray for Kao Er's son and daughter who would have been twenty-four and seventeen at the Communist revolution of 1949. Many years later Ruth received a photograph of the son from Shanghai with a personal inscription.”
― John Pollock

“In Bell's estimation, "The Book Room was one of the greatest single means of evangelization in our hospital. God used it directly and indirectly.”
― John Pollock

“Some will say this is China's war, not ours, but we are missionaries to China and, like the wedding vows, we should be here 'for better or for worse, in health and sickness”
― John Pollock

“Another plane scattered leaflets urging civilians to leave before the battle.”
― John Pollock

“It is possible that someday the American government may be thankful for the American missionaries who have carried on in the interior of China in spite of strong advice to the contrary. This tie of Sino-American friendship may aid very materially in salvaging the friendship of the two nations so seriously endangered by our present policy.”
― John Pollock

“she sailed, reluctantly, on October 22 for Wheaton and her destiny”
― John Pollock

“Bell next mentioned the Sun Yat-sen ceremony and the other snags which entangled a registered school. "Church history shows that each age has its testing and that whenever the church has compromised with the world, it has suffered loss of power and usefulness”
― John Pollock

“The whole process of redemption was very familiar to them,' he commented, 'not only because they had pawnshops, but also because many of them had had to redeem loved ones by paying ransom to bandits.”
― John Pollock

“Nelson turned to his Bible and found himself reading in Genesis - how Jacob, at the brook Jabbok, wrestled with a Stranger, found it was God, and received a blessing which made a new man of him, but at a price: God "touched him in the hollow of his thigh." When Jacob left the place of blessing, he limped.”
― John Pollock

“Worse than bombers were bandits; old miseries had returned with a vengeance ... Banditry is simply sweeping this section of the country now as prisons have been opened and arms and ammunitions are being sold to all who will buy them. The future in this connection almost beggars description.”
― John Pollock

“They chose instead the foreign school run by Presbyterians at Pyengyang (now Pyongyang) in northern Korea. The Bells all went down to Shanghai, and Nelson took Rosa via Japan in September 1932, returning by train through Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Pyengyang was then one of the world's most Christian cities. The tragedy of North Korea lay fourteen years in the future. No one knew in 1932 that the Red Army would pour across the frontier a few days before the Japanese surrender of 1945 to create a Communist state of North Korea, which ruthlessly exterminated, exiled, or drove underground the faithful Korean church and made Pyengyang the atheist capital.”
― John Pollock

“They [authors of Rethinking Missions] deplored evangelism. One of their four principals ran: 'The use of medical or other professional service as a direct means of making converts, or public services in wards and dispensaries from which patients cannot escape, is subtly coercive and improper.”
― John Pollock

“letters reported the air raids had been confined so far to the airfield and to some harmless machine-gunning over the hospital to frighten nurses”
― John Pollock

“Lina Bradley (the hospital secretary) also volunteered to return. She said it did not look right to run away and leave the Chinese to do all the trusting and suffering.”
― John Pollock

“Pearl Buck had become famous for her novel The Good Earth in 1931 ... She expressed the view that missionaries were ignorant, arrogant, superstitious, and crude.”
― John Pollock

“For weeks she has had the plan of keeping chloroform on hand so in case she had to hide with MaiMai, she could put her to sleep and keep her quiet. She [Virginia Bell] carries on her work just as usual and is an inspiration to all.”
― John Pollock

“Early on November 2, 1937, Nelson, Virginia, Miss Lina, MaiMai, and Clayton left Tsingtao for the battle zone.”
― John Pollock

“Nelson Bell took Price's book down to Shanghai to the Christian Book Room of Christopher and Helen Willis (in the future they would be the last Western missionaries in Communist China, for Helen Willis maintained the Book Room until expelled in 1959).”
― John Pollock

“Discussing the report with Benjamin Clayton, he wrote: 'I am now in my seventeenth year in China, and I have seen with my own eyes the power of the gospel of Christ changing the hearts and lives of thousands of people. I see it every day and know that it works. ...

It is our constant aim to help the bodies of these people all we can, using all the skill we possess and also trying to keep up with the latest developments in medicine and surgery, but we still believe the soul of the patient is infinitely precious, and it is our constant prayer that God will help us to do the best job we can on their bodies, that through this we may point them to Christ who saved us and who is so willing to save them.”
― John Pollock