Failure and Success in the Ministry of T.J.
McIntosh,
the First Pentecostal Missionary to China*
by
Daniel Woods, Ph.D.
If the name T. J. McIntosh registers with anyone here today, it is
probably in connection with early Pentecostal Holiness missionary efforts in
South China. But probably he is little more than a name to us, a brief mention
in the historical accounts of G. F. Taylor, Joseph Campbell, and others. We
know nothing of his life before 1906 or after 1913--and precious little of
intervening half dozen years of his ministry. We have no photographs. Only one
brief sermon and some scattered published letters have survived. He did write a
small book in 1909 titled The Life and Work of T. J. McIntosh and Wife and
Little Girl, Around the World by Faith, but no scholar has been able to
locate a copy.[1]
Other than the
important fact that T. J. McIntosh was the first pentecostal missionary in
China, what little we do know is rather troubling. Always starting things that
he never finished, he rarely stayed anywhere more than a few months. In China
he provoked the wrath of a veteran holiness missionary named S. C. Todd, whose
brutal letters lampooning the earliest pentecostal missionaries were carried in
mainline religious publications throughout Europe and North America during the
years 1908 to 1910. When pointing out that these enthusiasts arrived expecting
to preach in tongues but soon found the natives could not understand a word of
their ecstatic speech, Todd always “named names”--and he always named T. J.
McIntosh first. The last we see of McIntosh, he had left preaching to live on a
South Carolina farm. Shortly thereafter, the North Carolina Conference of the
Pentecostal Holiness Church voted to withdraw his ordination “on the grounds of
apostasy.”
So for years
McIntosh has been at best an interesting, if slightly embarrassing, footnote to
the early history of the IPHC. However, the recent work of historian Daniel
Bays, demonstrating the powerful impact of pentecostalism on the development of
Christianity in China, has focused serious attention on McIntosh’s pioneering
ministry for the first time in nearly ninety years.[2]
Hence, in 1999 I started a file on him in hopes that someday I would have enough
information to piece together his story. That day has come.
When the Annual
Conference of the Holiness Church of North Carolina met in November 1906,
McIntosh became the group’s first ordained preacher from outside the state. One
of their ministers was conspicuous by his absence. G. B. Cashwell had traveled
to Los Angeles to check out firsthand the reports that a modern pentecost had
begun at the Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street. Returning in late
December, Cashwell immediately began to preach the baptism of the Holy Ghost as
a third work of grace, subsequent to sanctification, obtainable by faith, and
evidenced by glossolalia. During the first several weeks of 1907, a tobacco
warehouse along the Atlantic Coast rails in Dunn became “Azusa East.” Preachers
and laity from a number of different groups flocked to Cashwell’s meetings to
seek their personal pentecost. McIntosh was among them. After speaking in
tongues, he told J. M. Pike, veteran holiness preacher and editor of The Way
of Faith, “that he was called to the mission work in China, and believed
that the Lord had given him the language.” Finding the young man “untrained,
utterly without knowledge of the field,” and without “a dollar in the world,”
Pike urged caution, but McIntosh was “filled with holy enthusiasm, and
overflowing with love for perishing souls, and felt called to go at once.”[3]
In February, just
after the Dunn meetings concluded, McIntosh convinced Cashwell to accompany him
to Berkeley County, South Carolina. This was probably McIntosh’s home, for he
had friends and family there, and he often returned to the St. Stephens
community when he was not overseas. Annie McIntosh’s aunt, Anne Kirby, preached
there with the future Pentecostal Holiness leader F. M. Britton. For several
years Britton had led a group called “the saints or Church of God” who kept the
Old Testament Feast of Pentecost and met only in upper rooms in hopes that God
would pour out the “latter rain” on them. McIntosh took an active role in
helping Cashwell convince them that there was a better path to the promised
endtime blessing. In short order, the Brittons, Kirby, and more than twenty
others had received the pentecostal experience complete with the “Bible
evidence.”[4]
For the next several
months, the McIntoshs drop from sight, but by June they were crossing America
“on faith.” Calculating that he would need $400 to get his family to the other
side of the world, McIntosh had the prospect of some support from the Berkelely
Camp Meeting, as well as from the readers of The Apostolic Evangel, the
Georgia-based paper of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church. He left, however,
without the official sanction of his own denomination. In Memphis, McIntosh spoke
in tongues “to a Chinaman on the street,” who said “that he understood me, and
that I talked to him about God and the Spirit.” Once at Azusa Street, he felt
God impressing him to go to a place called “Macao.” Never having heard of it,
he was relieved to locate the Portuguese colony on a map of the southern Chinese
coast. For some reason, perhaps because McIntosh refused to test his gift in
the Chinese section of Los Angeles, the leadership of the Apostolic Faith
Mission refused to undertake his support, but several individuals gave him
enough money to head north for San Francisco and passage to the Orient.[5]
When the McIntoshs
arrived in Macao on August 7th, they found an expectant audience. Twenty-five
missionaries (most of them vacationing on the coast during the hottest part of
the year) and five or six natives crowded into a room that night “to learn of
Pentecost.” Apparently undeterred by his inability to preach in Chinese,
McIntosh focused his message on the revelation that true Holy Ghost baptism
would be marked by unknown tongues. Several came close to receiving that night,
McIntosh reported, and the power of God fell on one man causing him “to roll the
floor and shout.” While S. C. and Lillian Todd were away on a lengthy trip to
Japan, residents of their Macao mission home helped the McIntoshs rent a house,
find furniture, and set up nightly meetings.[6]
Despite the initial
interest, Macao proved hard ground. In a letter dated August 22nd, McIntosh
complained that “the devil has crept in” and all but two or three of the
missionaries “have quit seeking.” More interest existed among the natives.
That evening, for example, “three Chinese girls received the baptism and spoke
in tongues.” Immediately “two ladies came running upstairs and tried to stop
them.” When McIntosh “rebuked them in the name of Jesus,” they promised to
have the Portuguese government deport him. By the end of the month, however,
two vacationing missionaries from the Christian and Missionary Alliance station
at Wuchow had been baptized in the Holy Ghost, and at least two residents of the
Todds’ mission home were earnestly “tarrying.”[7]
September was a
month of harvest. A wealthy resident of Canton, after donating money, a watch,
and an organ to McIntosh’s ministry, invited him to come and preach in his
home. After two weeks in Canton, thirty-three Chinese had been filled with the
Spirit. Meanwhile, pentecostal revival broke out in Wuchow once the two
missionaries returned. At least six of their colleagues, and an even larger
number of Chinese Christians, spoke in tongues there. “Just think,” McIntosh
wrote in late September, “in about one month seventy have received the Holy
Ghost with Bible evidence. About fourteen are missionaries, and the rest are
Chinese.”[8]
The revival among
the missionaries cooled off quickly that Fall, especially once S. C. Todd
returned from Japan. In Yokohama, he had visited a pentecostal service held by
“a party of about a dozen missionaries from the state of Washington.” Two of
these, May Law and Rosa Pittman, soon left Japan “because they felt they had the
gift of the `Hongkong’ dialect.” Once there, they joined forces with A. G. and
Lillian Garr, who had taken the Azusa message to India a year earlier and had
just arrived in the city. On Todd’s trip home, he attended two of their
services. Arriving in Macao, he found McIntosh no more able to preach in
tongues than the pentecostals he encountered in Japan and Hong Kong. This
proved a keen disappointment to Todd. For more than a year he had followed
accounts of the Los Angeles outpouring and “rejoiced that the hard problem of
acquiring these heathen languages had been solved.” Yet he also had experience
with the consequences of misguided enthusiasm, having dealt for several years
with two “young ladies” who had come to Macao around 1903 mistakenly “expecting
to speak in the native tongue” only to backslide. Ultimately, though, it was
McIntosh’s insistence that all who were truly baptized in the Holy Spirit would
speak in tongues that most troubled Todd, along with the youthful preacher’s
“harsh, repulsive, denunciatory Spirit” with those who disagreed with him.[9]
In turn, McIntosh
must also have been troubled by the reaction of Todd, whose support he had
reason to expect. While the two South Carolinians had never met, they had many
common acquaintances. As the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s Field
Superintendent for the Southern States from 1898 to 1900, Todd helped his
hometown friend and fellow Presbyterian evangelist, N. J. Holmes, establish the
Altamont Bible Institute, and he also conducted the first Falcon Camp Meeting as
a CMA “missionary convention.” In 1901 Todd, Holmes, and J. M. Pike moved their
respective ministries to Atlanta in an attempt to create a southern version of
the CMA’s New York complex. Todd also continued to work with the leaders of the
Holiness Church of North Carolina through their mutual involvement in the
overseas missions efforts of J. O. McClurkan’s Pentecostal Mission in
Nashville. Although Todd and his wife, a former CMA missionary to China, left
America for Macao in 1904, he maintained contact with his holiness friends in
the South.[10]
In October 1907,
Todd wrote a fairly open-minded letter to Holmes, asking his opinion of the
“tongues movement” and requesting that the Altamont community have special
prayer for his mission in Macao. His old friend sent a detailed defense of the
pentecostal message, along with the assurance that the entire school had sought
God for three hours and “felt great victory for the cause of Christ there.”
Holmes added, “We trust peace and unity of Spirit may prevail.” But it was not
to be. McIntosh gave Todd a disturbing letter to mail to F. M. Britton. It
contained more than one hundred and fifty Chinese-looking characters, with the
note, “As I was Righting to you the Spirit came on me to Right in what I believe
to be the Chinese language[.] Glory to God.” Todd never mailed it. He soon
received an even more troubling letter from an acquaintance in Alabama, the
mother of future Pentecostal Holiness missionary Anna Deane Cole, “saying her
fourteen-year-old daughter has the gift of tongues and can speak some dozen
languages, and . . . feels called to China. She wishes to know what kind of
clothes to make up for her.” “Think of it!” the outraged Todd wrote. “If that
mother knew the awful sweep of heathenism, with its deadening, soul-sapping
power, she would hold her child to her bosom and say, `not yet.’” Todd suffered
another blow when one of his colleagues, Fannie Winn, left his mission after
praying through to pentecost with the McIntoshs. By January 1908, Todd’s
reports of the “sad failures” of the pentecostal missionaries had begun to
appear in religious periodicals in America. The accounts invariably started
with McIntosh.[11]
Pike immediately
defended McIntosh in his widely-read paper. Admitting that God seemed to be
“using unpromising material as never before,” he wondered why Todd did not
recognize “the young man’s Christian love and zeal” when pointing out his
failures. After all, Pike concluded, “notwithstanding the mistake regarding the
language, God is greatly using the new missionary in spreading the Pentecostal
fire.” But the truth is that McIntosh made few advances in Macao once Todd came
against him, and he frequently thought about moving on. Early during his stay
in China, McIntosh nearly left when someone told him his tongues were not
Chinese but “the Malay language.” In November, McIntosh reported that the
colonial officials “have twice forbidden us to make any noise” and have “made a
new law that all foreigners must register.” On his way home from registering,
McIntosh suddenly felt another calling as “something within me began . . . to
say, `Go on your way to Palestine, to the country or town called Shaaraim.’”[12]
By the end of the
year, McIntosh was spending an increasing amount of time visiting with A. G.
Garr, eventually expressing a desire to move to Hong Kong and consolidate their
efforts. In particular, he felt a burden to publish a pentecostal paper in
Chinese. God gave him the name, Pentecostal Truths, and showed him that
“it was going all over China.” Mok Lai Chi, a Hong Kong schoolmaster who served
as Garr’s interpreter, helped get the paper off the ground and quickly took it
over. McIntosh could not seem to find his place. The arrival in January of two
new missionaries, Sister McIntosh’s aunt Anne Kirby and her teenage companion
Mabel Evans, failed to revive the movement in Macao. By February, they left
with Fannie Winn for Canton, hoping to build on McIntosh’s earlier success in
the city. Back in Macao, McIntosh complained that Todd and other missionaries
were using their influence--and their fluency in Chinese--to teach the natives
“that we are under a delusion.” But in his last letter from the city, McIntosh
turned the blame on himself for failing to “abide in Christ” to the degree that
he could bear miraculous fruit.[13]
In May 1907 the
McIntosh family, recently increased by the birth of another child, left for
Palestine. Again traveling “on faith,” they arrived in Jerusalem knowing no one
and with only seventy cents to spare. They soon met pentecostal missionary Lucy
Leatherman, who helped them get a room. We know little of McIntosh’s ministry
there, not even if he ever made it to Shaaraim. He did tour the holy sites. At
Gethsemane, McIntosh explained, “the Holy Spirit spoke with my tongue to a
priest, and he threw his arms around me and patted me on the shoulder, and
repeated the same words that the Spirit spoke with my tongue.”[14]
After a few months
in Palestine, McIntosh returned to America to recharge for another missionary
venture. At the Atlanta Camp Meeting, the Church of God in Christ Convocation,
and the Annual Conference of the Holiness Church of North Carolina, he found
great interest in his “missionary talks.” This gave him the idea to write a
book of his adventures that he could sell and use the proceeds to finance a
pentecostal tent crusade from Egypt to China. McIntosh and family wintered in
Columbia, sharing the living quarters at Pike’s Oliver Gospel Mission with the
A. E. Robinson family. We hear little from them during this time but do know
that their baby died at some point in late 1908 or early 1909. In April
McIntosh announced that he had finished his book and would get it printed as
soon as he had the money.[15]
The book was finally
printed in August 1909, just in time for the Falcon Camp Meeting. By then,
McIntosh had purchased or borrowed a tent and was preaching his way through the
Carolinas. His services were loud and effective, with the saints sometimes
“leaping and shouting and speaking in tongues until 12 o’clock.” Outside the
tent, young people fell on their faces to pray for souls. McIntosh rejoiced
that God miraculously confirmed his “full salvation” preaching, in particular by
empowering him to cast out demons. But that October in Rockingham, North
Carolina, a large mob led by the mayor and deputy sheriff pulled down the tent
he had planned to take to Asia and burned it.[16]
We next catch sight
of the McIntoshs celebrating Thanksgiving at the Upper Room Mission in Los
Angeles. According to Annie McIntosh, “we took the Lord’s supper, . . . washed
the Saints’ feet, shouted, prayed, and sang together of that man that died for
us!” In December, they left America once more, leading a group of at least nine
to work with the Garrs in Hong Kong. Shortly after their arrival, though, the
Garrs departed unexpectedly for Bombay, leaving T. J. McIntosh in charge of
their recently-opened mission home and its residents. Here he would work
directly with May Law, Anna Deane, Mok Lai Chi, and many others throughout 1910.[17]
At first a great
spirit of expectancy filled the mission on Wanchai Road. In early February,
after several sick children had been healed in response to prayers by the
pentecostal band, large crowds began to gather each evening. One missionary
wrote that they would bang loudly on the mission doors to gain admission and
then often stand around “as though spellbound” after the meeting ended. On one
particularly memorable night, the doors were never opened. As McIntosh
explained, “Mok said that there was one of the Chinese brothers who was seeking
the Holy Ghost and that God was evidently working on him: so I suggested that
we do not yet open the doors and let the heathen in, but have prayer with the
saints and try to get this brother through.” For more than three hours, “the
power fell on us, and three Chinese men received the baptism and three or four
more were under the power.” The workers “leaped, danced, shouted and talked in
tongues until about eleven o’clock.” “We are looking to God for great things in
South China,” McIntosh wrote the next day.[18]
Despite these
initial successes, the mission soon began to founder under McIntosh’s
leadership. In April Mok moved his ministry across the city to Caine Road, and
Anna Deane followed him with her fledgling school for girls. Thereafter, the
crowds declined on Wanchai Road. McIntosh twice reported that “the work was
moving on,” but noted that only a few Chinese were receiving the Holy Ghost.
Increasingly, he put much of his energy into wrestling with a second book (which
was never published). A bold witness to pentecost, McIntosh seems to have
struggled whenever his calling required that he write or teach. In July, Mok
complained that a skilled Bible instructor was desperately needed in Hong Kong
to counteract the doctrinal divisions created among the city’s pentecostals by
“no hellism” and finished work teachings. In the same letter, he also noted
that McIntosh felt called to leave for Jerusalem the following month, and that
the mission home would probably close.[19]
McIntosh did not go
to Jerusalem in August but kept the struggling mission alive by relocating to a
less expensive house across the bay in Kowloon. Merely paying the bills,
however, did not satisfy him. “We are still sowing and plowing in hope, and
trusting God to give the increase,” McIntosh admitted in early October, but “the
work is moving along slowly here.” Amid the discouragement, a new vision began
to stir in him. Some of the residents of his mission, including May Law and
several of the young women who accompanied her to China in late 1907, “have been
studying the language, the people and their customs long enough to begin to do
active work among them: they are really anxious to go inland to the needy
cities where they have no missions, and they OUGHT TO BE SENT FORTH!” McIntosh
explored the interior beyond Canton by rail and discovered Sai Nam, a city of
more than a hundred thousand people and “not a foreign resident or foreign
missionary in it.” Immediately he could see that it “would be better to have a
headquarters at Sai-nam than Hong Kong.” Not only would money stretch much
farther in Sai Nam; within five miles of the city “about a million people” lived
in “scores of villages,” each in need of a pentecostal missionary presence.
Without consultation, McIntosh “moved forward in the name of the Lord,” renting
a building Sai Nam and beginning the renovations necessary to move his team of
missionaries inland.[20]
McIntosh’s plans
seem to have caused some tension with Mok and Deane, who pressured
unsuccessfully several of the more experienced American women to remain in Hong
Kong. Meanwhile J. H. King arrived with a large group of new missionaries, most
with their agendas still open to the Spirit’s guidance. In answer to Mok’s
prayer for effective teaching, King lectured and preached at the mission on
Caine Road for more than a month to the growing crowd of American and Chinese
pentecostal workers in the city. During this “convention,” McIntosh apparently
convinced King and his party that the most fruitful ground lay in the interior.
By December, the entire group moved on to Sai Nam, where King taught for more
two months before continuing his world tour of pentecostal missions. Most of
his traveling companions, though, stayed with McIntosh, Law, and the others who
had moved from Kowloon, helping them build a church, school, and orphanage over
the next several months. Yet just as McIntosh appeared to be entering his most
stable period of ministry in China, he suddenly took his family back to
Jerusalem, where, he wrote, “the Lord gave me Jer. 12:11” and “the impression
that I should open a home here for these poor beggar Jews.” Homer Faulkner, who
had traveled extensively with King in North America before accompanying him to
China, assumed leadership in Sai Nam and reorganized the work “along independent
lines.”[21]
At this point T. J.
McIntosh nearly disappears from sight. In November 1911 he is living once again
in South Carolina. About the same time, The Bridegroom’s Messenger
stopped offering his book for sale, and the North Carolina Conference of the PHC
voted to give him $103 to cover his personal indebtedness at Sai Nam. At the
1912 North Carolina Annual Conference, McIntosh received an appointment as
general conference evangelist, served on the missions committee with J. H. King
and PHC General Superintendent S. D. Page, and listed his address as South
Lynchburg, South Carolina. The only subsequent mention of McIntosh is his
expulsion from the PHC the following year “on the grounds of apostasy.”[22]
What are we to make
of so mercurial a figure in IPHC history? His flaws are painfully obvious.
McIntosh could not preach in tongues (while he was not alone in this failure, no
one else was so widely ridiculed for it); he tended to rebuke his critics when
he felt backed into a corner; his reliance on visions, impressions, and voices
led him to start many projects and finish none; and in the end he seems to have
lost his faith. But as J. M. Pike suggested when he defended McIntosh from S.
C. Todd’s attacks, we need to judge his ministry with some Christian “charity
and forbearance.” When McIntosh encountered the power of the Holy Ghost, he did
not allow his lack of money, education, or experience to deter him. Fully
trusting “the supply of the Spirit,” he stormed ahead when others hesitated. In
1907 this boldness made him the first person to take the pentecostal message to
China, where the movement is still flourishing despite decades of communist
oppression. In 1908 it led him to launch Pentecostal Truths, the Chinese
language paper that perhaps did more than any other enterprise to broadcast the
full gospel message throughout the nation.[23]
In 1909 it helped him rebound from the destruction of his dream for a pan-Asia
tent crusade to travel once more to China “on faith.” And in 1910 it gave him
the courage to move his family to Sai Nam, an area known for fever and floods,
to establish the first Pentecostal Holiness mission in the interior of China.
Whatever his shortcomings and ultimate fate, for nearly five years T. J.
McIntosh continually confirmed Pike’s initial assessment of him as a man “filled
with holy enthusiasm, and overflowing with love for perishing souls.”[24]
*Presentation at the International Pentecostal Holiness
Church Archives Luncheon, 24th General Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 9,
2001
