Hudson Taylor on Faith and Money: Trusting God to Provide
Hudson Taylor is remembered for one conviction above almost any other: that God will supply the needs of His work, and that His servants should tell their needs to Him and to no one else. He held that work done for God should never go into debt. He refused to take up collections for his own mission. Over his lifetime hundreds of missionaries went out with him on those terms, with no promised salary.
He did not start with that faith fully grown. He set out to learn it as a young man in England, because he expected to have nobody but God in China. The story of how he learned it fills the early chapters of Hudson Taylor in Early Years: The Growth of a Soul, and he tells it again in his own words in A Retrospect. Here is that story, in the books' own words.
Learning before he left England
Taylor felt called to China at seventeen. As he prepared, one question troubled him. He did not doubt that God was faithful. He doubted that his own faith was strong enough.
When I get out to China … I shall have no claim on any one for anything. My only claim will be on God. How important to learn, before leaving England, to move man through God by prayer alone.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter X
He found a simple way to practice. In Hull, where he worked as a doctor's assistant, his employer had asked to be reminded when his salary came due. Taylor decided not to remind him. He would ask God to bring it to the doctor's mind instead.
Giving first: the tithe and Drainside
Even before this, he had settled what he would give. He resolved to give at least a tenth of all he earned. When he found that the money paid for his board also counted as income, he moved out of comfortable lodgings with relatives and took a cheap room in a poor part of Hull called Drainside, so he could tithe all of it.
Brought into contact in this way with many who were in distress, I soon saw the privilege of still further economising, and found it not difficult to give away much more than the proportion of my income I had at first intended.
A Retrospect, chapter 9
The half-crown
Then came the test he never forgot. The salary was overdue, the doctor had said nothing, and Taylor was down to a single coin, a half-crown. Late one Sunday night a poor man asked him to come and pray for his dying wife. Taylor found the family starving in a bare room. He wanted to help, but not with his last coin.
I little dreamed that the truth of the matter simply was that I could trust God plus one-and-sixpence, but was not prepared to trust Him only, without any money at all in my pocket.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter X
When he knelt to pray, his conscience would not let him call God "Father" with the coin still in his pocket. He gave it to the man. His joy came back at once. The next morning a letter came with no note, only a pair of gloves with a half-sovereign folded inside, four times what he had given.
Four hundred per cent for twelve hours' investment — that is good interest! How glad the merchants of Hull would be if they could lend their money at such a rate.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter X
The salary still had not come. A few days later the doctor finally remembered it, then said he had just sent all his money to the bank. Taylor kept silent and kept praying. Late that same night a wealthy patient turned up, for no clear reason, to pay his bill, and the doctor handed some of the notes to his assistant. Taylor went back to his room and praised God "that after all I might go to China."
The biographers explain why he could later say he had never made a sacrifice:
The compensations that followed were so real and lasting that he came to see that giving up is inevitably receiving when one is dealing heart to heart with God.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter X
London on brown bread
When he moved to London to study at the London Hospital, both his father and his missionary society offered to pay his costs. He turned down both, so that he would depend on God alone. He lived as cheaply as he could:
After various experiments I found that the most economical way was to live almost exclusively on brown bread and water. Thus I was able to make the means that God gave me last as long as possible.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter XIII
That winter he caught a fever from a pricked finger while dissecting, and a surgeon told him he was a dead man. He recovered, and God met his needs through a series of answers he describes in A Retrospect, chapters V and VI. The doctor who treated him, an unbeliever, heard the whole story and said, "I would give all the world for a faith like yours."
No debt
In China, the society that sent him often failed to send what it promised, and it borrowed money to pay its missionaries. In 1857, by then working in Ningpo, Taylor resigned.
To borrow money implied, to my mind, a contradiction of Scripture — a confession that God had withheld some good thing, and a determination to get for ourselves what He had not given.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter XXXIV
He had no other supporters lined up. He was ready to earn his own living if God did not provide. But he found the step brought him closer to God, not further away. The biographers sum up what he learned in that chapter by the Hebrew name for God, El-Shaddai, which they render "The God that is Enough."
Ebenezer and Jehovah Jireh
On the wall of the room in Ningpo where Taylor and his colleague Mr. Jones held services, two Chinese scrolls appeared. They read Ebenezer, "Hitherto hath the Lord helped us," and Jehovah Jireh, "The Lord will provide." Those words were tested soon enough. The two men were feeding seventy or more destitute people every morning. One Saturday they paid the week's costs and had nothing left, and that day the mail came in a week early with a remittance.
A few weeks later they were down to a single cash, a coin worth a fraction of a penny. They set out to sell their iron stove, but the bridge of boats over the river had washed away, and the ferry cost two cash each. They went home, found a little cocoa in the cupboard, and prayed. While they were still on their knees, a letter arrived from England with money. Taylor's wedding was two weeks away.
Oh, it is sweet to live thus directly dependent upon the Lord, who never fails us!
A Retrospect, chapter XVI
A hospital with no funds
In 1859 Dr. Parker, who ran the mission hospital in Ningpo, had to return to Scotland after his wife died. The hospital had been paid for by his private practice. Taylor took it over with no income for it at all. Within weeks the cook came to say that the last bag of rice had been opened. Then a letter came from his friend W. T. Berger in England with a cheque for fifty pounds. Berger had just inherited money from his father, did not want to raise his own standard of living, and asked whether there was need for more.
Suppose he had held back from taking charge of the hospital on account of lack of means, or lack of faith rather? Lack of faith — with such promises and such a God!
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter XLI
When his health failed and he left the hospital some months later, there was more money in hand for it than when he began.
What it became
These lessons became the rules of the China Inland Mission. Taylor would not solicit money, take up collections or issue collecting books. He asked God, and he reported to friends what God had done. Missionaries went out without any guaranteed income, knowing the mission would not borrow. When a chairman pressed him to allow a collection after a talk, Taylor explained why not:
I added that I thought the tendency of a collection was to leave the impression that the all-important thing was money, whereas no amount of money could convert a single soul.
A Retrospect, chapter XIX
The next morning that chairman, after a sleepless night of prayer, handed him a cheque for five hundred pounds. That same morning Taylor paid it on account for passage on the Lammermuir, the ship that carried the first party to China.
Read the whole story
These lessons read best as Taylor lived them, one test at a time. Start with chapters X through XIII of Hudson Taylor in Early Years, beginning with From Faith to Faith. For the shape of the whole book, see our chapter summary. For his life in brief, read Who was Hudson Taylor?, and for more of his words, see our Hudson Taylor quotes.