by David Murray (Author), Ruth H Finnegan (Editor). Callender Press (Milton Keynes 2025) 212 pages, Pbk £19.99
Reviewed by David Chapman
This is not a book I would have read were it not that I knew the author and the editor, but in the end I was glad that I did. David Murray and Ruth Finnegan (David’s wife) were both senior academics at the Open University and David was Jowett’s son. Ruth took the book through to publication after David died at the end of 2023.
I came to the book with a liberal’s deep suspicion of missionary work, but it was clear that this was the starting point for David too. As Ruth explains in the preface:
Like many of his generation [David] began with quite negative views of the missionary project and hence of his missionary father, It looked to be a typical ‘colonialist’ project to bring the superior ‘enlightenment of the west’ to the assumedly uneducated heathen – the ‘oriental pagans’. …
But David gradually discovered there was another side to Jowett. [He was] a pilgrim learning from Chinese tradition. He was sharing the Christian message so that it could be taken forward in the Chinese language by Chinese evangelists and through Chinese churches.
Jowett was with the London Missionary Society (LMS), and the LMS mission in China was both evangelical and educational. Quite a few of the ‘troubles’ alluded to in the book title relate to tensions between the two: what is the priority for LMS resources? This was a battle internal to LMS and in my opinion the book spent too much time on the ‘office polities’ of the Society. But running through the book are also rivetting narratives and major world events impinging on Jowett and the LMS, and we are drawn to Jowett and find ourselves rooting for him – even if we are not always on board with his motives.
A significant incident occurs after a period back in the UK, when Jowett returns to China on a Japanese ship, the Yasaka Maru, in 1915. The ship is torpedoed by German U Boats and Jowett is on a drifting lifeboat when, in the dark, a small French gunboat reaches them.
As the lifeboat and gunboat rolled towards each other in the dark, a voice was heard calling for them to jump. But in the dark of the night, with no ships’ lights, in a heaving sea, not one the seventy in the lifeboat responded. Then a Japanese stewardess from the Yasaka Maru… launched herself into the dark to be caught by the crew on the French gunboat.
Everyone in the lifeboat, including Jowett, then followed and was saved. Jowett used this leap of faith in the dark in his later sermons, but also saw in the incident ‘divine confirmation of the decision to return to China to serve Him’. It is a remarkable story, but, rather than a divine message, I see the extraordinary humanity of the crew of the French gunboat and the bravery of the Japanese stewardess.
Jowett is in China at the time of the civil war and the Japanese invasion of 1937. How the mission navigates these turbulent and dangerous times, and their relationship to key actors such as Chiang Kai-Shek (who became a Christian) is fascinating, and Jowett shows wisdom and courage throughout. During the second world war Jowett and his family (including David) were interned, suffering great hardship and privation.
In addition to the narrative of Jowett’s life, this is a highly reflective book, exploring wider questions of how people from different cultures interact and learn from one another, but also ‘meta’ questions of the nature of biography. My time invested in reading it was time well-spent.