"I want nothing for myself; I want everything for the Lord." These words of Watchman Nee can be regarded as the motto of his life and ministry. The Local Church movement which he founded also spread overseas, especially after the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949. Through his itinerant preaching and voluminous literature work, Nee greatly influenced the conservative wing of the Chinese church. The theological vocabulary he formulated has become an important ingredient in today's Chinese theology. For almost 20 years, he was imprisoned by the Chinese government, but he kept his faith until his death.
Born in Swatow, Nee was called Shu-tsu, which means "declare your ancestors' merits." Later, he was renamed Tosheng, which is the sound produced when a time-watcher hits the bamboo gong at night. Shortly after his birth, his parents returned to Foochow, where Nee received his early education in Chinese classical studies.
In 1916, he entered junior high school at the Anglican Trinity College, which was run by the Church Missionary Society. However, religious activities at school did not interest Nee, whose sensitive mind was absorbed in the events of the day. Subsequent to the formation of the Republic in 1912 under leadership of Sun Yet-sen, China moved into a period of intellectual revolution commonly called the May Fourth Movement (1915-1923). This was a time when traditional Confucianism was criticized for its alleged inability to modernized the country and Western learning was introduced as a viable means to build the young nation.
Nee's conversion came in Apr 1920 after he attended a Gospel meeting of Dora Yu, a Methodist evangelist. Disenchanted with Anglican doctrine and liturgy, Nee spent a year at Yu's Bible school in Shanghai, where he received basic training in Christian living. He was deeply influenced by Margaret E. Barber, a British missionary who introduced him to the Holiness literature of writers such as T. Austin-Sparks, Jessie Penn-Lewis, D. M. Panton, Andrew Murray, and F. B. Meyer. Part of Nee's inspiration for Christian service came from the Keswick Movement and the Welsh Revival (1904-5). He also became familiar with the Brethren Movement through the writings of J. N. Darby, George Muller, William Kelly, and C. A. Coates. He also studied the lives of significant Christian leaders, including Martin Luther, John Know, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, George Whitefield, David Brainerd, John Henry Newman, D. L. Moody, Charles Finney, and C. H. Spurgeon.
Nee began his literature ministry in 1923 by editing Revival, a devotional magazine for free distribution. In 1926, he published The Christian, which succeeded Revival and gained wide circulation in only a few years. At age 25, during a period of serious illness, Nee wrote his first major book, The Spiritual Man, an exhaustive analysis of human psychology from a biblical perspective that seeks to explain the whole process of spiritual formation. These early efforts laid the theological foundation for his future career.
The Chinese indigenous church movement was gaining momentum during the 1920s. Many church leaders attempted to develop an independent, nondenominational church suited to the cultural and ethnic characteristics of the Chinese people. Nee's Local Church was a unique model in this broad movement. It began in 1927 with a small household gathering in Shanghai. This group multiplied quickly, and many local churches were founded. To the threefold ideal of self-propagating, self-governing, and self-supporting, Nee added the principle of locality, i.e., there is only one true church in each city. Such exclusiveness in defining ecclesial boundaries was controversial to Nee's contemporaries. Nee had a team of fellow workers, including Witness Lee, Simon Meek, and Faithful Luke. Through their ministries, local churches were planted in many cities in Southeast Asia.
Nee's theological outlook was influenced by the Brethren tradition. For a time, he had contact with the Exclusive Brethren in London. In 1933, he was invited to visit the Brethren communities in England and the United States. However, this relationship later severed because their principle for Christian fellowship was too restrictive and their emphasis on perfection in Christ too excessive for Nee.
In the 1930s, Nee was briefly exposed to the Pentecostal movement through the ministry of Elizabeth Fischbacher of China Inland Mission. He did not speak in tongues and reacted to that he deemed as excessive on the part of the charismatic groups. In 1938, he attended the Keswick Convention, and during his European tour he gave a series of talks on Romans 5-8. Based on this lecture series, his book The Normal Christian Life presented his theology derived from The Spiritual Man and mingled with insights gleaned from the Keswick tradition and Brethrenism.
After Pearl Harbor, Japanese occupation of China's eastern seaboard jeopardized the economy of the country. This affected the financial condition of Nee's movement. In 1942, Nee decided to help his brother George in his pharmaceutical company in order to raise money for his fellow workers in the ministry. But he was misunderstood and criticized. The elders at the Shanghai assembly forbade him to preach until he gave up his secular job. As founder of the movement, such rejection was a heavy blow to Nee and caused him to revise his ecclesiology regarding the structure of authority.
Subsequent to the Sino-Japanese War, Nee published several books on ecclesiology, including The Orthodoxy of the Church, Authority and Obedience, and On Church Affairs. In 1947, Nee consigned all his business assets to the church and was restored to his former senior position. His new ecclesiology was summarized in the Jerusalem Principle, which limited the power of the elders in the local assemblies, placed the whole movement under central control, and launched a program of evangelism by dispatching a host of workers to unreached areas. As a result, his movement continued to prosper at the eve of the Communist takeover of the mainland. By 1949, there were over 700 local churches with a combined membership of 70,000.
When the Communists came to power in 1949, the Christian Church in China struggled for survival. Any form of imperialism in the church was to be purified; and, under these circumstances, the Local Church movement was doomed. Nee himself was arrested in Manchuria in Apr 1952 on charges of corrupt business practices. Four years later, in a public trial in Shanghai, he was found guilty on political and moral grounds and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Some of his churches joined the Three-Self Patriotic Movement; others went underground.
In 1950, during a visit to Hong Kong, Nee had been begged by Witness Lee not to return to Shanghai. Nee refused and said, "I do not care for my life. If the house is crashing down, I have children inside and must support it, if need be with my head." Nee's love for God's church surpassed that for his own life.
Nee bestowed on the Christian church the legacy of a spiritual theology based on a trichotomy of the human constitution---body, soul, and spirit. Salvation for him lay in the restoration of communication between God's Spirit and the human spirit. He regarded sanctification as the lifelong process of the spirit's controlling the soul and the soul's directing the body. In the Christian life the spirit constantly walks in step with the Holy Spirit and in the light of Scripture. Nee considered the local church the most congenial environment for the cultivation of such spirituality.