‘This is what the Lord has called me to do’

The Yi are one of the 55 minority people groups of mainland China. According to the 1990 census, they number about 6.6 million — the largest minority group in the southwest provinces. The largest concentration of Yi (over 4 million) live in the mountainous areas of Yunnan Province. The Yi are often divided into Black, White and Wild/Independent. The Black Yi are the ‘true’ Yi and generally owned the White Yi as slaves in feudal society. The Independent or Wild Yi are found in Sichuan Province and can be both black and white. These mountain-dwelling Yi are distinct because they have maintained more of their original culture than those in other parts of China.
The Yi language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language group and is made up of at least six dialects. The written language, which consists of 800 symbols, was standardised in 1974.
Christian work among the Black Yi of Yunnan began in 1915. By 1949, a Bible school and 10 large churches had been established. The exact number of Yi Christians is not known, but in 1991 it was reported that there were as many as 150,000 Yi Christians in Yunnan. Yi hymnals and New Testaments have been published to Yunnan believers.
(source: www.omf.org.uk)
By Tan Tan Yeo, Program Manager,
China Partnership

CHINA — Zhang Xuecai comes from a small village in Yunnan Province. He is a Black Yi (see right) who came to faith at the age of 12 through relatives who visited his home to share the Gospel with his family. He was baptised in 1979 and began preaching at the age of 16. In 1985, having worked for eight years as a teacher, he decided to leave his stable job to devote himself to serving God. He worked as an evangelist and then, in 2001, he was invited by the Black Yi Bible translation team to help with the translation work organised by the Christian Council/Three-Self Patriotic Movement, supported by the United Bible Societies.

Serving the Lord full-time has not been easy for Zhang. He has to support his parents, his wife and his two children. The family relies mainly on farming to sustain itself. He is now a deacon of his church. He also walks for between six and 10 hours each Saturday to visit a rural church, preaching there on Sunday and making the return journey on Monday. While he is away, his wife has to take care of the family and carry out all the manual labour.

The Black Yi people are not wealthy. Families usually let their sons have priority with regard to education if money is short. Zhang struggled to pay to send both his son and his daughter to primary school. When they reached secondary school age, he knew that he would only be able to afford to send one of them. It was a very hard decision: he and his wife did not want to abandon their daughter’s education because she wanted to study theology and then serve God. Without a secondary education, it would be impossible for her to go to Bible school.

Turmoil

The family did not know what to do except pray. In the midst of their turmoil, Zhang met a man who was helping the poor in the area. When the man heard about the family’s difficulties, he was touched and agreed to pay for the children’s education. “It was just as it is written in Psalm 23,” Zhang recalls. “God loves me very much. Even in the little things of life, he knows, he cares and he provides.” His daughter is now studying at Yunnan Bible College.

By the time Zhang turned 39, his family situation had become more stable. God had provided for his children’s education, so he began to pray for an opportunity to study theology for himself. The answer to his prayers came the following year when he was approached by the leader of the Black Yi Bible translation team to assist with the work. Offered the opportunity to learn more about God’s Word, he readily agreed.

“Even though I am not studying at a Bible college, this is what the Lord has called me to do, so I will give my all,” he says. “God knows what is best for me. He loves me. I want to do everything I can so that the Black Yi people can read the Scriptures in their own language and know that God is with them and loves them.”

For Zhang, the greatest joy of the translation process is the part that requires him to understand God’s words. This could mean reading a verse 10 times before he can translate it. There is another process he also enjoys, he explains. “Our lives should reflect our understanding of God’s words, active and living in us, so that we can live to please him. Our lives should be a ‘living translation’ of God’s words so that others may see God.” (WR 400/27 - 03.06)