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God's nutcase
Alex Buchan

I met an evangelist in Henan province once who had managed to elude the authorities by perfecting an astonishing escape technique. He would preach standing on a small box. If police surrounded the church, he was able to unhinge his shoulders, tuck his legs up behind his neck and contort himself to fit into this tiny box. An accomplice would then pile a hymnbook or two on the top. When police burst in, he was nowhere to be found. They never thought of looking for the evangelist in the box, believing it too small to contain a man.

"Where on earth did you get the idea to do that?" I asked him, wondering if he had been a circus contortionist.

"The Lord gave me a Scripture," he replied.

I racked my brains for Scriptures that mentioned any Houdini-like prophets, but eventually I asked, "What verse did He give you?"

Back came the reply: "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30). It had saved him on numerous occasions from being jailed.

Some of the verses taken literally can be very difficult to comprehend. One house church elder in Fujian province was reading the story of Noah in Genesis 6, when his eyes lit upon a phrase he later said "came as sweet as honey and I knew God had spoken". The phrase was in verse 14: "Cover it inside and out with pitch."

He didn't know what pitch was, but he lived in a part of Fujian province where houses were made from a clay resin, so he decided God was saying his house needed an extra coat of this stuff inside and out. To the astonishment of his neighbours, he began the laborious task of creating an extra clay layer to his house. They asked him, "Why are you doing this? It's so unnecessary." He just replied, "This is my ark, and God told me to cover it with pitch." He neglected his fields for this task, and failed to gather in his harvest in time. He lost most of his crops.

Then, torrential rains and floods came to his area. For the first time in hundreds of years, entire villages were swept away. Houses collapsed--except for his house. The extra coats of clay had strengthened his house so unusually that it was the only one left standing in the village of 200 homes. His neighbours were so impressed, they donated some of their harvest, and he and his family ate better than ever throughout the following winter.

Of course, bizarre interpretations are not the exclusive province of Chinese Christians. I once met a man called Ole whom I could best describe as a "Christian Viking". A Scandinavian, he stood six feet six inches, and proclaimed himself as having the "ministry of horn-blowing". The Lord, he said, had told him he was a priest who had to blow horns around the world to make "the Jerichos of today tumble to the ground". His verse was Joshua 6:5: "They are to sound one long note."

Ole embarrassed me greatly by his ministry. I had agreed to go to Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong to meet a Scandinavian Christian as a favour to a friend who was suddenly unavailable. I stood with my white welcome board with "Ole" scrawled on it, though my friend had said, "You can't miss him. He's got a blond beard, and he's huge--think Goliath, and you'll know him right away."

Well, I hadn't spotted him, though his flight had landed an hour earlier. I turned away to go to an information counter. Suddenly, the air was filled with a high-pitched screeching sound that went on for about 10 maddening seconds, bringing dead silence to an arrival area filled with over 2000 chattering Chinese.

I turned around to see this huge man with a beard removing his lips with a smile from a large shell that had been his horn. Ole had arrived.

He walked in total silence through the shocked figures straight over to me. If I had not been so shocked myself, I might have pulled the board down and slipped quietly away. He said, "Hi. I sounded the Lord's note of triumph</#209>that's my ministry." The police then came up to warn me I was responsible for this man's actions while he was in Hong Kong.

Ole chattered in the taxi about the verse that had given him his call. Then he leaned over and whispered, "Every time I blow the horn, something happens."

I said, "How interesting!" I thought, "He's nuts!"

"Have you been to China before?" I asked, to change the subject. He had been, back in 1976. He told how late one night he had sneaked out of the Beijing Hotel and, under a starry sky in the centre of Tiananmen Square, had blown one long note to make his Jericho tumble. He was detained by police but was not charged. Evidently they thought he was nuts also. He leaned over and said, "I blew it at midnight on September 8."

I never saw Ole again, but months later I awakened in the middle of the night with a loony thought. I got up and consulted the Cambridge Handbook of Contemporary China. Mao Zedong had died at 12:10 a.m. on September 9, 1976, ten minutes after Ole had blown his horn.

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