Bertha Smith

Bertha Smith was born in 1888 in South Carolina, in a farming family. She grew up in the rural South, and she was a quiet and sincere girl who attended church. She trained as a nurse and had a deep desire to serve God overseas. In 1917 she was appointed as a missionary by the Southern Baptist Convention and sent to China. She went to Shantung province, in the northeast of the country, and spent the next thirty-three years there.

She worked in the cities and villages of Shantung, teaching, caring for the sick and helping the churches. She never married, and she gave all her energy to the work. She was a strict and disciplined woman, with a firm sense of duty. For a number of years she was busy and fruitful, but she later said that in her heart she was dry. She felt the lack of spiritual power in her own life and in the work around her.

In 1927 a time of crisis came. The civil war in China forced many missionaries to leave their stations, and a group of them gathered on the coast in the city of Chefoo. The Norwegian missionary Marie Monsen came to speak to them. She challenged them to examine their own hearts and to ask whether they had been born again. Many of the missionaries were shaken. Bertha went through a time of deep conviction and confessed hidden sins to God and to others. She said that God broke her pride and made her clean. From that time, she was a changed woman.

A revival began to spread in the churches of Shantung in the years that followed. It was marked by prayer, confession of sin and a new love for the Word. Missionaries and Chinese pastors were awakened, and the movement spread through the province. Bertha Smith was in the middle of it. She traveled from place to place with teams of Chinese Christians and missionaries to hold meetings. She said that the key was to deal honestly with sin and to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

When the Communists took control in 1949, she was forced to leave China. She went to Taiwan and continued her work there for a few more years, teaching and encouraging the churches. She retired in 1958 and returned to the United States. She was seventy years old, and she did not rest. For the next thirty years she traveled across the country, speaking in churches and conferences. She preached on the filling of the Spirit and the need for revival, and she was in demand as a speaker well into her nineties. She wrote a book, Go Home and Tell, which tells the story of the Shantung revival and her own experience.

Her manner could be blunt. She did not soften her message, and some found her too direct. She insisted that believers should clear up every wrong they had done and should be willing to confess in front of others. This was hard for many, and it was sometimes criticized as excessive. Yet she held to it, since she had been changed by it. She also made no claim to be anyone special and often spoke of herself as a poor sinner saved by grace.

She died in 1988, a few months short of her hundredth birthday. Her life stretches across the story of Baptist missions in the twentieth century, and her witness carried a call to repentance to a new generation.