Biography
Betty Scott was born on February 22, 1906, in Albion, Michigan. Her parents were missionaries to China, and she spent much of her childhood there, in the port city of Tsingtao. She grew up speaking Chinese and loved the land. She was sent back to the United States for her education and studied at Wilson College in Pennsylvania and then at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. At Moody she met a young man named John Stam, who was preparing to be a missionary.
John Stam was born in 1907 in Paterson, New Jersey, in a family of Dutch heritage. As a young man, he felt a call to China. He studied at Moody and was accepted by the China Inland Mission. In 1932 he sailed for China, and Betty followed a few months later. They met again there, and in October 1933 they were married. They were both in their twenties and full of hope.
They were assigned to a station in Tsingteh, in Anhwei province, a region where the gospel was little known. They lived in a small house and began to learn the local ways. In September 1934 their daughter, Helen Priscilla, was born. Betty wrote letters home that were full of joy. In those years, China was torn by civil war, and Communist forces were active in the region. The missionaries knew the danger but chose to stay.
On December 6, 1934, a band of Communist soldiers entered the town. They captured John and Betty and their baby. They demanded a ransom of twenty thousand dollars, a sum that the Stams could not pay. John wrote a letter to the mission to tell them of his capture. He said that he and Betty were in the Lord's hands and that whether they lived or died, Christ would be honored. The soldiers marched them through the streets, mocking them.
On the morning of December 8, they were taken to a hillside outside the town. John was forced to kneel, and Betty was made to watch. A man in the crowd, a shop owner, stepped forward to plead for their lives, and he was seized and killed. John and Betty were both beheaded. They were twenty-eight and twenty-seven years old. The soldiers left their bodies on the hill.
Their baby daughter had been left behind in the house, wrapped in blankets. When a Chinese evangelist named Lo Ke-Chi reached the house two days later, he found her still alive, though cold and hungry. He took her up and carried her, with the help of others, over mountains for more than a hundred miles to a place of safety. She was raised by Betty's parents in the United States.
The story of the Stams reached around the world. It moved many young people to give their lives to missions, and it has been told for generations. It must be said honestly that they did not live long enough to build a great work. Their witness lay in their willingness to give everything. Their deaths showed that the gospel is worth a life. Their daughter grew up to be a missionary herself, and their grave in China became a place of remembrance.