Biography
Geoffrey Bull was born in England in 1921 and grew up in an ordinary home. He was a bright and thoughtful young man who came to faith in Christ in his teens. He served in the Second World War, and after the war he felt a call to missionary work. He joined the Christian Brethren and went to China in 1947. He had an eye for the unreached and soon turned toward the borderlands of Tibet, in far western China, a region where few outsiders had ever lived.
He settled in the area and began to learn the Tibetan language and to work among the people. It was a lonely and demanding task. The altitude was high, the winters were severe and the people were suspicious of strangers. He kept going, traveling to remote villages and meeting people who had never heard the name of Jesus. Then history overtook him. In October 1950 the Chinese Communist army invaded eastern Tibet. They took the town of Chamdo, where Bull was staying at the time. He was arrested.
He was held prisoner for three years. The Chinese authorities accused him of being a spy and an agent of foreign powers, charges that were false. He was put through long and unrelenting interrogation. His captors tried to break his will through isolation and pressure. They put him in solitary confinement, and they tried a method of thought reform that was designed to wear down the mind. He was made to write confessions and was threatened with death. For long stretches he had no Bible, no contact with friends and no knowledge of what was happening in the world.
He has written candidly of the struggle. He described the fear and the temptation to give up. He wrote of the weeks when his mind seemed to slip and when the ordinary comforts of faith felt far away. He also wrote of the quiet ways in which God held him. He remembered the Scriptures he had learned and found them rising in his mind in the darkest hours. He prayed, sometimes without words, and he found that he could trust God when he could feel nothing. He saw that the grace he had read of in the Bible was real in a cell.
He did not claim to be a hero. He said that his own strength failed him often and that he was kept by God alone. He admitted that there were times he signed statements he later regretted. He was a man of limits, and he knew it.
In December 1953 he was released and expelled from China. He returned to England, thin and worn but alive. A short while later he wrote When Iron Gates Yield, first published in 1955. It recounts his experience with a poet's eye and a pastor's heart. The book has been read around the world, and it stands among the great missionary books of the last century. It is a story of the trial of faith and of the God who keeps His servants.
After his release he served in Britain as a Bible teacher and writer. He lived quietly and continued to speak about the cost of following Christ. He also remained burdened for China and for Tibet. He did not seek attention, and he declined much of the fame that came to him.
He died in 1999. His life stands as a testimony that the Lord keeps those who trust Him even when they are alone and tested beyond what they can bear. The iron gates of the prison did not hold him, because the Lord who had called him held him fast.