Biography
Samuel Lamb, whose Chinese name was Lin Xiangao, was born in 1924, in Guangzhou, in the south of China, in the province of Guangdong, and grew up in a devout Christian family. He was educated in the schools of the city, and he was drawn to the church from his boyhood. As a young man, he felt called to the ministry, and he began to preach in his teens, in the years of the war with Japan. He was a youth of an earnest and quiet temper, who studied the Bible with care. By the time of the Communist victory in 1949, he was a young pastor in his twenties, leading a small group of believers in Guangzhou.
In the early 1950s, the Communist government set up the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, a body that was meant to bring all Protestant churches under state supervision. Lamb refused to join. He said that Christ alone is the head of the church and that no government has the right to rule it. He continued to hold meetings, in homes. In 1955, he was arrested for the first time, and he spent two years in prison. In 1958, he was arrested again, and this time he was sentenced to twenty years in prison, on the charge of being a counter-revolutionary. He was thirty-four. He spent the years in prison and labor camps in Guangdong and elsewhere. He worked in mines and on farms. He endured hunger, cold and beatings. He was separated from his family and from the church. His mother died while he was in prison.
He said that in these years, he learned to depend on God. He kept the Scriptures in his mind. He had memorized long passages of the Bible, and he said them over to himself in his cell. He prayed. He also spoke to his fellow prisoners about Christ, and some of them came to faith. He did not lose his hope. He said that the prison was his seminary. He was released in 1978, in the changes that followed the death of Mao Zedong. He was fifty-four years old, and he had spent twenty years in confinement. He went back to Guangzhou.
He began to preach again almost at once. He gathered a group of believers in a small room on Damaoshu Street, in the old part of the city. The meetings grew, and soon they filled the room, the stairs and the corridors. In time, the congregation numbered more than a thousand people, who came to several services on Sundays. It was one of the best known house churches in China, and visitors came from all over the country and the world. He taught the Bible plainly and with warmth. He stressed the cross, repentance and a holy life. He had a gentle manner, and people called him Uncle Lamb. His church became a place of training. Young preachers came to learn, and they went to the provinces to start new house churches.
He refused to register the church with the government. He said that he could not accept the control of the state over the church, and he held to this to the end. He was subject to constant pressure. The police raided the meeting, and he was detained for short periods several times. He was watched and was harassed. But the church survived. He also ran a printing and publishing work. He printed Bibles, hymnals and Christian books and distributed them to house churches across the country, at a time when Bibles were hard to find. He supported pastors in remote areas. He wrote a number of books and sermons.
He held to a firm and simple faith. He had no bitterness against those who had imprisoned him. He said that he forgave them. He also had strict views and took a hard line on questions of separation from the official church, and some of his fellow believers thought that he was too rigid. He lived in a small and plain apartment, and he did not seek to be known. He was a poor man who gave away what he received. He had a number of illnesses in his later years, but he preached until his strength failed.
He died on August 3, 2013, in Guangzhou, at the age of eighty-eight. Thousands of Christians came to mourn him. His life shows the effect of a pastor who refused to bend and who used his freedom to build the church. He is remembered as one of the great figures of the house church movement in China.