I Maintain My Joy - Watchman Nee

The Final Letters

Near the end of May 1972, Watchman Nee was an elderly and seriously ill prisoner. For almost twenty years he had lived under the prison and labour-camp system of the People’s Republic of China. The public meetings that once filled his days had ended. The journeys had ended. The conferences, publishing work, training gatherings and correspondence with churches were mostly beyond his reach. His wife, Charity, had died before him. Heart disease had weakened him. He had little control over the conditions of his remaining life.

Yet one of his surviving late letters contains a sentence that has become inseparable from his memory: “I maintain my joy.”

Those words are often repeated as though they summarize his whole life, but they carry their weight only when the history before them is remembered. Nee had not spent his life in a protected religious world. He had worked through the instability of Republican China, the rise of Chinese nationalism, civil war, Japanese invasion, the growth of indigenous Christian movements and finally Communist rule. He had known illness, disputes among fellow Christians, exclusion from public ministry, accusations about his leadership and business activity, and eventually imprisonment.

Near the end, a fellow prisoner named You Qi Wu later remembered helping Nee during a transfer. Nee was weak enough that You Qi tried to make the journey easier with a small bamboo chair and a folded blanket. Nee asked him to carry a message to Witness Lee if he ever had the opportunity: he had not abandoned his faith in Jesus Christ.

Within days, Watchman Nee was dead.

The manner of his death has sometimes overshadowed the more complicated life that came before it. He was not simply a prisoner who endured. He was a Chinese Christian thinker, preacher, publisher and organizer whose ideas reshaped a large network of churches. He was also a controversial leader whose convictions about authority, church order and the place of the worker in the local church produced tensions that outlived him.

To understand why a sentence such as “I maintain my joy” mattered at the end, the story has to begin much earlier.

A Christian Home and a Personal Conversion

Watchman Nee was born Ni Shu-tsu on November 4, 1903, in Shantou, Guangdong, while his father was serving there. The family belonged to the educated Chinese Christian world that had grown through nineteenth-century Protestant mission work. His grandfather had been connected with Christian ministry, and Nee grew up with Scripture, churches and missionaries already present around him.

That background did not mean that he considered himself converted.

The China of his childhood and youth was itself passing through enormous change. The Qing dynasty fell in 1911. The new Republic struggled with political instability. Western influence was visible in schools, missions, commerce and the treaty-port system, while nationalist movements increasingly attacked the humiliations associated with foreign power. Christianity was therefore never only a private matter. Chinese Christians had to work out what it meant to follow Christ in a faith that many compatriots associated with the West.

Nee was a strong student and intellectually ambitious. His education included mission-school influence, but religious familiarity had not settled the question of his own allegiance to Christ.

A decisive change came through the preaching of the Chinese evangelist Dora Yu. Nee’s mother, Lin Heping, attended Yu’s meetings and experienced a spiritual renewal. One incident became important in Nee’s later recollection. His mother had treated him unjustly in a family dispute. After her renewal she apologized to him. In the social world of the household, the humility of that act affected the young man deeply.

Nee then attended Dora Yu’s preaching. He later described a struggle in which the issue was not merely whether Christianity was true, but whether he was willing to surrender the right to direct his own future. He understood Christ’s call as a claim upon the whole life.

In 1920, at seventeen, he yielded.

His later testimony treated that night as the dividing line in his life. He had known Christian teaching before it, but afterward he understood himself as belonging to Christ. Salvation and surrender remained closely joined in his teaching from then on. He would later oppose the idea that conversion could be reduced to accepting correct doctrine while the direction of the life remained untouched.

Learning Prayer, Restitution and Witness

Nee began trying to speak to fellow students about Christ. The early effort frustrated him. He could explain the gospel, but he saw little response.

A missionary worker challenged him about how he prayed for the people to whom he spoke. Nee began keeping a list of schoolmates and praying for them by name. He also became concerned with making restitution where he believed he had wronged people and confessing offenses that pride would have preferred to hide.

In his later testimony he connected these practices with a period in which many of those for whom he prayed professed faith.

The experience helped form a conviction that stayed with him: ministry could not be sustained by speech alone. A Christian worker might possess ability, knowledge and boldness and still lack spiritual power. Prayer, obedience and the hidden dealings of God with the worker mattered before public usefulness.

This concern would later become one of the strongest themes in his teaching. He repeatedly distinguished between what a person could accomplish by natural energy and what came from the life of Christ working through the believer. The terminology developed over the years, but the root of the concern appeared early.

Margaret Barber and the School of the Cross

Among the people who shaped Nee most deeply was Margaret E. Barber, an English missionary living near Fuzhou. She was not leading a large institution. Her own missionary career had included disappointment and conflict, and by the time Nee knew her she was living a comparatively hidden life.

Young Chinese believers visited her for counsel. Nee came often.

Barber exposed him to strands of holiness and “deeper life” teaching that had circulated through British evangelical Christianity. She also introduced him, directly or indirectly, to writers concerned with spiritual experience, the cross, holiness and the inner life. But Nee remembered her influence less as a list of books than as personal correction.

He was intelligent, forceful and capable of arguing his case. When he believed another Christian had treated him wrongly, he sometimes went to Barber hoping she would confirm that he was right. Instead, she pressed him to consider what God might be doing in his own character through the conflict. He later described how painful those encounters could be.

This background helps explain why “brokenness” became such a large word in his mature ministry. For Nee, brokenness was not theatrical self-denial. It meant the breaking of self-assertion, self-sufficiency and the determination to vindicate oneself. It was the inward application of the cross to the believer’s natural strength.

Recent historical scholarship has shown that this theme grew not only out of books Nee had read but also out of repeated experiences of conflict inside the church. His theology of the cross was worked out while he himself was learning how difficult Christian fellowship could be.

Fuzhou, Fellowship and Early Conflict

In the early 1920s, Nee joined other young Christians in Fuzhou who wanted a form of church life they believed to be closer to the New Testament. They practised believer’s baptism, gathered for the breaking of bread and increasingly resisted the denominational divisions created by foreign mission bodies.

The desire for indigenous church life had a particular force in Republican China. Chinese Christians were asking whether churches planted through Western missions had to remain structurally dependent on Western organizations. Anti-Christian movements frequently accused the faith of being foreign. Nee’s rejection of denominational structures therefore had both biblical and historical significance.

He was not alone in the early work. Leland Wang and other Chinese believers were important. Nor was the path smooth.

Disagreements arose about evangelism, church organization, publishing and authority. Nee found himself in conflict with coworkers and at one point outside the fellowship he had helped build. These events are important because later movement histories can make the development of the local churches appear almost inevitable. In reality the work emerged through painful disagreements among sincere Christians who did not all reach the same conclusions.

Nee kept writing and teaching. His influence began moving beyond the boundaries of one local fellowship.

The Printed Page and The Spiritual Man

Print became one of the principal instruments of Nee’s ministry.

He read voraciously. His sources included Scripture, Plymouth Brethren authors, Keswick teaching, holiness writers and books concerned with the inner Christian life. He had no seminary degree, but it would be misleading to describe him as unstudied. He absorbed enormous quantities of Christian literature and then reorganized what he had learned inside his own biblical framework.

He edited periodicals, produced tracts, answered questions and published teaching for believers scattered across China. This gave him a reach that travel alone could not have provided.

During the 1920s his health deteriorated badly. He contracted tuberculosis and for a time believed he might die. In the midst of that illness he worked on what became his largest early book, The Spiritual Man.

The book argued for a strong distinction between spirit, soul and body and explored what Nee believed were the consequences for Christian life. He warned believers against mistaking intellectual ability, emotion or strength of will for spiritual life. The book’s system was influenced by earlier holiness and evangelical writers, but Nee developed the distinction with unusual thoroughness.

Not every Christian tradition has agreed with his biblical psychology. Some readers believe he pressed the distinction between soul and spirit beyond what Scripture can bear. Yet the pastoral concern beneath the system was clear: spiritual life could not be produced merely by a forceful personality.

His own illness gave the argument a personal edge. Much of his public usefulness was being carried by a body that could not be taken for granted.

The Local Churches

As Nee’s writings and conferences reached more Christians, fellowships associated with his ministry appeared in different cities.

Outsiders sometimes called the movement the “Little Flock,” a label connected in part with a hymnbook title. Those within the movement generally preferred to speak simply of local churches or assemblies. The distinction mattered because Nee believed denominational identity itself was one of the problems he was trying to escape.

His ecclesiology came to rest on the principle of one church in one locality. All genuine Christians in a city, he argued, already belonged spiritually to the one church there. A congregation should therefore not take a denominational name that separated it from other believers in the same place.

Local elders were to care for the congregation. Workers laboured more widely to establish and strengthen churches. The system was intended to preserve local responsibility without making the churches branches of a foreign mission society.

The ideal produced real energy. Chinese Christians could gather without waiting for foreign control. Workers were raised up inside China. Publications circulated. Conferences trained believers. Churches multiplied.

But difficult questions followed. Who decided which workers carried wider authority? How were disagreements between workers and local elders to be resolved? What happened when one group claimed to represent the church in a locality while other Christians in the same city did not accept that claim? Could a movement organized around rejecting denominations avoid becoming a distinct denomination in practice?

These tensions became part of Nee’s legacy. His teaching on authority and submission inspired many believers, but later critics also warned that such teaching could be used to protect leaders from proper accountability. The history should preserve both the intention and the danger.

Britain, the Brethren and the Wider Christian World

Nee’s reading had brought him into close contact with Plymouth Brethren ideas, especially their concern for New Testament church order. In 1933 he travelled abroad and met Brethren believers in Britain and North America.

For a time there was fellowship, but the relationship eventually broke down. The Exclusive Brethren circles with which Nee had contact maintained strict boundaries concerning with whom believers could share communion. Nee’s continuing fellowship with Christians outside those recognized circles became a point of conflict.

The rupture reinforced his conviction that the unity of believers in Christ could not be made dependent upon submission to a narrow institutional boundary.

Nee travelled again in Europe in the late 1930s. He spoke at Christian gatherings and spent time with believers associated with T. Austin-Sparks at Honor Oak in London. Messages from this period later became some of the best-known English material under his name.

This point requires care. Several famous English books associated with Watchman Nee were not prepared by him as finished English manuscripts. Messages were translated, recorded, edited and later assembled by others. The Normal Christian Life, for example, grew out of addresses on Romans and related themes and reached its familiar English form through editorial work after the messages had been delivered.

The substance belonged to Nee’s ministry, but the publishing history matters when exact quotations are used. A sentence printed in a later English edition may have passed through translation and editorial reconstruction.

Marriage, Illness and Public Controversy

In 1934 Nee married Charity Chang.

The marriage itself produced public controversy. A relative of Charity strongly opposed the match and circulated hostile material about Nee. The episode damaged his reputation and contributed to a period of public strain.

Charity became an important companion through the most difficult years of his life. The marriage produced no children. During his imprisonment she would become one of the few remaining links between Nee and the world outside confinement.

Illness also continued to shape his life. Tuberculosis was followed by serious heart problems. The physical weakness that appears repeatedly in his teaching was not theoretical. He knew long periods in which his ability to travel, preach or work depended on health he did not possess naturally.

His ministry nevertheless expanded. Conferences, training sessions, publications and visits to churches occupied his years. Younger workers increasingly looked to him for instruction.

The larger the work became, the more serious the questions of authority became as well.

War, Business and Six Years Outside Public Ministry

The Sino-Japanese War placed enormous pressure on Chinese society. Travel became dangerous. Christian workers were displaced. Money became scarce. Communities were disrupted.

During this period Nee became involved in his brother’s pharmaceutical business. His own explanation, preserved in sympathetic sources and considered in recent historical scholarship, was that business income could help support Christian workers who were suffering materially.

The decision created a severe crisis inside the Shanghai church.

Elders objected to his commercial involvement and to other matters connected with his leadership. Paul H. B. Chang’s recent intellectual biography describes a six-year period in which Nee was excluded and ceased public ministry. This is one of the most important correctives to simplified versions of his story. The man later remembered as the central teacher of the local churches spent years unable to exercise the public ministry for which he was known.

Movement-produced accounts, hostile accounts and later political accusation materials interpret the controversy differently. Some accusations concerned money and business. Others touched personal morality. The evidence is difficult because some claims were later reused inside Communist denunciation campaigns, while sympathetic biographies sometimes passed too quickly over the earlier church conflict.

A responsible record should not decide disputed matters simply by choosing the account most favourable or most hostile to Nee. What can be said firmly is that his business involvement became a major source of conflict, that the Shanghai elders excluded him from public ministry, that the interruption lasted years, and that his restoration involved other leaders, including Witness Lee and Peace Wang.

The period deepened his later teaching on brokenness and the cross.

Return to Ministry and the “Handing Over” Movement

Nee returned to active public ministry in the late 1940s.

The years immediately before the Communist victory were among the most intense in the movement’s history. Training gatherings brought workers together for extended teaching on the church, ministry, authority and spiritual life.

A movement of financial consecration also developed. Believers offered property and resources for Christian work. Nee transferred control of the pharmaceutical enterprise into the work. Supporters understood these actions as a recovery of the New Testament principle that possessions belonged to God and should be available to the Body of Christ.

The scale of surrender was striking. So were the dangers.

Whenever spiritual authority, property and organizational control become closely connected, accountability matters. The local-church movement was not immune to the problems that can arise when a gifted leader carries unusually wide influence. Nee’s teaching tried to distinguish spiritual authority from mere human power, but later history showed that the distinction could be difficult to maintain in practice.

Nevertheless, the growth of the churches was real. Chinese workers were being trained. Congregations were becoming less dependent on Western missions. Publishing and conferences had created a shared theological world.

Then the political environment changed completely.

Communist Victory and a Narrowing World

The People’s Republic of China was established in 1949.

Foreign missionaries increasingly left the mainland. Protestant churches were pressured to sever foreign ties and to demonstrate political loyalty. The Three-Self Patriotic Movement presented itself around the principles of self-government, self-support and self-propagation, but these familiar missionary terms now operated inside a Communist political program that demanded increasing control over organized religion.

Nee’s earlier rejection of Western denominational control did not protect his churches from the new state.

His position in the early years was more complicated than later martyr stories sometimes suggest. Recent scholarship shows that Nee and Assembly Hall leaders made attempts to accommodate the new political order and expressed public support for aspects of the new regime. This should not be surprising. Chinese Christians were trying to survive in an environment whose final limits were not immediately visible.

The space narrowed.

Political accusation campaigns demanded public denunciations. Christian leaders were pressured to conform. Independent networks became suspect. A church could no longer prove loyalty merely by being Chinese-led and free from foreign money. The state increasingly required ideological submission.

Nee had opportunities to remain outside mainland China. He returned.

His motives have been variously interpreted: responsibility for the churches, confidence that he could still serve, unwillingness to abandon coworkers, or failure to grasp the full danger. The available evidence does not require a single motive. What is clear is that he stayed when leaving would have been safer.

Arrest, Trial and Twenty Years of Confinement

Watchman Nee was arrested in 1952.

He remained detained for years before the public proceedings that led to his sentence. In 1956 he was tried and condemned to fifteen years of imprisonment and reform through labour. Government accusations included economic, political and moral charges.

The historical context is essential. Communist campaigns of the period used public denunciation, ideological remoulding and accusation meetings against religious and social groups considered politically unreliable. The trial was not a neutral modern court process aimed only at establishing facts.

At the same time, historical seriousness does not require claiming that every criticism ever made of Nee began with the Communist state. Some accusations echoed earlier disputes from his pre-Communist ministry. The proper conclusion is narrower: the political prosecution occurred in a coercive system, some charges overlapped with older controversies, and the trial record cannot safely be treated as an impartial account of his life.

His fifteen-year sentence passed.

He was not released.

For a man whose life had been filled with words, the silence was severe. He had preached, edited, travelled, answered questions, trained workers and written constantly. Prison removed almost all of that.

Letters were restricted. Religious expression could create difficulty. His health deteriorated. Heart disease became increasingly serious.

Charity remained one of the few people allowed contact for part of this period. She too suffered under political campaigns. During the Cultural Revolution she was subjected to harsh treatment. She died before her husband, leaving him still more isolated.

Later retellings sometimes fill the unknown prison years with imagined prayers, imagined conversations and scenes no one recorded. That should be resisted. The known facts are sufficient. Nee spent roughly two decades deprived of ordinary freedom. His health failed. His wife died. Public ministry disappeared. He remained identified with Christian faith.

The Final Transfer and Death

In May 1972, with his health already poor, Nee was transferred again.

Testimony preserved from You Qi Wu describes the physical weakness of the old prisoner and his request that Witness Lee be told he had not abandoned faith in Christ.

On May 30, 1972, Watchman Nee died.

Relatives who arrived after his death learned that his body had already been cremated. There was no public funeral capable of gathering the churches that had once known his ministry.

The contrast with his earlier life is severe. A teacher whose influence had spread through conferences and books died almost unseen. A leader associated with many churches left no final organization under his own control. A man whose writings had spoken constantly of Christ as the believer’s life reached the end with outward usefulness almost entirely removed.

That is the setting in which the words “I maintain my joy” belong.

Teaching, Influence and Continuing Controversy

Nee’s influence expanded internationally while he himself remained inaccessible.

English-language books based on his earlier ministry circulated among evangelicals, house churches, holiness Christians, independent congregations, missionaries and later charismatic believers. The Normal Christian Life became especially influential because it presented Christian growth not as self-improvement but as participation in Christ’s death and resurrection.

Several themes explain why his work travelled so widely.

The first was Christ as life. Nee continually resisted Christianity reduced to moral imitation. The believer did not merely copy Jesus from a distance; Christ Himself was the source of spiritual life.

The second was the cross. The cross reconciled the sinner to God, but Nee also used it as the pattern by which natural self-sufficiency was brought to an end.

The third was the distinction between natural ability and spiritual reality. His terminology of spirit and soul could become highly technical, yet beneath it was a practical warning: giftedness is not the same as spiritual life.

The fourth was the church. Here his legacy remains more controversial. The “one city, one church” principle gave many Chinese Christians a way to imagine churches free from imported denominations. The same principle later raised difficult questions when local-church groups treated their own assembly as the practical expression of the church in a city.

The fifth was authority and submission. Nee insisted that genuine spiritual authority came from God and should never be confused with self-assertion. Yet teachings on delegated authority can be misused when leaders are treated as though disagreement with them were automatically rebellion against God. Later controversies in movements influenced by Nee make this a necessary caution.

He therefore cannot be reduced either to a devotional writer or to an institutional founder. He was both a Christian thinker of the inner life and a leader attempting to construct a particular form of church order in modern China.

What the Record Can Safely Say

Watchman Nee’s life should not be made easier than it was.

He was gifted, disciplined and extraordinarily influential. He was also strong-willed and repeatedly involved in conflict. His business decisions during wartime produced serious disagreement. His teaching about the local church created both freedom from foreign denominational control and new disputes about exclusivity. His teaching on spiritual authority has been used fruitfully by some believers and dangerously by others.

His Communist prosecution took place in a coercive political system, but persecution does not make every earlier criticism irrelevant. His later suffering should be honoured without turning historical complexity into hagiography.

The strongest witness in his life does not require that.

At seventeen he came to believe that receiving Christ meant yielding his future. As a young worker he learned that speaking to people could not replace praying for them. Margaret Barber repeatedly forced him to face the difference between being right and being broken. Illness exposed the limits of natural strength. Church conflict cost him public ministry. Political revolution eventually took almost everything outward from him.

At the end there was no platform to defend, no institution he could control, no public reputation he could manage and no remaining possibility of proving himself through visible usefulness.

There was only the faith he had confessed when he was young.

“I maintain my joy.”