Eric's Beijing Diary

Read in the ZGBriefs newsletter that James Hudson Taylor the third passed away. I don't know much about him. He grew up in China, as the son of a prominent missionary family, but the Communists had taken over and kicked the missionaries out by the time he came of age. He spent a number of years in Taiwan, and ran OMF (descendant of the China Inland Mission founded by his great grandfather) for awhile. But in my opinion, his greatest contribution to missions was after he retired and moved to Hong Kong, where he founded MSI Professional Services.

I supposed he would have had some measure of notoriety as the great grandson of Hudson Taylor, but he made his own unique contribution to modern missions with the establishment (with others) of the innovative MSI projects that have contributed to the development of rural China. I'm not sure if this organization is still operational in Western China, but during the nineties, their sheep loan program enabled farmers to build a flock of sheep from nothing with no capital investment. MSI did not give handouts. They loaned sheep to farmers, and then the farmers would replace the sheep they had borrowed, once they had been able to build up their flocks.