BACKGROUND
In 1922, Charles Roberts, age 27 years, found himself teaching at the Hunan Bible Institute in Changsha, Hunan, China, a large and growing city south of Hankow. Changsha lay along the large Siang River, the major tributary to the Yangtze River from the south. This city was the heart of central China with a large population of 250,000 people, including an international community of approximately 200 foreigners. For the Chinese people, it represented one of their finest university cities and was also the most anti-foreign province. Hunan Province was the last to permit foreigners to enter in the 20th century. What was he doing here? An American medical doctor, Dr. Frank Keller, had invited Charles to come to teach Bible at a new spacious Bible Institute. Dr. Keller was a graduate of Yale University, and in 1911 its alumni had established a medical college and hospital in Changsha. Dr. Keller was anxious to make Hunan Bible Institute (H.B.1.) one of the finest educational institutions of its kind for the church in China. It had been founded by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (Biola) under the generosity of two fine Christian men, the Milton and Lyman Stewart brothers, who established the Union Oil Company of California. These men donated $1,000,000 in 1920 to build the Institute. Dr. Frank Keller had come to China at the turn of the 20th century as a missionary doctor with the China Inland Mission (C.I.M.) He was so discouraged at the wretched level of medical practice of simply cleaning up infectious wounds and venereal diseases that he decided his life would be better spent educating small groups of Chinese Christian men and women to go out in teams to the villages to preach the gospel much the same way that Christ had done with his disciples. Shortly afterwards Dr. Keller observed an American tobacco company representative marketing cigarettes from a small boat moving along the Siang River, handing out free cigarettes. This so disturbed him that he was more determined than ever to organize a bible school to educate young people to preach the gospel.
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs