Pastor George Douglas sends us the following from Liao-yang:
Several friends have asked me for an account of a series of meetings held in this city by Pastor Ding Li-mei.
Let me say at once that he has gone, leaving a fine stimulus behind. He turns everything into an occasion for prayer. This is his real source of power; he is Spirit-filled, for he is not a man of outstanding eloquence, though he has a fund of apt illustrations.
We began our day at 7 a.m. with prayer meetings in six different centres throughout the city. To these he bid our Christians come with slips in their hands showing what members of their families and other friends were not yet Christian and for whom they invited prayer. Jang-san mu-rin was then invited by the leader to state his case in public and give reasons. Thus the nets were cast early in the day. Pastor Ding himself did not attend these meetings, which was wise.
At 11 and 4 o’clock, twice daily, our church was crowded when Pastor Ding preached; his appeal being mainly to the outsider, but very skilfully turned upon the church member too. At his request I early sent a band of thirty workers round the city with my card (duly protected from abuse) and a printed invitation, which seems to have been well received. We called the meetings a Yen-shuo-hui, but the crowd came to a distinctively divine service with a full range of hymns and prayers and reading of the word. The preaching centred, where it ought, at the cross. One of the best addresses was on “The love of Christ constraining,” and our Manchu chief magistrate sat by my side one morning right through a moving appeal on “My peace I leave with you.”
Sixty-four new enquirers were enrolled openly before the congregation. This is a feature which Pastor Ding strongly insists upon without committing the candidates too much, and we are going to continue it.
There were none of the terrible scenes which characterized the great revival two years ago, but many came forward asking for prayer, confessing vows unfulfilled and carelessness as to the welfare of their neighbours. Then the same waves of general petitions swept over the congregation without the agony.—The Chinese Recorder, April, 1910, p. 308