GBC’s 66th Anniversary: Lessons from Lora Clement
As we commemorate 66 years since GBC was established, let us learn more about the life of Lora Clement. Lora was one of the missionaries whose ministry eventually borne fruit and led to the founding of GBC.
As Grace Baptist Church celebrates our sixty-sixth anniversary, we rejoice with the nation commemorating six decades of independence, and recount the goodness of God. And as Hebrews 13 exhorts us, we want to remember those who first spoke the Word of God to us.
The festivities around National Day on August 9th are a sweet reminder to do so. Anniversaries, even when not on milestone years, are good occasions to see how God opened this door for ministry, and how we entered into His kingdom.
Those curious about our history, can of course, refer to the written records of the church, documented on the occasion of our sixtieth anniversary in 2019. But only a few among us have firsthand memories of Ms Lora Clement, the American missionary who together with Ms Dorcas Lau, first came knocking on the hard doors of Kampong Silat to lead the lost to faith in Christ. It was their hard work that opened the doors to what Grace Baptist Church would become.
Knowing Lora Clement
But what was Ms Clement like? Long before she arrived in Singapore, she had already been a missionary veteran of some 35 years.
Ms Lora Amelia Clement was born on 24 February 1889 in Spartanburg County, South Carolina to Albert Patterson Clement and Sarah Ann Bishop. She attended Winthrop College in South Carolina and graduated in 1909, then Moody Bible Institute in Illinois in April 1915. For a brief time, she was a teacher. In October that same year, she set out to be a missionary to China with the Southern Baptist Convention.
She served many years in China, mostly among women and girls, before the Baptist missionaries were forced to leave China when the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949. In 1950, after a brief furlough ministering to the Chinese in California, Ms Clement became the first SBC missionary to Singapore, where she ministered for 8 years.
Truly God prepares those He commissions and despatches into the field. Had she not walked through the open door of ministry and cultivated faithfulness in China long before she arrived, Ms Clement would have never seen the ministry effectiveness she did in Singapore. Besides Grace Baptist, Kay Poh Road Baptist and Queenstown Baptist trace her as one of their founders. The latter traces its roots to the Sunday School she began in her home at Barbary Walk.
We also learn more about Ms Clement’s ministry approach, and her personality from the scattered records of her ministry, in particular, to Chinese women and girls. The records of the Southern Baptist Convention Foreign Mission Report in 1930 contain a memorable report filed by Ms Clement about her work in “Kong Moon” or Jiangmen in the Canton province of southern China.
Gospel zeal and faithfulness
Ms Clement describes her ministry setting in China among women who were left to domestic work at home while the men travelled abroad for business and opportunity: “In reporting the Woman’s Work of the Kong Moon field, it is well to say that here, where there are countless men and boys, the women outnumber them three to one. So many of the men and boys seek work in Hong Kong, the South Sea Islands, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, America, England and European countries. The mothers, wives and daughters are left at home to shift for their own living in many instances.” Her ministry modus operandi was thus long established before she arrived in Kampong Silat, to evangelise and witness among women who would allow her the time of day.
But Ms Clement did more than push her message at her hearers. We see her keen powers of observation in her detailed description of how the women occupied themselves with activity: “This they do by tilling their fields of grain, tobacco, tea, hemp and mulberries. Others work in their homes, make linen and cotton thread for weaving cloth, or make baskets and fans or weave towels.” Ms Clement must have been attentive indeed.
Like the apostle Paul, she was grieved that so many worshipped idols, and she was attentive to their heart cries and innermost desires: “Many supply the constant demand of idol-worshipping things, such as candles, incense sticks, paper and paper prayers. They labor along alone with the earnest hope and expectation that at some bright future day the family will be reunited in a new, beautiful home with sufficient means to support the family and to send the son abroad to take up the business left by the father.”
Ms Clement’s spiritual depth, bold spirit and deep commitment to serve Jesus are immediately apparent from her ministry report: “It is to these busy women and girls, the majority of whom cannot read, that we come to press home the claims of the Living Lord. Some give time, thought and heart to hear the gospel and are convinced of the message, yet because of darkness and fear of man they turn away until a more convenient time. Others, believing the Word, have life in His name.” How stirring to note that almost a century ago, this woman of faith was boldly moving among the Cantonese and challenging them to turn to Jesus Christ, the Light of the world, and proclaim His gospel.
We read also of her ministry ambition and zeal: “Our hearts have been stirred to reach especially those places where the gospel has not been preached before. The Lord has made preparation for this in throwing open the doors of opportunity by giving peace to the country, greater safety in travelling, and by changing the attitude of the people toward foreigners and Christianity.” For Ms Clement, the political circumstances served the cause of the advance of the Gospel, nothing more, and as her Lord was on the move, so should the missionary be in the field.
Graciously, God did grant spiritual fruit from the work: “In Kong Moon, where the work is more difficult in many respects, there have been two women to take a stand for Christ and unite with the church. One of these is in answer to prayer of relatives and others made for thirteen years.”
Ms Clement’s love for Chinese believers did not wane even when she retired from the mission field. Her prayers were for their endurance under trial, and for the Gospel to continue advancing among the Chinese. Art Toalston, writing for the Baptist Press, records that during “China's years of communist oppression of Christianity, Clement regularly prayed for the Chinese. She rejoiced as China opened its doors to foreigners during the past two decades. Chinese Christians "were persecuted terribly… But at the same time, the Lord kept them preaching the gospel, witnessing to his grace. Today, there are many, many Chinese who have turned to the Lord because of their witness…” Toalston records that even in her retirement from ministry, Ms Clement continued to speak in churches about missions well into her last years.
Ms Lora Clement died on 10 Nov 1991 at the Bethea Baptist Retirement Community in Darlington South Carolina at the ripe old age of 102, and was buried in Rosemount Cemetery in Union County, South Carolina. Her obituary in the Baptist Press referred to her as “the oldest retired missionary”. In her old age, she was a living embodiment of Proverbs 16:31: “gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.”
Reflecting on her legacy
What lessons can we learn from this life well-lived?
Ms Clement’s memory should cause us to be deeply grateful for the church we are a part of. She has survived 66 years of ups and downs, by the grace of God. Let us give thanks to God for GBC’s magnificent history!
But Ms Clement’s life also challenges us to consider our own sense of mission. Each one of us can bring the Gospel to friend, family and neighbour, and even to strangers as Ms Clement did, going door to door to speak of Him. And we should also take up the cause of cross cultural, international missions. As the worship leader prays for unreached people groups on Sundays, we can say amen in our hearts and get involved, both by learning about the work, contributing generously to missionary work, or partnering our missionaries for yourself. If we are not going, then let us be sending – and all for the Gospel to advance.
On our sixty-sixth anniversary, do the members of Grace Baptist Church carry the same missional zeal to see the Gospel preached where it has not been before? Will we pick up the baton extended to us by our forebears, and stand in the gap in this generation?
Do we grasp the peace of our circumstances, the ease of our travel and the receptiveness to Christianity as favourable conditions provided for the cause of the Master?
In the words of the late Ms Clement, surely God is “throwing open the doors of opportunity” for the Gospel. He calls faithful men and women to the cause of building His church, of advancing His kingdom, and of seeing the knowledge of the Lord cover the earth like water over the sea.
Frank Houghton, an Anglican, would have been one of Ms Clement’s contemporaries in the Chinese mission field. He served as the general director of the China Inland Mission up to the point of having to leave China in 1951. He famously penned these hymn lyrics of missionary zeal:
We bear the torch that flaming
Fell from the hands of those
Who gave their lives proclaiming
That Jesus died and rose
Ours is the same commission
The same glad message ours
Fired by the same ambition
To Thee we yield our powers
O Father who sustained them
O Spirit who inspired
Saviour, whose love constrained them
To toil with zeal untired
From cowardice defend us
From lethargy awake!
Forth on Thine errands send us
To labour for Thy sake.