James O. Fraser - Revival and The Fraser Alphabet

Revival and The Fraser Alphabet

Fraser developed a script for the Lisu language and used it to prepare a catechism, portions of Scripture, and eventually, with much help from his colleagues, a complete New Testament. Working initially on Mark and John and then on a handbook of Lisu history and language, Fraser handed on the translation task to Allyn Cooke and his wife, Leila, coming back to help the team with revision and checking in the mid-1930s. The complete New Testament was finished in 1936.

Fraser maintained a consistent policy of training the Lisu converts (usually whole households and whole villages at a time) to be self-supporting and to pay for their own books and church buildings. They raised their own funds for the support of pastors, of wives and children of their travelling evangelists and of festivals and other occasions. Unlike other missionaries of his generation, Fraser would not pay local preachers to go out, or for building local church structures, and this was something that put the Lisu in good stead for the years of Japanese occupation and the Communist persecution, particularly during the Chinese cultural revolution. Nevertheless tens of thousands of them fled during this era to neighboring Burma and Thailand. Fraser also left church government in the hands of Lisu elders; very little imprint was made on them that had a home church character, other than the tremendous prayer support the Fraser organised back in England for the Lisu and his work.

Throughout the 1930s other missionaries came to assist in the work, but the bulk of the conversions happened as a result of Lisu evangelists covering the ground and reaching not only Lisu but also Kachin and Yi people (Nosu). Revivals also broke out at this time. It is acknowledged by the Chinese Government that by the 1990s over 90% of the Lisu in China were Christian.