God’s Battle Axe – Dr Nelson Lemuel Bell

Nelson Lemuel Bell was born on July 30, 1894 at Clifton Forge, Virginia, United States of America, to James and Ruth Bell, both of Scottish descent. Shortly thereafter, his father, then director of Longdale Mining Company, moved with his family to Waynesboro, Virginia where Nelson attended public school and graduated in 1911. Bell committed his life to Christ at age 11, due to the influence of his godly parents.

The family began each day with prayers and his mother often chose missionary stories as Sunday reading lessons. Despite the interest he showed in these stories, he intended to be a lawyer. That was until a college classmate challenged him to become a medical missionary. Commenting on this encounter, he said, “That very instant, I knew what God wanted me to do…It was just as clear as if I heard God speaking in audible tones.”

 He attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington between 1911 and 1912, for prelaw programme and then, after deciding to be a foreign missionary, in the premedical programme. From 1912 until he became a doctor of medicine in 1926, he studied at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.

Upon graduation, Bell served a brief internship at the Summerlee Coal Mines of the New River Company in West Virginia, and in late 1916, he and his bride of six months, Virginia (nee Leftwich) arrived in Tsingkiangpu, China, where at the age of twenty-two, he became a surgeon at the largest Presbyterian hospital in the country.

He remained there, except for furloughs and one forced evacuation during the disturbances in 1927 and 1928, until the threat of war between the United States and the occupying Japanese forced him to return to America with his family in 1941. During one furlough, in 1922, he studied on a Rockefeller Foundation Grant at the Mayo Clinic, New York Post-Graduate Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.

 While in China, his sense of adventure included driving his Harley-Davidson car” over rural roads. He often encountered medical problems for which he had no background or training. For instance, kala-azar (black fever) was then a devastating scourge in northern Jiangsu, but after the missionary and a Chinese colleague developed a cure, their kala-azar clinic was the world’s largest. Despite many such achievements, Bell always considered medicine a means to the end of saving souls. For him, there was no separation between his “secular” work in the hospital and his “sacred” work as a missionary. Jesus was Lord of all. His passion for souls spurred him to invite leading Chinese evangelists such as Ji Zhiwen, Andrew Gih and Wang Zai to conduct revival meetings.

        In 1941, Bell settled in Montreal, Canada; from then until 1956, he practiced medicine in nearby Swannanoa and was surgeon on the staff of all the hospitals in Ashville. He was a member of the American Medical Association and the North Carolina Medical Society; as well as fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

        In 1941, in response to what he considered the alarming growth of liberal theology in his church, Bell, though without formal theological training and formal journalistic credentials, founded the Southern Presbyterian Journal to promote a return to evangelical, Bible-centred, Reform theology. From a monthly in 1942, the journal grew to be a semi-monthly in 1945 and a weekly in 1950. In 1959, when its second editor was selected, its name was changed to the Presbyterian Journal. Nelson, never the journal’s editor but its publisher, feature writer and guiding light, left it in 1971 when its board officially supported a move to form a new, more conservative church, one that would withdraw from the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States.

           In 1948, Bell was elected to his church’s Board of World Missions on which he served for 17 years. In 1950, he led the opposition to the proposed merger of his church with the Northern Presbyterian Church in America. The Northern church, he argued, was no longer true to the Bible, and to join with it would be a sell out to liberalism. He made speeches and wrote articles branding the merger a potential tragedy for the Southern church, which was one-third the size of the Northern church and thus could not hold its own in theological debate. His cause prevailed and the proposal was dropped.

             In 1956, after his second severe heart attack in five years, Bell retired from active medical practice. The same year, with the aid of his son-in-law, Billy Graham, and the President of Sun Oil Company, J, Howard Pew, he founded another journal, Christianity Today, to offset on the interdenominational Protestant level the theological liberalism he had fought within his own church in the Southern Presbyterian Journal.

He served as the new journal’s unnamed publisher and in later years, he wrote its most popular feature article, “The Layman and His Faith.” Christianity Today proved a solid financial success. It surpassed in subscriptions after only six years the long-time voice of liberal Protestant thought, the influential Christian Century.

          Despite a third and fourth heart attack in the 1960s, Bell continued to play an active part in his church’s life. In 1972, he was elected moderator of the 112^th annual General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. Though chosen as a man with conservative ties who yet favoured denominational unity, it was under his administration that the dissident members of the church finally broke away to found the National Presbyterian Church. The split grew in part from his own earlier opposition to liberal thought. Nelson died in his sleep in 1973, shortly after the end of his term as moderator.

          Bell’s life is a portrait of what God wants from all His children. What skill has He blessed you with for the church and the world at large? What are you doing with these skills? As the missionary himself said, “I am often overwhelmed with the goodness of our Father, what He will do through us if we let Him. The hard thing often is being willing to be led by Him.” A life totally yielded to God is the only productive life in His Kingdom.     

***** Nelson Bell, 1894-1973, https://www.prayforchina.com; Bell, Lemuel Nelson, https://www.ncpedia.org