Young, George Armstrong., 1898-1991

George Armstrong Young, Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) missionary in China, was born in 1898 in Leicester, England to a working class Baptist family of Scottish background. Young had no early desire to become a missionary and after attending school in Glasgow he moved to London where he became a civil service clerk when he was sixteen. He fought in Belgium and France during the First World War and it was an experience on the battlefield at Ypres in 1917 which led to his deep Christian convictions. He returned to the civil service after the war but no longer felt satisfied with his former life and made the decision to become a missionary.

After training at Rawdon Baptist College (1920-24) Young left for China with the BMS in 1924. His first eight months were spent in Beijing then he went to the province of Shaanxi where he was based in Fuyints'un and where he continued his language training and began evangelising in the surrounding countryside. In 1927 he married Nora Haslop a missionary at the nearby station at Sanyuan. In 1927 the missionaries were forced to evacuate to coastal cities but the Youngs were able to return to Sanyuan in 1928. From 1929 Young was in charge of the Sanyuan and Fuyints'un mission stations. He continued evangelical work and set up food kitchens and orphanages to help combat the effects of the famine of that time.

...