The Meaning of Life

The torch passes in Surabaya, Indonesia, 1957. At a revival meeting led by Andrew Gih — the evangelist who had crisscrossed China with John Sung in the Bethel Band a generation earlier — a seventeen-year-old refugee boy from Fujian named Tong Chong Eng surrenders his life to Christ and to the pulpit. The fire lit in entry three of this collection is now lighting its next lamp. Over the following half-century, Stephen Tong becomes something Asia had not seen before: an evangelist who fills stadiums like a crusade preacher but teaches like a systematic theologian — two and three hours at a stretch, without notes, on God, truth, sin, and the meaning of human existence, translated sentence by sentence across the languages of Asia.

Tong’s signature evangelistic series — preached in hundreds of cities under the title “The Meaning of Life” — is built on three questions he says every honest person must face: Where do I come from? Why do I live? Where am I going? Modern man, he observes, has answers for everything in the middle — career, technology, pleasure — and silence at both ends. His anchor text is Ecclesiastes: God has set eternity in the human heart. That is why nothing temporal ever quite fills us; we were built with a cavity the size of forever.

What set Tong apart was his refusal to make the gospel easier than it is. He lectures his stadium crowds on philosophy — walking through the answers of materialism, hedonism, existentialism, and religion, taking each seriously enough to show precisely where it runs out — before presenting Christ not as a feeling but as the Logos, the Truth in whom origin, purpose, and destiny finally cohere. His motto: make evangelism theological, and theology evangelistic. The astonishing thing is that the crowds stay — hour after hour, night after night — because he pays his hearers the ultimate compliment of preaching to them as thinking beings.

Ask those who heard him what they remember, and it is rarely a single phrase; it is the sensation of being taken seriously — mind, conscience, and soul — and then being brought, by argument and by fire together, to the feet of Christ.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.”

— Ecclesiastes 3:11 — the verse beneath fifty years of preaching: the heart’s cavity is eternity-shaped.

“Make evangelism theological, and theology evangelistic.”

— Tong’s famous motto — the two halves of the pulpit, welded back together.

There is no single “that day” — there are thousands of them, which is precisely the point. Since founding Stephen Tong Evangelistic Ministries International in 1978, Tong has preached tens of thousands of sermons to millions of hearers across Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the Chinese-speaking world, often to crowds that filled the largest halls available. In 1989 he founded the Reformed Evangelical Church of Indonesia; in 2008 he opened the Reformed Millennium Cathedral in Jakarta — a church, seminary, concert hall, and museum under one roof, most of it designed by his own hand.

Tong reconnected two wires that twentieth-century Christianity had pulled apart: the evangelist’s fire and the theologian’s rigor. A generation of Chinese-speaking pastors worldwide — many converted or called under his preaching — carry the Reformed awakening he ignited, and his recorded expositions circulate through the Chinese church the way Spurgeon’s printed sermons once circulated through Victorian England. He proved, against every assumption of the age, that crowds will come back night after night for doctrine — if the doctrine burns.