Xiao Min

Before

Lü Xiaomin — known simply as Xiao Min — was born in 1970 into a poor farming family of the Hui minority in Henan Province, the rural heartland of China's house-church revival. She had only a few years of formal schooling and grew up an ordinary peasant girl, expected to do farm work and little else. She had no musical training whatsoever; she could not read a single note of music, had never studied composition, and possessed none of the gifts or advantages the world takes notice of. There was no earthly reason to think her life would ever matter beyond her village. But when the gospel swept through the Henan countryside in a great wave of revival, Xiao Min believed — and a love for Jesus took hold of her that she could scarcely contain.

The Turning Point

That love had to come out somehow, and it came out as song. As Xiao Min prayed, wept, and worshiped before God — often alone, working in the fields or kneeling at home — melodies and words began to well up inside her together, whole songs arriving as if handed to her. She had no way to write them down: she could not notate music and barely write the lyrics. So she would simply sing what came, over and over until she had it, and ask other believers to help her capture it on paper and tape. The first of these songs, born around 1990, became the opening of what would be called the Canaan Hymns (Jia'nan Shixuan) — 'Canaan' for the promised land her suffering people longed for. And they did not stop. Song after song poured out of her, not composed at a desk but received in prayer, each one a cry of love, repentance, or longing wrung from a heart wholly given to Christ.

After

Over the years Xiao Min has written well over a thousand hymns — by some counts more than fifteen hundred. With no publishing house, no record label, and no concerts, the Canaan Hymns spread the way the underground church itself spread: by hand-copied notebooks and worn cassette tapes passed quietly from believer to believer across China. Songs like 'China, Get Up and Pray!' became anthems of a suffering, surging movement, sung and wept over by tens of millions — and for many years, almost none of them knew the name of the humble peasant woman God had chosen to write them. She remained, by her own desire, hidden behind the songs, content that the glory go to the One who gave them.

In Their Words

“I am only an empty vessel. The songs are not mine but the Lord's — He gave them, and they are for His church.”— Xiao Min