Peter TORJESEN

   Cause of his death was killed by a Japanese bombing raid.

   Other names for Peter were Petter TORJESEN and Ye YONGQING.

  Noted events in his life were:

• Occupation, 1909, Norway. bookkeeper, cashier, clerk and correspondent in Norwegian, English and German

• Migration: from Minnesota, 1916, Illinois. went on to Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Chicago

• Immigration: from America, 1916, Norway. needed for military service at home

• Immigration: from Norway, 1918, China. via the U.S., ordained by the Norwegian Evangelical Free Church in Brooklyn

followed by two-year Chinese course with the China Inland Mission [CIM]

• Biography. ¹ Peter Torjesen (1892 - 14 December 1939) was a Norwegian missionary to China with the China Inland Mission.

When Peter was 18, he heard the call to evangelize China. That day, he not only emptied his wallet into the collection plate, but included a small note with the words, "And my life." Eight years later, 1918, he arrived in China.

On 17 January 1923 he married Valborg in Lan Xian, China.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War Peter, and his wife Valborg opened their home and church premises in Hequ, Shanxi, to shelter up to 1,000 refugees.

Torjesen died on 14 December 1939, the result of a Japanese bombing raid at Hequ, Shanxi.

Legacy
Torjesen's family were informed by Hequ county officials in 1988 that Peter was on the county's list of "people's martyrs", and that the county wanted to erect a monument on the 50th anniversary of his death. The marble monument, with Peter's story engraved in gold characters, was unveiled in August 1990.

Bibliography
Malcolm, Kari Torjesen. We Signed Away Our Lives: How One Family Gave Everything for the Gospel, ISBN 0-87808-780-X

• Reference: The Australian, 2010. In the name of the father
THE AUSTRALIAN JANUARY 07, 2010

CHINA constantly catches people by surprise. Deep in the heart of a country whose ruling Communist Party remains staunchly atheist, a Christian missionary organisation is running health, education and agricultural programs, and is providing advice on ethics to People's Liberation Army and police officers.

The extraordinary story of this group, Evergreen, with which Australians work, is virtually unknown overseas because it is based in Shanxi, one of China's poorest provinces, and because it runs so contrary to the more high-profile accounts of religious persecution, of Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims as well as of Christian house groups.

As so often in China, there is a back story. It begins with the Boxer Rebellion from 1899 to 1901, when 189 missionaries and their families, including 52 children, were killed, 159 of them in Shanxi.

A zealous new governor, Yu Xian, had arrived in April 1900 accompanied by bands of cargo-cultist Boxers. On July 9 he presided over the execution, by beheading, of 45 men, women and children, Catholics and Protestants. The Western powers joined to defeat the Boxers and exacted onerous reparations on the Chinese government. But the families of the missionaries killed in Shanxi chose to divert their share of the reparations to build one of China's first universities, in the provincial capital Taiyuan.

A few years later, in 1909, 17-year-old Norwegian Peter Torjesen heard a mission organiser speak about China. He placed in the collection bowl, with his meagre money, a piece of paper on which he wrote "Og mit liv" ("And my life").

In 1918 he arrived in China as a Norwegian Evangelical Free Church missionary, under the auspices of the China Inland Mission. After two years of language study, Torjesen's childhood sweetheart, Valborg Tonnessen, was able to join him.

They were dispatched, at their request, to the toughest place on the map: Hequ, a city of 10,000 alongside the Great Wall, on the Yellow River, the gateway to Inner Mongolia, on the edge of a fearsome desert. It took five days to reach it by mule from Taiyuan. The previous missionary there had been killed by the Boxers.

Peter - whose Chinese name was Ye Yong-qing, Evergreen Leaf - and Valborg eventually married in 1922, in a Norwegian ceremony at Lan Xian, Shanxi, where the local mandarin's wife sent their cook to supervise the wedding banquet.

They survived civil war, famine, and, in Peter's case, typhoid. Then came the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. The Torjesens sheltered large numbers of Chinese refugees at their mission station, protected as they believed by a Norwegian flag that they lay flat on the ground, to claim protection from aerial attack because of their country's neutrality.

But then the Japanese attitude changed, condemning missionaries as supporters of the Chinese resistance.

On December 14, 1939, they were bombed by Japanese warplanes. Peter died soon after, killed by the centre-beam of the collapsing house. He was the first missionary to die in that war.

Hundreds of Hequ people attended the funeral service, amid scenes of devastation. The local Catholic priest, a German, spoke on the theme "Greater love has no man, than to lay down his life for his friends."

Valborg and three of their four children managed to escape China. The fourth, Edvard, was being educated in Norway.

Fifty years later, as China opened up following Mao Zedong's death, the Communist Party secretary of Hequ decided to establish a monument to recognise Torjesen - who had never been forgotten there - as a "martyr of the people".

Valborg died in 1970. But her and Peter's children, their spouses and grandchildren, 16 people in all, were invited to a celebration in Hequ to honour Ye Yong-qing.

The vice-governor of the province, Guo Yuhuai, astonished them by issuing an invitation in his speech: "We want you to come back for the long term", for a commitment such as Peter had made.

He pointed especially to Finn, son of Edvard Torjesen, who had grown up as a missionary child in Taiwan, where he met his wife, Sandy. They both spoke Chinese and were then working as missionaries in Indonesia.

The vice-governor said he wanted them to act as a bridge between the resources of the West and the needs of Shanxi.

In 1993 Finn and Sandy established their new group, named Evergreen, based in Taiyuan, a coal-fired city declared the world's most polluted by the World Bank. They operate transparently. Their organisation aims "to assist Shanxi and China in developing public benefit services for the people, continuing the good works of Ye Yong-qing, acknowledging God's gracious calling in our lives and reflecting the credibility of Christ." Members must have professional skills as well as missionary competence, "and the higher we raise the barrier, the better the people who come", Finn says.

He constantly ensures local officials are well briefed on Evergreen's activities. Unlike other missionary operations that seek to work covertly in China - operating underground with their members using their day jobs, such as teaching English, to conceal their evangelistic activities - Evergreen has no cover.

Whereas other mission groups are based in one country and are sent across the world, Finn says, Evergreen operates the other way around; people from many countries come to work in China. They must spend at least two years, once there, learning Chinese and they must commit to stay at least 10 years. Staff members joke that that's the short-term option. The longer term is for life.

"As doors open, we find out what's possible," Finn says. "Rather than entering under the radar, which makes people around you nervous, we become part of the community."

Besides the 34 foreign experts, there are 40 Chinese staff.

Evergreen's annual budget is $US1.3 million ($1.5m).

Some Evergreen members, Finn says, disagree completely about how churches are organised, or the ordination of women, or points of theology. But they place those issues to one side to work together in Shanxi.

"To have someone coming in here and fighting for denominational theology, it would be a disaster," Finn says.

Westerners, he says, often embrace a black-and-white, systematic position on what the Bible says, "like book-keeping". But Chinese people tend to take a more multidimensional approach to their faith.

"We have to engage here, and discover as real partners with them, what truth is for China," Finn says. It takes time to build trust. It took a year before Finn and Sandy gained the confidence - "as solid members of the community, not crazy outsiders" - of the local leaders of the Three Self Church (self-governance, self-support and self-propagation), the only legally established Protestant church in China.

Evergreen's sponsoring Chinese agency - required for all organisations operating in the country - is the Shanxi provincial government's commerce department. Finn says: "Eighty per cent of government departments are hugely behind us, but there's always one or two with which we encounter difficulties."

Last year, it was the social security bureau, implementing a new labour law in the anxious lead-up to the Beijing Olympic Games, which "almost got us kicked out", Finn says. Any foreigner who wasn't working for a "seriously profitable business" in Shanxi appeared to be at risk.

But the head of the commerce bureau announced that Evergreen was "one of our model companies in this province", and the day was saved. That underlines, Finn says, the importance of building broad relations throughout the Chinese system.

He says that in his previous work as a missionary, in Taiwan and Indonesia, his gifts appeared to be for preaching and for running youth camps.

"But here, to my surprise, I've found my important gifts are for consulting and for schmoozing government officials, and for development work."

It was Evergreen that helped the Taiyuan officials find a credible management group for a hotel to attract international visitors, Holiday Inn.

The group has brought to Shanxi top medical experts who donate their time to conduct training sessions in hospitals in the province of 30 million.

Evergreen operates a community centre in a grim rural town on the outskirts of Taiyuan that provides activities for retired people, helps young people study and runs a mobile library that visits surrounding villages. It has helped local businesses develop corporate social responsibility programs.

The agricultural work, led by a Dutchman, Marc de Ruiter, includes developing a cheese factory and marketing its gourmet products nationwide, paying the myriad cow owners a premium for proven high-grade milk.

A new trend, Finn says, is the rise of volunteer work in China. Evergreen now has a supporters' club, mostly comprising non-Christians. Finn's personal assistant left a highly paid job in the go-getting southern metropolis of Shenzhen to refocus her energies on her family and community, and her father, a former vice head of the provincial foreign affairs department, is Evergreen's leading consultant on many issues.

The father told Finn that he joined the Communist Party to serve people, and that Evergreen was doing that in a way he had dreamed about.

The group's work rehabilitating a young woman whose leg was amputated as she lay pinned by debris after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 raised its profile in the province.

"We are involved in life here," Finn says. "That's much more powerful than preaching. If we do whatever we do excellently, people will listen to us. But we don't need to grow much. We model the possibilities, which others can pursue elsewhere in China."

And Peter Torjesen has not been forgotten. When Valborg returned to their home village, then retired Sunday school teacher Erik Little presented her with that piece of paper on which Peter had written "And my life". Today it is in China, framed on a wall of Evergreen's HQ in Taiyuan. The commitment continues.

• Reference: EVERGREEN, 2013. ² Posted September 25, 2013 by Charles Lindquist

A few days ago, I stood at the foot of a graven marble slab in the city of Hequ, in the province of Shanxi, where the Yellow River meets the Great Wall of China. The stone is a monument to the life and service of one Peter Torjesen, a Norwegian Christian missionary who died near the site in 1939.[1] His Chinese name was "Evergreen Leaf" (Ye Yong-qing, ???). He is remembered until today as a hero.

The monument was commissioned by provincial officials in 1988 and dedicated publically in 1990. Torjesen is remembered as a "people's martyr": the stone was proposed in recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of his sacrifice. It is a simple, impressive stone, engraved in Mandarin with Torjesen's impressive story.

Peter Torjesen was born and raised in Norway. As a young man, he heard presentation of the pressing spiritual need of faraway China. It was a need that immediately commanded his heart, and presented young Torjesen with the unmistakable calling of God. Torjesen emptied his pockets into an offering plate, as it passed through the congregation following the presentation. Unsatisfied with the amount, he dropped a note of paper into the plate as well \endash a kind of IOU. "And my life," it said simply. "Og mit liv." The young man pledged to give his life for the people of China. And he would.

The monument reports that Torjesen arrived in Hequ in 1921. He was soon joined by Valborg, his Norwegian fiancée. Peter and Valborg married in the community. They built their family in the community. They lived out their faith in the community. And when the World War came and the Japanese invaded, they stood in solidarity with the people of Hequ, providing encouragement, medicines \endash and a bomb shelter just beneath the church near the Torjesen home. Scores and hundreds were sheltered there. Yet on one day in 1939, as another bombardment began, the monument reports that the Torjesens themselves didn't make it into the shelter. Valborg was injured, but survived. On December 14, 1939, Peter was killed.

In 1990, at the dedication of the memorial stone, the descendants of Peter and Valborg Torjesen were invited to resume the work begun by their ancestors long before. Finn and Sandy Torjesen became the center of this effort. The result was Evergreen, founded in 1993, now a respected service agency in the tradition of Peter and Valborg Torjesen.[2] The organization celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year, and invited its friends and partners to participate in related events. That is why I found myself in Hequ.

Evergreen is comprised today of some 30 expatriate and 40 Chinese national staff. It proposes "to assist Shanxi and China in developing public benefit services for the people, continuing the good works of Ye Yong-qing, acknowledging God's gracious calling in our lives and reflecting the credibility of Christ." The organization is unabashedly Christian. It serves the people of Shanxi in a transparent, open-hearted, holistically Christian way. And it is respected for its service. The gospel message is respected, too, as it is incarnated in gospel-centered lives.

"Evergreen" is a good name for this ministry. And not only because this was the name given to Peter Torjesen by the community of Hequ. The name calls to mind a deep spiritual dynamic. "Blessed are those who trust in the Lord… They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit" (Jeremiah 17:7-8). These words, in fact, are written in stone on the marble slab in Hequ. Those who trust in the Lord are "ever green."

The story of Ye Yong-qing \endash "Evergreen Leaf" \endash provides a good challenge and reminder. It is a reminder, on the one hand, of the unexpected adventures that sometimes come our way, in this life of faith and service. Sometimes they will mean unexpected sacrifice. And the story is a challenge, as well. It challenges us to get planted by the streams of God's Word, to trust deeply, to sink our roots deep into God's faithful character and his wonderful gospel message. This is the way the spiritual life works: we are called to "take root downward, and bear fruit upward" (2 Kings 19:30, Isaiah 37:31). It is the only way to remain "green."

Peter married Valborg TONNESSEN, daughter of Henrik Haakon TONNESSEN and Karoline Regine KRISTENSEN, on 17 Jan 1923 in Lan Xian, China. (Valborg TONNESSEN was born on 22 Jun 1892 in Kristiansand, Vest-Agder, Norway, baptized on 3 Jul 1892 in Kristiansand, Vest-Agder, Norway and died in Dec 1970.)