It was a turbulent time in China when Carter and Agnes Morgan were asked to go there and work as missionaries in 1955. The Morgans, who are members of Westminster Baptist Church, had spent the past six years as missionaries in Hawaii and were not looking to leave their island paradise. But God had other plans for them.
Agnes and Carter Morgan“It was not an easy decision to leave Hawaii. After praying about it, we decided to go on to Hong Kong,” said Agnes Morgan.
“Nobody in their right mind would go to Hong Kong at that time. It was a chaotic time,” Carter Morgan added. “It’s a mistake to go to Hawaii first.”
But they went anyway and never looked back or regretted the decision. They spent years teaching at seminary, the university and leading Bible studies – as well as assisting people in basic needs.
“For about 15 years, we wondered if we’d be here tomorrow,” Morgan said. “We turned it over to the Lord. The idea was, he brought us there and he would take care of what needed to be done.”
As the son of missionaries who had worked in China during his childhood, Morgan was accustomed to the Chinese lifestyle. His parents had even been friends of Lottie Moon’s, the pioneer Baptist missionary to China during the late 1800s and early 1900s. This was, however, Agnes Morgan’s first trip to China.
“I was thrilled. I loved the Chinese people from the very beginning. I was glad I went,” she said.
The Morgans were greeted in Hong Kong with political unrest and hundreds to thousands of refugees pouring into the city daily.
Retired missionary Carter Morgan is surrounded by students during a teaching stint in Hong Kong.“The communists almost took the city several times,” he said. “Some people got killed and bombs went off.”
Despite the risks, the Morgans said they never considered giving up their mission work and coming home.
“There was an opportunity and a need. We wouldn’t go home unless the place burned down,” Morgan said. “You almost never hear of somebody saying, ‘I can’t take it, I’m going home. You can die, but that’s not the worst thing that can happen. Something comes up and you know this is part of God’s work.”
In 1958 the Morgans were blessed with a son, Joel, and parenting was added to their long list of duties. They said Joel fit right in with their mission work, carried to meetings in a basket as a baby and lending a hand when he became a young boy. Although danger continued to surround them, Morgan said he did not fear for his son’s safety.
“For some strange reason, no (I was not worried about him). Joel went anywhere he wanted to go. He took the bus or walked,” he said.
Joel grew up speaking both English and Chinese and working side by side with his parents.
“We tried to familiarize him with some of what we were doing,” said Morgan. “He was never detached from what we were doing, and I was grateful for that.”
While in China, the Morgans saw the number of Baptist churches in China grow from four or five to more than 70. They also witnessed the opening of a Baptist hospital, Baptist summer camp, a Baptist university and several Baptist schools.
“We have lived to see the whole thing change over from a skeleton crew of missionaries,” Morgan said.
“The Lord was good to let us see the fruit of our work,” Agnes Morgan said. “The Lord was good to let the work get established before it was too late.”
Morgan said the most significant thing about the Baptist church in China today is that it’s the Chinese leading the Chinese to God.
“We are old and just about finished ourselves,” he said. “After 20 years of retirement, we look back at a half century of service in the Asian rim and the thing that we’re so happy about is that we’ve seen Baptist work move over from missionary work to nationals.”
Although they were officially retired, that didn’t stop the Morgans from returning to China in the 1990s for another six-year stint of teaching in Hong Kong.
“It was easy to be invited back,” she said. “We enjoyed that part very much.”
Morgan has now reached the age of 94 and his wife is 84, and they have called Westminster their home for many years now. Although their health is not always what they would like it to be, on good days they can be found in Clemson leading Chinese students in Bible study.
They still receive phone calls, letters and sometimes even visits from the people they worked with while in Hong Kong. After returning from their most recent trip to Hong Kong in the 1990s, they received a memory book from some of his students with pictures and thoughts. One man signed the book with his reflections that sum up the Morgans’ lifetime of work as well as anything: “Because of you, we are never ever the same.”