Doris Brougham, an American missionary, who for 70 years used English and music to share Christ with tens of millions of Taiwanese people, died Tuesday on the age of 98.
Through radio, television, magazines, live performances, and in-person classes, Brougham’s organization Overseas Radio & Television (ORTV) taught everyone from dignitaries to middle school students speak English. At the identical time, she held weekly English Bible studies and began a well-liked Christian singing group called Heavenly Melody.
Brougham’s contributions to Taiwan led her to receive its highest civilian award, the Order of the Brilliant Star with Violet Grand Cordon, in 2002. Last yr, then-president Tsai Ing-wen made an appearance on ORTV’s show Studio Classroom to hand-deliver Brougham a Taiwanese passport, a special honor given 72 years after she first arrived in Taiwan.
“Her story brings tears to [my] eyes,” wrote former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou within the preface of the 1998 Chinese-language biography on Brougham. “She is the English teacher of 20 million people [the population of Taiwan], cultivating countless professionals within the English education field. … How many individuals have listened to her broadcasts and browse her articles? Surely greater than 20 million.”
While, today, Brougham is essentially the most well-known American in Taiwan—where Christians make up 7 percent of the population—she never planned to come back to Taiwan in the primary place. The missionary’s initial aim was to minister to mainland China, however the Chinese Civil War forced her to alter plans and move to Taiwan (then called Formosa). Her love of music led her to begin the primary Christian radio station, the start of what became a well-liked media ministry.
“I used to be just here to serve because God led me here,” Brougham told CNA in 2023. “I just thought of doing that every day. Then days became months after which years, and, wow, here I’m 72 years later!”
Doris Brougham was born in 1926 in Seattle, the sixth of eight children. Her father was a mechanic, while her mother stayed at home. Despite living through the Great Depression, her mother taught her and her siblings to think about ways to assist the less fortunate, in keeping with the biography.
Brougham’s parents passed right down to her a love of music. One time, when Brougham was a baby, her father’s client couldn’t afford to pay for automotive repairs and begged to make use of his saxophone as payment. After her father gave the saxophone to Doris, she began practicing each day and joined her school orchestra. Later, she learned play the trumpet and the French horn, instruments that will accompany her the remainder of her life. Even into her 90s, Brougham would play her trumpet onstage at rallies around Taiwan.
The call to China got here at a summer Bible camp when Brougham was 12. Chinese evangelist Ji Zhiwen asked the group of Americans, “Who would really like to go to China and help the people there of their need?” As Brougham raised her hand, the adults round her laughed, pondering that she had no idea what she was signing up for, Brougham recalled in her biography.
Five years later, while debating whether to take a full-ride scholarship to the Eastman School of Music, Brougham remembered her promise to go to China. Psalm 2:8 got here to mind: “Ask me, and I’ll make the nations your heritage, the ends of the earth your possession.” Brougham responded to God, “If you wish me, I might go to the farthest ends of the earth for you.”
After ending Bible school, Brougham joined the Evangelical Alliance Mission and boarded a steamer for China within the spring of 1948. Shortly after arriving in China, the civil war intensified. Brougham and other missionaries made their way from Shanghai to Lanzhou to Hong Kong to flee the fighting. Along the best way, she dressed soldiers’ wounds, led Bible studies in refugee camps, and preached to ethnic Tanka people. Eventually, the missionaries were forced to go away mainland China, so in 1951, Brougham moved to Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had established the Republic of China.
Unlike most missionaries who resided within the more populous western half of the island, Brougham selected to go to Hualien on the eastern coast. She soon found that her Mandarin was no help, because the aboriginals she ministered to spoke either local languages or Japanese, attributable to Japanese colonization. Still, she built friendships with local children by playing the trumpet and teaching them to sing, and slowly learned the language. During her time there, she taught music at Yu-Shan Theological College, trained Sunday school teachers, and began a small church.
Brougham learned that to succeed in people, “you needed to do something to get their attention,” she toldWorld magazine. “You should connect, not only communicate.” She decided to begin Taiwan’s first Christian radio program in 1951 to succeed in more individuals with the gospel. The show included choir singing, preaching, skits, and, after all, her trumpet playing.
Brougham told World that, on the time, she liked to ride her bike while this system was on and listen to people on the streets and within the temples listening to it (on the time, Taiwan was about 99 percent Buddhist). Once, Brougham said a Buddhist nun called her over and secretly asked where she could discover a Bible. Seeing her success, Far Eastern Broadcasting Company asked her to develop more Mandarin programs that were broadcast into mainland China.
In a time when English resources were scarce, leaders in Taiwan, including then-president Chiang Kai-shek, asked Brougham to show government officials. At one point, her students included members of Chiang’s cabinet.
In 1962, the Ministry of Education asked the state-run radio station to provide a radio program to show English. The company asked Brougham to steer it, and Studio Classroom was born. Listeners asked for the show to print its on-air dialogues in order that they could follow along at home, which gave rise to the Studio Classroom magazine.
When the primary TVs got here to Taiwan that very same yr, Taiwan had just one station, and Brougham needed to compete with Buddhist and Catholic groups to clinch the solo slot available for religious programming. Because her show had music, producers selected it. She remembers people crowding across the rare television inside temples to observe sermons and choirs singing hymns. “How often are you able to preach in a Buddhist temple?” Brougham told World. “God had a plan for that to occur.”
Yet the brand new gospel broadcasting ministry, ORTV, lacked funds. Brougham considered selling the saxophone her father had given her in childhood. With a heavy heart, she thought, If I can’t part with my very own belongings, how can I expect others to assist us? She ended up selling it. To raise money, Doris returned to the US several times, sharing her vision with churches and Christian business owners. She encouraged her introverted self by saying, This isn’t for myself; it’s for God.
Her TV program featured a choir called Heavenly Melody Singers, which became the primary Christian singing group in Taiwan. Heavenly Melody has since recorded greater than 30 albums and toured in 36 countries.
Over the many years, the music and English teaching ministries continued to grow. Studio Classroom’s programs and magazines expanded to incorporate Let’s Talk in English for younger students and Advanced. Today, the Studio Classroom TV show incorporates puppets, music, and on-the-ground travelogues in its English teaching, while its teachers travel around Taiwan holding rallies at public schools. ORTV also continues to carry English classes for presidency officials, in addition to weekly Bible studies for college kids across Taipei.
The late Christian artist Sun Yue stated that, in Taiwan, almost everyone under the age of 60 who can speak English grew up listening to Studio Classroom, especially as schools used the magazine and radio program to accumulate their students’ English skills. He said Doris’s life was “legendary,” because she held on to convictions she made on the age of 12 and maintained them throughout her life. “Everyone must study Teacher Doris’s life and her decisions, that are completely different from the values of this society,” he added.
In 2001, heavy rains and flooding from Typhoon Nari severely damaged ORTV’s expensive production equipment and constructing. But Brougham encouraged the staff by saying, “Don’t be sad about what we’ve lost; these are only tools. The most significant thing is that we’re all here and may proceed to serve God.”
Through the years, Brougham, who never married, worked tirelessly. She once recalled a conversation with Billy Graham, where she asked the evangelist whether she should retire at 65. He responded by saying, “Doris, [retirement] isn’t within the Bible.” Brougham took that advice to heart as she continued to work on the ORTV office until the age of 97, whilst she relied on a wheelchair to get around.
During a Christmas concert last December, Doris shared with the audience: “I’ve been in Asia for greater than 70 years, and I’ve at all times told people who God loves everyone a lot that he sent his only son, Jesus, into the world to die on the cross for our sins, in order that we could possibly be forgiven of our sins and spend eternity with him.”
According to her will, she plans to donate all the things she had and can be buried in Taipei.
With additional reporting by Angela Lu Fulton.
