Missionary Jackie Pullinger felt “extraordinary joy” ministering to drug addicts and Triad members in Hong Kong’s Walled City

When she settled in with the gangsters, drug addicts and prostitutes amid the squalor of Hong Kong’s Walled City in 1966, Jackie Pullinger prayed: “It would be worth my whole life if You would use me to save just one.”

The British missionary arrived in Hong Kong by boat that year, and became a primary school teacher in Kowloon Walled City, an opium production centre that was controlled by the triads. 

In 1981, she founded the St Stephen’s Society (which started as a Youth Club), providing rehabilitation homes for drug addicts, prostitutes and gang members. The charity was recognised by the Hong Kong government which provided land for these houses, and it continues its ministry today.

Nearly 60 years on, Jackie maintains a mettle is as steely as ever.

“When people say ‘how brave of you’, they’re entirely wrong. It’s much easier to do what God made you for than to get sucked up by a whale. (Jonah 1:17)

“Really, when you think you’re paying a great price, it’s only before you’ve paid the price that you think: ‘Oh, it’s costing everything.’

“When you’ve made the decision, you realise, it’s no price at all.

“He paid it all.”

The Prison Ministry Conference 2024 was attended by some 300, who were mainly prison ministry staff and volunteers. Screengrab from Prison Fellowship Singapore’s Facebook page.    

Giving the keynote address at the Prison Ministry Conference 2024 last month (July 27) at Bukit Panjang Methodist Church, she paid sincere tribute to the traditions that “made way for us to understand how to look after those who, for their crimes – or not even theirs – have been incarcerated”.

“The rest of us who’ve not been caught for offending the law look like we’re not prisoners,” she pointed out.

“We are all prisoners.”

Gloom and doom

During its dubious heyday, the Walled City was a slum teeming with structures built one atop another. These reached such precarious heights that light was unable to reach its narrow alleyways.

Darkness spread a thick blanket across the City’s six-acre area, and decay was free to meander through its atmosphere.

A young Jackie settled in the Walled City with little more than a “use me” prayer. Image from St Stephen’s Society website.

“That, for God’s very good reasons and plans, was where I spent a lot of my life – in the dark,” Pullinger recounted.

“It was a very strange thing because I loved it. I felt extraordinary joy.

“And you know how you feel sometimes when it’s your birthday, or if you’re a woman and somebody said you’re beautiful? There was a sort of ‘whoop!’ in my heart.

“Every time I went into the Walled City it was like that, because it was the place the Lord made me for.”

Most of its residents languished in an opiated limbo. Others were constantly high on heroin. It didn’t matter whether they were even alive: Many had not been certified at birth, many more would not be at death.

The place was beyond the rule of civil order and law, being under neither Sino nor British authority.

But was not beyond the jurisdiction of God’s love.

“What a mercy I couldn’t speak Cantonese,” she said wryly of her early years. “Otherwise I would have shoved the words of the gospel down someone’s throat.

“They were not listening, but they were watching.”

The “ordinary” gospel

And as they watched, God did “so many things that were great there”, Jackie testified.

Hers were the hands and feet living out the “ordinary gospel”: Sharing her food with the hungry, taking desperate strangers into her tiny home.

The Walled City was a no man’s land that fell between the cracks of shared Sino-British rule in 1960s Hong Kong. Image from St Stephen’s Society website.

Every now and then she found herself wiping up a bloodied gang-fight victim along a staircase that gamblers used as a toilet.

She prayed for them unceasingly.

Her pleas for the Holy Spirit’s power to be poured out were not in vain, for all too soon it was her turn to be watching as signs and wonders happened.

Drug addicts experienced painless withdrawal, aided by the gift of tongues. An embittered man in remand was converted by reading the Sermon on the Mount. A sweet fragrance filled a new believer’s prison cell – only his.

But Jackie wanted more.

She prayed: “Dear Lord, they’re impressed but they’re not changed. I want to see lives saved now and for eternity. Would You please give me whatever helps me to make You real?”

She told the conference attendees: “Please don’t think that signs and wonders are the shortcut to the long journey. They’re not. You’re supposed to do the long walk, and signs and wonders.

“It’s not that signs and wonders cut out visiting the man in prison, [or] visiting the parents of the teenager who’s died of the overdose. They need your time and company, not just today but tomorrow.

“You can’t cut out the journey of loving them, of understanding their pain, of paying their wife’s debts or their children’s school fees. It’s not just the ‘power of the Holy Spirit’ and everything’s settled.

“It’s the whole gospel. You do the ordinary and it gives you permission to do the miraculous. It’s all.”

Just ping-pong please

The Youth Club that Jackie set up in the Walled City was proof of concept. Its recreational activities like ping-pong and barbecues were well-received; her Christian meetings were not.

But she persevered.

Once, the premises were brutally vandalised. However, enduring that trial proved her character. She earned respect, as well as a Triad boss’ protection.

No matter their standing in society, people knew where to find her when they needed her, and with her they knew they’d find Jesus.

People knew they’d find Jesus where Jackie was. Image from St Stephen’s Society website.

Envious that a former addict was putting on weight and no longer – like them – a mass of deteriorating skin and bone, his peers would ask for the secret and find out that “it’s Jesus!”

They would demand of Jackie: “Where is He? Where is Jesus?”

She would encourage: “Close your eyes and He’ll come.”

“And of course He’ll come,” she said. “The problem is, we get in the way. Let Him introduce Himself; don’t get in the way. This is the job of the Holy Spirit.”

Her job was to keep in step, she pointed out, describing how salvation and deliverance took place.

“Because I prayed, ‘please lead me to the people you’ve got ready’, people started coming to the Lord. They actually prayed themselves off drugs. No shakes, no stomach cramps happening.”

As the addict began to breathe deeply and feel comfortable, she’d ask: “Will you believe that Jesus is God’s Son?”

“They always say ‘yes’. And then I’m praying in tongues – not out loud, it’s very rude.”

Before long the addict would realise he is feeling very light. She explained: “Oh, that’s because Jesus was down here 2,000 years ago and He put all the things you’ve done wrong and all the things you feel bad about on His body and took it away. Will you believe Him?”

The addict would reply, “Yes.”

Said Jackie: “He won’t understand at the time, but he’s willing. We pray for a bit more. ‘Will you believe that after three days Jesus rose from the dead?’”

There was one addict who came to the Youth Club. He received the gift of tongues and 30 minutes later, was set free from drug addiction for good. Image from the St Stephen’s Society website.

He answers, “Yes, I’ve just met Him.”

“They’re really sure about the resurrection,” she noted. “‘Why don’t you tell Him you’d like a new life?’”

She added: “Which prisoner would not like to have your record grubbed, to be able to go with a passport that’s got no marks so that you can get to that heavenly country, visa-free?

“And so that’s how they come to Jesus.”

They also all receive the gift of tongues. She said: “It’s very kind of the Lord to help people say, when they don’t know how to say, they love Him.”

Nonetheless, she qualified, “They are just born of the Spirit; their minds aren’t changed.” (Romans 12:2)

From helping drug addicts to screen addicts nearly 60 years later, Jackie’s charity continues its ministry of reconciling people to God. Image from Prison Fellowship Singapore’s Facebook page.

She learnt the hard way that they are “certainly not yet a new man at all” (2 Corinthians 5:17), and sending them back out into the world after two days was setting the bar too high.

Policemen would come knocking on her door, hinting at a relapse: “Poon siu ze (abbreviated Cantonese for Ms Pullinger), I think I’ve found one of your men queueing up for an injection.”

Resigned, she would recognise: “He was doing what the old man always had done.”

A heart for reconciliation

The journey continues.

Today, Pullinger’s St Stephen’s Society – light years away from the tiny room she first started her Youth Club in – is still serving addicts of all sorts.

Today’s St Stephen’s Society includes multi-purpose rehabilitation homes. Image from St Stephen’s Society website.

At any one time, for instance, there are 70 teenagers within its premises, battling screen addictions. Some are labelled “delinquents” by the law, others are committed by their parents.

“All over the world there are kids that won’t go out of their bedrooms. Some of them die in their rooms,” she lamented. “When we have people with problems, we always know that it’s not the prisoner, not the kid; it’s a whole family problem.”

The solution’s no different, as far as she is concerned.

“People say to me, ‘What’s your ministry now?’

“I never use that word,” the 80-year-old scoffed. “I say I don’t have a ‘ministry’, I have a life.

“I’m not employed, so my ministry has always been the same, the only one that’s in Scripture: The ministry of reconciliation with each other and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

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