Otis Gibson

Otis Gibson (; Pinyin: Jīshùn; Foochow Romanized: Gĭ-sông; December 8, 1826 – January 25, 1889) was a Methodist pastor, best known for his missionary work to the Chinese in Fuzhou, China and in San Francisco, California.

Life

Early life

Born on a farm in Moira, New York, Otis Gibson had five brothers and one sister. He was converted at the age of 13 after the sudden death of his brother. When he was 19, he joined the Methodist Episcopal Church. In the early 1850s he attended Dickinson College. Later he became a teacher and went to a Quaker settlement in Maryland to teach, where he met his wife-to-be Eliza Chamberlain.

Shortly before he graduated from college, Otis Gibson decided to go into the ministry and was appointed as a missionary to Fuzhou. He graduated in June 1854 with a D.D. and was licensed to preach on 4 November the same year. A few months before he and Eliza were sent to China, they got married in a Methodist Camp Meeting. following Gibson's teacher Erastus Wentworth with whom he got acquainted at Dickinson College.

In 1856, Otis Gibson and his Methodist co-laborers established two churches in the city, namely, and Church of Heavenly Peace, which were the first two Methodist churches built in East Asia. On December 26, 1856, Gibson purchased a place in the South bank of River Min and established there in 1859 a commodious wooden Western-style boarding school for laymen and ministers. In the 1860s Gibson also helped in the translation work of the Bible and other Christian books into the local Fuzhou dialect.

On June 14, 1857, Otis Gibson and Robert S. Maclay baptized their first convert, a native tradesman named Ting Ang . In 1868 he was assigned to San Francisco, California as superintendent of the Methodist Church's "Chinese Domestic Mission" designed to minister to the swelling number of Chinese immigrants in area of the California Conference. There he learned the Cantonese dialect and opened many missions and churches, including San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, Salinas, and in the gold fields in the foothills of California, and he also wrote a Chinese-English Dictionary and translated the New Testament into Cantonese. In October 1871, Gibson baptized his first convert in America, a young Chinese prostitute named Jin Ho.

In his later life, Otis Gibson made untiring and courageous efforts in behalf of the poor and the wronged of the Chinese on the Pacific Coast. In his landmark work The Chinese in America (唐人在金山, ) which was published in 1877, Gibson concluded his polemic against the anti-Chinese arguments with a noble restatement of the American ideal:

Otis Gibson was strongly anti-Catholic.

While attending a preachers meeting in 1884 Gibson was stricken with paralysis. He died in San Francisco after a long illness on January 25, 1889, at the home of his son.

Family life Otis Gibson and Eliza had two sons while in China. One died in infancy. and died in 1902 at age 46. Only daughter was Myra Alice Gibson.

Legacy Otis Gibson started in 1868 the first Methodist ministry to the Chinese in America with a mission in San Francisco. The great 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed Gibson's Washington Street building that housed the Chinese Mission, along with most of San Francisco Chinatown. In 1911, after five years of displacement and fund raising, the Chinese Methodist Church was rebuilt on the corner of Washington and Stockton Streets.

Otis Gibson was also the first pastor to the Japanese on the Pacific coast. When the first Japanese church in America was dedicated in San Francisco in 1894, he was memorialized in the west window stain glass of the Japanese Church on Pine Street.