Doris Brougham, an American missionary, who for 70 years used English and music to share Christ with millions of Taiwanese people, died Tuesday at 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 how to speak English. At the same time, she held weekly English Bible studies and started a popular 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 year, 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 in 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 in the English education field. ... How many people have listened to her broadcasts and read her articles? Surely more than 20 million.”
While, today, Brougham is the most well-known American in Taiwan—where Christians make up 7 percent of the population—she never planned to come to Taiwan in the first place. The missionary’s initial aim was to minister to mainland China, but the Chinese Civil War forced her to change plans and move to Taiwan (then called Formosa). Her love of music led her to start the first Christian radio station, the beginning of what became a popular media ministry.
“I was just here to serve because God led me here,” Brougham told CNA in 2023. “I just thought about doing that each day. Then days became months and then years, and, wow, here I am 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 of ways to help the less fortunate, according to the biography.
Brougham’s parents passed down to her a love of music. One time, when Brougham was a child, her father’s client could not afford to pay for car repairs and begged to use his saxophone as payment. After her father gave the saxophone to Doris, she began practicing every day and joined her school orchestra. Later, she learned how to play the trumpet and the French horn, instruments that would accompany her the rest of her life. Even into her 90s, Brougham would play her trumpet onstage at rallies around Taiwan.
The call to China came at a summer Bible camp when Brougham was 12. Chinese evangelist Ji Zhiwen asked the crowd of Americans, “Who would like to go to China and help the people there in their need?” As Brougham raised her hand, the adults around her laughed, thinking 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 came to mind: “Ask me, and I will make the nations your heritage, the ends of the earth your possession.” Brougham responded to God, “If you need me, I would go to the farthest ends of the earth for you.”
After finishing Bible school, Brougham joined the Evangelical Alliance Mission and boarded a steamer for China in 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 escape the fighting. Along the way, she dressed soldiers’ wounds, led Bible studies in refugee camps, and preached to ethnic Tanka people. Eventually, the missionaries were forced to leave mainland China, so in 1951, Brougham moved to Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had established the Republic of China.
Unlike most missionaries who resided in the more populous western half of the island, Brougham chose to go to Hualien on the eastern coast. She soon found that her Mandarin was no help, as the aboriginals she ministered to spoke either local languages or Japanese, due 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 started a small church.
Brougham learned that to reach people, “you had to do something to get their attention,” she toldWorld magazine. “You have to connect, not just communicate.” She decided to start Taiwan’s first Christian radio program in 1951 to reach more people with the gospel. The show included choir singing, preaching, skits, and, of course, her trumpet playing.
Brougham told World that, at the time, she liked to ride her bike while the program was on and hear people on the streets and in the temples listening to it (at the time, Taiwan was about 99 percent Buddhist). Once, Brougham said a Buddhist nun called her over and secretly asked where she could find 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 teach 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 produce a radio program to teach English. The company asked Brougham to lead it, and Studio Classroom was born. Listeners asked for the show to print its on-air dialogues so they could follow along at home, which gave rise to the Studio Classroom magazine.
When the first TVs came to Taiwan that same year, Taiwan had only 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 chose it. She remembers people crowding around the rare television inside temples to watch sermons and choirs singing hymns. “How often can you preach in a Buddhist temple?” Brougham told World. “God had a plan for that to happen.”
Yet the 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 own belongings, how can I expect others to help 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 is not for myself; it’s for God.
Her TV program featured a choir called Heavenly Melody Singers, which became the first Christian singing group in Taiwan. Heavenly Melody has since recorded more than 30 albums and toured in 36 countries.
Over the decades, the music and English teaching ministries continued to grow. Studio Classroom’s programs and magazines expanded to include 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 hold English classes for government officials, as well as weekly Bible studies for students 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 build up their students’ English skills. He said Doris’s life was “legendary,” because she held on to convictions she made at the age of 12 and maintained them throughout her life. “Everyone needs to learn about Teacher Doris’s life and her choices, which 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 building. But Brougham encouraged the staff by saying, “Don’t be sad about what we’ve lost; these are just tools. The most important thing is that we are all here and can continue 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] is not in the Bible.” Brougham took that advice to heart as she continued to work at the ORTV office until the age of 97, even as 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 more than 70 years, and I’ve always told people that God loves everyone so much that he sent his only son, Jesus, into the world to die on the cross for our sins, so that we could be forgiven of our sins and spend eternity with him.”
According to her will, she plans to donate everything she had and will be buried in Taipei.
With additional reporting by Angela Lu Fulton.
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