Enthusiastic `Rascal' -- She Went To China With Her Horn And Bible; Now She Runs A Christian Media Company -- `My Trumpet Has Always Been A Way For Me To Get People To Listen.' - Doris Brougham

------------------------------- Three concerts

Doris Brougham and the Heavenly Melody Singers will appear in three concerts here this weekend: At 7 tonight, Westminster Chapel, 13646 N.E. 24th St., Bellevue; At 11 a.m. tomorrow, Evangelical Chinese Church, 651 N.W. 81st St., Seattle; and At 7 p.m. tomorrow, Emmanuel Bible Church, 503 N. 50th St., Seattle. ------------------------------- Doris Brougham is hardly your typical Christian missionary, saving souls in some steamy jungle backwater. Her ministry is more exotic than that.

Brougham stepped off a freighter's gangplank in Shanghai 50 years ago with a trumpet, a Bible and a commission by her Seattle church to save souls in China.

Now she runs an international Christian media company - Overseas Radio and Television (ORTV) - with a staff of 200 who work out of a six-story building in Taipei, Taiwan. The company has branch offices in Seattle, Los Angeles, London, Frankfurt, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

Together they produce weekly television and radio shows in Mandarin, Taiwanese and English for broadcast to 4 million Chinese worldwide. Their two slick English-language magazines have a combined circulation of 200,000 in Taiwan.

Their catalog includes a variety of items - albums of original music and old hymns by ORTV's resident choir, the Heavenly Melody Singers; English-language textbooks; children's books and videos.

Brougham has two missions - bringing Chinese people to Christianity and teaching them to speak English. She attacks both with a breathless enthusiasm that's unexpected in one her age.

"I'm barely 72," she insists with an impish grin. "I'm a young 72. My favorite thing is scuba-diving. I still do it and I love it. I'm really known as something of a rascal."

Brougham is in Seattle as part of a U.S. tour to celebrate her 50 years as a missionary in China and Taiwan. She and ORTV's choir will visit several Midwestern and Eastern states before returning to Taiwan at the end of the month.

Brougham is being honored at 7 p.m. tomorrow with a gospel-music concert by the Heavenly Melody Singers at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Emmanuel is across the street from ORTV's Seattle office, near Woodland Park. Brougham attended the church as a child when she promised God she'd go to China and be a missionary.

She was 12 and attending a church-sponsored summer camp. As she remembers it, a minister was talking to the children about far-away, exotic China and asked "Who will help the Chinese?"

She raised her hand and looked back only once.

China instead of the trumpet

As a 15-year-old trumpet player in the Seattle Youth Symphony, she was offered a music scholarship. It was tempting, but it would mean she wouldn't be able to go to China.

She found a Bible verse, Psalm 2:8, that seemed to speak to her: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possessions."

"I thought, `It sounds like I'm not supposed to stay here. I'm supposed to go to China,' " said Brougham, the niece of legendary Seattle sportswriter Royal Brougham.

"Things come up like that in life. There's always chances to get out of things, and, I know people don't believe this much anymore, but in my family we believed you do what you promise. We believed if God wants you to do something, you do it."

Brougham arrived in Shanghai in 1948. She was 21 and remembers being stared at because of her curly, blond hair.

China was embroiled in civil war when she arrived. In 1949, the Communists took power and the Nationalist followers of Chiang Kai-shek fled to the offshore island of Taiwan. Brougham followed.

"It was a mess," she says of the war. "All we did was change bandages for the Nationalist soldiers. It was a terrible thing for a sheltered girl from Seattle. I wondered why anyone would send a young girl there. We were evacuated from the Communists three times, one time by gunboat down the Yangtze."

Her first missionary assignment was with the tribal people in the mountains of Taiwan. Each week she would pedal her bicycle into the countryside to teach Sunday school and Bible studies.

Sometimes she traveled with a pastor. When they'd get to a village, she'd pull out her trumpet and begin to play. When the curious villagers came to gawk, the preacher would give a sermon.

"I felt like a circus act. But my trumpet has always been a way for me to get people to listen," she said.

By 1951 Brougham was playing her trumpet for a gospel radio program in Taiwan. Tape recorders were new technology then and cost about $100.

She persuaded someone to send her one. "I'd record the pastor and the choir at my house and play it back on the radio. Pretty soon I had another tape recorder and I was recording them at different times and mixing them myself," she recalled.

First telecast in 1963

Brougham and Leland Haggerty, also of Seattle, founded ORTV about 10 years later. Their first telecast, in 1963, was called Heavenly Melody, a gospel mix of music and drama. The choir became the Heavenly Melody Singers.

"It was never like Christian TV here," Brougham says. "We always had skits, dramas and English-teaching programs along with the gospel music and preaching."

The English-language programming and publishing are as important as the gospel programming, Brougham says.

ORTV's magazines, "Studio Classroom" and "Let's Talk in English," feature simply written stories in English about a variety of subjects, along with vocabulary lists for students to memorize. One recent article about Texas had a vocabulary list that included "brag" and "rodeo."

"It's not religious," Brougham acknowledged. "We don't mean it to be. When you teach English, you teach English. You don't preach. I might say something like, `God made this wonderful world, and let's take care of it.' But we don't push people. If they want to learn English, that's what we teach them. If they want religion, they ask."

To mark the 50th anniversary of her work in Asia, Brougham has written a book. It's one of ORTV's few Chinese-only productions.

"I won't let them translate it into English," Brougham says. "Some things are really funny to the Chinese and they don't translate into English." Sally Macdonald's phone message number is 464-2248. Her e-mail address is: smacdonald@seattletimes.com