But as for me, I will look to the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me. Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me. I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me. He will bring me out to the light; I shall look upon his vindication.
Previously in Session 2
In the first fifty years of the twentieth century, the Chinese church maintained its independence as a whole and two camps came into being, the fundamentalist churches and the liberal churches. While the boundaries between the two were somewhat vague and many other churches stood somewhere in the middle, all-told the two camps were distinct from each other in theology and leadership.
The main actors in the fundamentalist churches included representatives from the indigenous revivals, such as Wang Mingdao, John Sung, and Watchman Nee; those like Hugh White and Watson McMillian Hayes who represented Western denominations in the Shandong Presbytery and Northern Jiangsu Presbytery of the Northern Presbytery Mission as well as the Northern China Theological Seminary that they founded; and the China Inland Mission, which represented the mission boards. On the other hand, the main actors in the liberal churches included representatives from the YMCA and YWCA, such as Y. T. Wu and Liu Liangmo; representatives from the Christian Council and Church of Christ in China, such as Cheng Jingyi, Wu Yifang, and Chen Wenyuan (the latter two became leaders of the TSPM); and representatives from Western denominations who had fallen under the spell of Communism, such as the Anglican Churches.
The Emergency Response Meetings of the Churches
Among the churches of that time, the Western denominations had a better understanding of the situation than the indigenous churches of China. With their global perspective, the missionaries knew what the Communist party had done in the Soviet Union. At the same time, they were identified with the Anglican church. But the Chinese church as a whole was enmeshed in nationalism. While the independence movement and the Great Revival held differing positions, in varying degrees they both increased the Chinese churches’ identities as national churches rather than increasing an identity as independent members of Western denominations. Believers and leaders primarily viewed the church as the “Chinese” church rather than an Anglican church. Similarly, it was obvious that they took the CCP first of all as the “Chinese” Communist Party rather than the Chinese branch of the Communist International.
Consequently, Western missionaries and mission boards generally agreed that once the CCP took power in China, the church would take an unprecedented hit that it possibly wouldn’t be able to sustain. Therefore, in 1948 and 1949, Christians led by the mission boards had a few emergency response meetings in Sichuan and Huangshan. However, independent churches, including those within the fundamentalist camp, tended to be more optimistic and did not think that the CCP would threaten the existence of the church. For the missionaries China was undergoing a universal spiritual war between God and Satan. They were worried that “the church is losing China.” But for the independent churches of China, China was undergoing a civil war between left and the right-wing powers. No matter who won the war, The Chinese still won. The independent church thought the saying that “the church is losing China” to be sp,e mere exaggerated exclamation of the Western missionaries borne out of their identification with Western colonization.
What is interesting is that during the historic moments of change since Protestantism entered China, Presbyterian missionaries have typically played critical roles with their insights and perspectives. Robert Morrison, the first missionary to China, was a Presbyterian. John Livingstone Nevius, the first missionary who proposed the Three-Self principles, was Presbyterian. Calvin Wilson Mateer, who founded the first college and was chairman of the committee for Bible translation of the Chinese Union Version, was a Presbyterian missionary. Watson McMillian Hayes, who was the first to leave the liberal seminaries to start the Northern China Theological Seminary and predicted that Christian schools would fall “into bridges of communist propaganda” was also Presbyterian. Similarly, in early 1949, the first person to propose the house church as the Chinese church’s emergency solution was also a Presbyterian pastor: Francis Wilson Price (1895–1974) of Shanghai Community Church. (Li Chuwen, special agent of the Chinese Communist Party, worked for him and would later accuse him and take control of the church from him).
At the time the churches focused on the cities rather than the countryside. While many missionaries marched to the remote villages near the southwestern borders, the majority of the churches remained in large cities. Most believers, Christian organizations, and resources were located in southeastern coastal areas. Therefore, Pastor Francis Wilson Price proposed two emergency strategies in response to the Communist control of power. First, the church must shift its focus from cities to the countryside and build up rural churches. Second, the church must be prepared to take the form of house churches in response to a future aggravated situation and exist in smaller scales as the early churches did. The two key terms were “rural” and “house.” Price was a pastor and prophet, a visionary like Watson McMillian Hayes. At that time, no indigenous preacher, including Wang Mingdao or Watchman Nee, had such vision and preparation. These indigenous preachers could not foresee what would come with the CCP because they were also caught up in nationalism. The history of the Chinese churches in the next half a century was just as Pastor Francis Wilson Price had predicted.
Of course, the indigenous churches knew that the CCP was rooted in materialism and atheism. Yet, the CCP’s propaganda about “new democracy” between 1945 and 1949 was very successful. People believed that the nationalist party was corrupt and authoritarian and that the CCP would promote democracy. One important charge the CCP cited against the nationalist party was that it practiced a one-party authoritarian rule. A few years back, there was a writer from Sichuan who attended the very first gathering of the Early Rain Fellowship. He collected editorials and other articles by the Xinhua News Agency between 1946 and 1948 and compiled them into a book called “The Heralds of History.” Ironically, if you post these articles online today without indicating that they were written by the CCP in those years, you would most likely be visited and detained by the authorities because these articles promoted liberty, democracy, and opposed a one-party rule. They warmly praised the United States and even commended Christianity. Several of them were written by Mao Zedong himself. Consequently, the Chinese church at the time wrongly concluded that being “Chinese” was the first and foremost characteristic it should seek after rather than being “the church.” They had fears and worries about the CCP taking power but were not overly afraid of it, not because they rested their hope in Christ alone, but because they had more or less been impacted by progressivism, had maintained a lingering hope for authority, and had underestimated the evil that atheism could bring.
Early 1950 Wang Mingdao visited Tianjin to preach to a local congregation. At the entrance of a local park he saw a banner that read, “We resolutely protect the freedom of religious belief.” He thought the CCP meant what they said, and that they would protect the basic freedoms of religion. While it may be more difficult to share the gospel since the CCP was atheistic, there would be no need to worry about the existence of the church. These sentiments were shared by almost everyone within the fundamentalist camp.
One thing worth mentioning is that before 1949, the strong social thought that consisted of a combination of nationalist passion and progressivism lay behind both the fundamentalists and the entire church independence movement. Appeals for Chinese independence, revival of the nation, and freedom from Western control swept the whole of the country. Therefore, the indigenous churches no longer considered themselves a part of a foreign religion. They thought naively that independence had made them a “Chinese” church that no longer had any relationship with their mission boards or with Western Christianity. Consequently, they never imagined that their compatriots could consider them to be traitors who had illicit relations with foreign countries, nor had they viewed themselves as part of “Western imperialism” since they had long fought against imperialism. The transfer of spiritual authority during the Great Revival also induced to some degree the nationalist position that prompted the church to wrongly think that it had removed its “Western” caption, even before the Chinese society had removed it from the church.
Therefore, when the TSPM came to be, Wang Mingdao immediately spoke out against it in the Spiritual Food Quarterly he founded. His disagreement came from two positions. Of greatest importance was the spiritual position against the union of the fundamentalists and “nonbelievers” that the TSPM was attempting to achieve. This union was a political endeavor for political purposes aiming to limit and to wipe out Christianity. In 1950, Zhou Enlai met Y. T. Wu and other church leaders and made his terms clear to them. He gave them the three criteria which had to be met for the church to be able to exist in the new China. First, outwardly the church had to cut its relationship with imperialism. Second, inwardly the church had to purify itself and pull out the “counterrevolutionaries and bad elements.” Third, the church would no longer be able to evangelize in public and religious activities would have to be limited within preapproved places of worship. In fact, today most churches (Three-Self or house churches alike) still conscientiously (by self-inspection) abide by this last criterion demanded by Zhou. Christianity is still missing from public and social life today. From this perspective, after 1949, the church as a whole has been institutionalized into the secular nation, whether actively or passively. Only in the past ten years have some counter-institutional public house churches come onto the scene in major cities. In the half century before, no matter if the security situation was aggravated or relaxed, the Chinese churches, including most house churches, subconsciously thought that existence was the supreme purpose of a church. Thus, fear has been the most common life experience of Chinese house churches.
The second position that Wang Mingdao took against the TSPM was in fact an extension of the independence movement and the nationalistic independence thought behind it. He believed that the church had been “three-self” from early on. In the early stages of the TSPM, there was a demarcated period before the movement expanded. The outbreak of the Korean War turned China and the United States into warring enemies. At that time, the whole of society was covered in anti-American slogans. As the war broke out, the US government froze all Chinese assets in the US. Many denominations and churches in China still relied on financial support from mission boards and foundations. Once the war broke out, all money connected to the US was frozen. Then, the Government Administration Council (the State Council at the time) called a meeting of “churches and organizations that have been granted American allowances” and demanded them to liquidate and terminate all American ties. All relationships concerning personnel, finance, and property had to be cut off. Since the beginning of the TSPM, this was the largest religious affairs meeting and it was attended by the highest-ranking officials. Lu Dingyi (1906–1996), the CCP’s publicity head hosted the meeting and Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002), father of President Xi Jin Ping, spoke at the meeting. Even most of the fundamentalist church leaders attended the meeting, including Watchman Nee and Jing Dianying (1890–1957), the founder of Jesus Family in Shandong, who represented the two largest indigenous church systems at the time.
While Wang Mingdao enjoyed tremendous spiritual influence. However, his Christian Tabernacle was an independent congregational church. Before 1949 it expanded with an extra courtyard and a rebuilt chapel. In 1949, the Christian Tabernacle hosted a revival. The whole courtyard was filled with five to seven hundred people gathered for worship. However, there was only one such Christian Tabernacle and it had no relationships concerning spiritual authority with any other congregations. Meanwhile, the Local Churches under Watchman Nee were all over the country and claimed to host 100,000 followers. The Jesus Family under Jing Dianying was primarily located in Shandong. While it was not a national organization, it was to some extent like the People’s Commune and imitated the believers’ community in book of Acts after Pentecost when the believers lived together and had everything in common. The difference was that the Jesus Family was also a community of production and business. A dozen families would constitute a “small family,” a group of small families would constitute a “big family,” and each family would have its own head of the household, much like the kibbutz after the reestablishment of the state of Israel. Believers voluntarily contributed their belongings and gave up their rights so that they would have everything in common. Because of their high efficiency in production, they also enjoyed economic success. Consequently, in effect the Jesus Family formed a new social structure. One hundred and thirty Jesus Families were spread over several northern provinces.
We mentioned before that in the traditional Chinese social structure, the landowning gentry class was considered the elite socio-economic class in rural China. When the churches came into rural areas, missionaries and pastors became the “foreign gentries” of rural China. When religion began to impact the social structure and then went on to impact the cultural order, conflict broke out between the church and the local gentry. For example, after the removal of the prohibition of Christianity due to the Beijing Treaty of 1860, the first incident between the church and local gentry was the Qingyan Incident that took place in Guizhou during the Dragon Boat Festival when the gentry and local people played gongs and drums as they passed a Catholic church. This incident led to a conflict.
After 1949, the CCP began to wipe out the gentry class in rural areas to replace them with village party secretaries. This, in effect, replaced the traditional farmer-scholar families with rogue proletarians. These party leaders were neither the cultured members of traditional rural society nor respected members within the patriarchal system. All of those people had been wiped out. Instead, those who came to power were local gangsters. They became the new rulers of the rural areas.
Yet in Shandong and other provinces, the Jesus Family had already broken the traditional gentry rule and formed a new social structure in rural areas with the “family,” which in the economic sense, functioned like the commune. Its heads of the household were both religious leaders and village leaders. Therefore, to some extent, the Jesus Family was the most grounded denomination, was deeply rooted in the most traditional Chinese rural order, and became a new order on a small scale. Furthermore, it looked like the most “socialist” order since it had been carrying on common ownership for the thirty years prior to 1949.
Therefore, from the socioeconomic perspective, the Jesus Family had far more impact on Chinese society than any other church, and thus were more of a concern for the CCP. In 1950, Wu Zongsu, son of Y. T. Wu, was studying at YenChing University in the College of Religion. His classmates included several children of pastors, including Song Tianying (1929–1993), the daughter of John Sung and Yang Anxi (1930–2009), the son of Yang Shaotang. One day the school hosted a seminar where the room became very crowded. A group of people dressed like farmers and led by Jing Dianying, who at the time was doing a report at Yenching University on the Jesus Family, arrived at the seminar. The entire school was stirred up and students filled the room to see the Chinese Christian commune, so socialist and revolutionary, while at the same time so Christian. Everyone was excited. Yet in 1952, the Jesus Family became the first denomination to be wiped out by the authorities. Why? Because party branches could not take over the villages without first wiping out the Jesus Family who controlled the villages and had formed its own structure in these rural areas. Therefore, while the Jesus Family was the denomination most actively involved in the TSPM, accounting for 300 out of the first 1,500 church leaders to sign the TSPM Manifesto, and they self-identified as the most socialist, they were the still the first and most severely persecuted Christian community to be completely dismantled. While the State Administration of Religious Affairs (SARS) did not yet exist, He Chengxiang (1900–1967), director of the State Council Religious Affairs Bureau, led one task force to the Jesus Family to make accusations against counterrevolutionaries and local tyrants. This action resulted in Jing Dianying being sent to prison for committing counterrevolutionary crimes. He died in prison four years later. The whole Jesus Family system was destroyed.
Watchman Nee also founded his own church system. The primary goal of the CCP was to strike down organized church systems because they tended to reform entire social structures. Nee’s theology stood against denominationalism because he considered all denominations to have a wrong basis. This viewpoint was partially correct, because during the first half of the 20th century the global churches as a whole and their denominations were influenced by liberalism and those churches that took the narrow way apart from denominations and held onto the old, genuine gospel had become the minority, “the little flock”. Therefore the Local Churches were also called the “Little Flock” as they believed that they were set aside to recover the lost gospel truth. Consequently, they went against all denominations and claimed that they needed no denomination, no identification as a church or even a name, and others called them “the Little Flock.” Later, they met on Hardoon Road in Shanghai. For registration purposes, they called their meeting the “Assembly.” Because Nee also emphasized one church in each locality with no denomination, they were also called the “Local Churches.” However, they did not consider themselves to be a church, but rather a group of true believers of Jesus who gathered and broke bread together. However, denominations have always been the product of movements against other denominations. In the 1940s, the Local Churches had in fact become the largest and most organized indigenous denomination with the most systematized teaching.
Therefore, in 1951, the CCP arrested Watchman Nee. The Local Churches were very fundamentalist in faith and emphasized an internal life of faith, spirituality, and relationship with the Lord. They basically stood against institutionalization and theology and emphasized detachment from society. Historically, they were influenced by the British Plymouth Brethren and mysticism. If you were with them, you would find they were very spiritual and would not talk with you about secular topics like movies or novels, nor would they talk about politics, economy, or culture. From their perspective, these were contents of the “soul.” Their anthropology was known as “trichotomy,” which distinctly separated the “spirit” from the “soul.” Therefore, some would call Wang Mingdao a “Confucian Christian” and Watchman Nee a “Taoist Christian.” When moral content is stripped from the “spirit,” it makes it easy for heresy to enter the scene. Once I met someone from a heretical cult. The brother responsible for the receiving visitors into the church spent some time with him. Afterwards, this brother commended him for his spirituality, saying that he did not speak like a human being. Rather, his speech was full of biblical quotations. The brother did not know how to deal with him except for to fully admire his spirituality. In one sense the Local Church represents a great tradition. But in another sense, they were too extreme in their ignorance of society and culture. This ignorance would eventually lead to exegetical issues.
Furthermore, one common phenomenon of the fundamentalist churches of 1950 was that those who never paid attention to politics eventually became very politically naïve. The churches in 1950 were very politically naïve. Since they completely lacked the ability for discernment, most of them were easily coerced into political movements. In 1949, the Local Churches hosted a prayer meeting in Shanghai in order to stop with prayer the People’s Liberation Army from crossing the Yangtze River. They were also dressed in white and took to the streets to share the gospel, claiming that the Kingdom of Heaven was near and the Last Day was coming when there would be no more opportunity for repentance. Then in 1951, they were sentenced as counterrevolutionaries. However, the Local Churches were not only naïve regarding church-state relationships, they were also naïve regarding church-economy relationships. Watchman Nee went to Northeast China because there were several factories there. He planned to open factories and support preachers with their profits. He ended up being arrested on the train-ride to the factories and was detained until he was sentenced in 1956. In that period, he disappeared from the Chinese church scene for five years. No one, including his family, knew where he was detained. When the case against the Wang Mingdao counterrevolutionary clique broke out, it did not take long for the case against the Watchman Nee counterrevolutionary clique to follow. This was a huge blow to the Local Churches.
Watchman Nee also joined the TSPM. Initially, he was against joining, but he changed his position later—possibly out of immense pressure, possibly due to his lack of a clear political position. Later he said that the country was like a plate and the church was like a cup. The cup had to be placed on the plate. Therefore, it was acceptable to join the TSPM. Watchman Nee loved using parables and they could be interpreted in multiple ways. Consequently, the Local Churches as a whole joined the TSPM. But the CCP would not release him due to the large scale of his church system. After he was arrested and the counterrevolutionary case broke out, many Local Churches withdrew from the TSPM. In the meantime, the government discovered evidence of Watchman Nee’s moral sins. This evidence may have be true. Since the church did not deal with it, it became a weapon in the hands of Satan to break the church. The evidence could also be a result of his being framed or extorted. According to the narration of Yang Anxi, son of Yang Shaotang, at the time many servants of the Lord, including Watchman Nee, were struck down by the moral sins they had committed. Those sins became the breach for Satan’s attack and also an instrument for God’s discipline.
So, Local Churches in different localities took different stances. Some became assemblies within the TSPM, while others left the TSPM and became house churches. In fact, in the following decades, there were Local Churches on both sides.
Unlike Watchman Nee and Jing Dianying, two leaders who attended the State Council meeting regarding American allowances, Wang Mingdao was the only church leader who resolutely refused to attend the meeting. The government tried its best to persuade him to attend the meeting with personal invitations from representatives of the YMCA and senior preachers. He still refused to go, saying that he had absolutely no relationship with imperialism and that he had long achieved the three-self principles. He argued that having never received any allowance or contribution from the American church in previous decades, he had been self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing. He was indeed qualified to say so since he even baptized himself after he jumped into the river. Therefore, he said that he did not need to attend the meeting and was not qualified to attend the meeting. He was the only church leader who did not attend the meeting and the CCP hated him as bitterly as Haman hated Mordecai because he was the only one who would not prostrate at the King’s gate. However, the CCP still tried to win over Wang Mingdao. Namely because he did not have a church system, there was no urgency in dealing with him like there was with Jing Dianying and Watchman Nee. However, they also wanted to win him over because of his incomparable personal influence. In this regard, the CCP was abnormally patient with him.
As late as 1955, Zhou Enlai still put the word out that there was a position reserved for Wang Mingdao in the TSPM. If he decided to join, he would immediately become the vice chairman of the national committee. After the Korean War, China badly desired some sort of diplomatic breakthrough because not many countries at the time would recognize China as a sovereign state. The Chinese government invited the general secretary of the United Nations to visit China, and the general secretary proposed certain conditions before he would make the trip (which did not happen in the end). One such condition was that he wanted to meet Wang Mingdao in China. Therefore, the Chinese government wanted to leave Wang Mingdao free and keep him as a card that they could play. But he was stubborn and claimed that he would not meet the general secretary if he ended up coming. Finally, the government figured out that there was no use keeping him free. By June of that year, Wang Mingdao had published three important articles in a row. This act bears similarities to Martin Luther’s three publications on proclamatory works in 1520: On the Freedom of a Christian, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, a move that many take to be the true beginning of the Reformation. In 1955, Wang Mingdao wrote “Truth or Toxin?”, questioning whether the Bible is truth or whether it is Imperialist poison. He claimed that not one word in the Bible was imperialist poison, but that the whole Bible is the pure truth of God. This was a resolute expression of fundamentalist belief. He then wrote his most famous apologetic article, “We are for the Faith.” In it, he exclaimed that he would not join the TSPM, not because he was a counterrevolutionary, nor because he was opposed to the CCP. Rather, his only reason for not joining was for the faith because he would be ashamed to associate himself with those who had joined the TSPM since he did not regard them as believers of God. He wrote no word against the CCP, but only against those who left Jesus to follow the CCP. In one sense this was related to his fundamentalist beliefs. He did not write this from the perspective of church-state relations, claiming that political power should never override the church. He never said this.
This is very different from our situation today. The fundamentalists of that time would not say the CCP should not rule over the church and Chairman Mao Zedong could not be its head. Doing so would be to speak against the Bible and would result in God’s judgment. Instead, the fundamentalists would only say that those (within the TSPM) are not believers. They are Judases who would only follow Caesar. Their thought was, “We are for the faith. ‘Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.’ Consequently, we should not join the TSPM.” Thus, in 1951, the government in Beijing took one step back and offered them a seemingly reasonable option: “Since you will not join the TSPM, we will allow you to register as a temporary place of gathering. You can form your own organization, which will still be subject to government administration.” The government in Beijing would allow them to stay out of TSPM on condition that they would organize their own political education. Wang Mingdao consulted with eleven leaders of independent churches, including Allen Yuan and Wang Zheng, and replied to the government: “As citizens we could personally attend political education as required by the government, but since the church has nothing to do with politics, we cannot attend political education as a church.”
This position had nothing to do with belief or unbelief. The church was inevitably going to encounter the issue of church-state relationships. Ultimately you would have to say: “Sorry but the church has nothing to do with politics and I will not join the TSPM. The government should not interfere with religion, so I cannot under any circumstances join any political activities that the government organizes or requires the church to host. Otherwise I would be betraying the Lord.” Their attitude was humble and gentle, evidenced by the way in which they said that as citizens they could personally attend, saying, “If you forced me to go with a gun to my head, I would have to go.” What Wang Mingdao meant was this: “As a citizen, I do not have the responsibility to strongly resist you, but as a preacher, I do have the responsibility to strongly resist you.”
As a result, after he published “We are for the Faith,” the government decided to arrest him. On Sunday August 7th, he preached a sermon titled “The Son of Man Was Sold into the Hands of Sinners.” That night he stayed in his home, which shared a courtyard with the chapel. He was in the bed, and as he got up, a voice suddenly came from behind him, “Freeze!” One policeman held a handgun against his waist and asked him where the key was. Wang realized that they did not come in through the door, but that they had come over the wall and that is why they were asking for the key. Deep into the night, a dozen policemen came over the wall. They opened the gate and let others in. Wang Mingdao later recalled how scared he was. If you have never had someone else holding a gun against your waist, you can never know how great human weakness can be. He said that from that moment on, he was mentally broken. Not long after he was arrested, and even before he was tried and tortured, he confessed to all the crimes with which the government had charged him. He admitted to everything he had stood against from 1950 to 1955. He gave up everything he had been holding onto. In prison, Wang Mingdao wrote his confession and agreed to join the TSPM. Then the government released him, and his confession was published in the People’s Daily, similar to the TV confession of our time.
This was the first time Wang Mingdao was arrested. Soon after entering prison, he fell. Later he admitted that he had an inner-spiritual pride. He had been in constant fighting, especially against the Japanese. When the Japanese army took Beijing, he lived under its rule for eight years. The intelligence division of the Japanese General Headquarters also organized a Three-Self church called the North China Chinese Christian Mission. They even invited delegations from the Japanese church to visit, claiming that churches of different countries should love each other. Since the Japanese church was visiting, shouldn’t the Chinese church welcome them and fellowship with them with warm reception? So, they organized the North China Chinese Christian Mission under their secret service division. Wang Mingdao refused to join. A Japanese colonel personally came to invite him. After a few failed attempts, they arrested him and locked him up in the kenpeitai prison. Even there, they treated him politely and would talk to him with words like “please sit down, Mr. Wang.” But Wang Mingdao would not give in. The kenpeitai could do nothing with him and felt he had no political value, but rather was only a “fanatic of Jesus.” Killing him would do them no good, so they released him. Thus, Wang Mingdao was greatly acclaimed as the “national hero” of the Chinese church who held onto his faith in the face of the Japanese army.
Therefore, he admitted to his inner-spiritual pride, saying “If I was not afraid of the Japanese, why would I be afraid of the CCP? After all, they are also Chinese. There is no way that the Chinese would be more ferocious toward their fellow Chinese than the Japanese.” That was his thought in the beginning. But later when he found out that the Chinese were in fact more ferocious toward their fellow Chinese, he quickly fell. The cells in the prison were categorized into first, second, and third classes. He was locked into a second-class cell. His two cellmates asked him what crime he committed. They also said that anyone who was locked in the second-class cells must have committed heinous crimes and would be executed by shooting. These two cellmates were actually informants planted into his cell by the government. They would purposefully chat with each other beside Wang, saying, “The government recently invented a new type of bullet that will drill nonstop into the prisoner’s head so the prisoner will not die but rather will suffer from it for hours.” Wang Mingdao said he overheard this and believed it, and it terrified him. He thought being shot and immediately dying would be okay, but to be shot and suffer a painful death that lasted for hours scared him to death. All sinners are weak and so was Wang Mingdao. In the face of the sword, the faithful servant that the Lord had used tremendously, the one we all respect, was weakened to the extent of being incredibly stupid. Therefore, after he was released from prison, he stopped all church services and would not join the TSPM. He knew he had fallen, so he meditated over his sins behind closed doors and repented to the Lord. When he was in the prison, the hymn, “Offer Everything,” was brought to his mind, and he changed the lyrics to “All Hope is Lost.” You can see how broken he once was. Our faith can never be stronger than Wang Mingdao’s once was and also can never be weaker than his once was. Consequently, while we are Christians who have only a slight taste of the gospel, he was a “great sinner” who was tremendously filled and used by the gospel.
He did not say the words “all hope is lost” while at home, but he sang “all hope is lost” while in prison. This proves that God is the God who “lifts the needy from the ash heap” and that the way of the Chinese church is a way of grace alone. Revivals did not occur because the church had a few extraordinary people of moral and spiritual excellence. It took Wang Mingdao a very long time to recover from his fall. In fact, in the following half a century, he seldom preached publicly. When he was released again in the 1980s, there were small gatherings at his home in Shanghai, but he would no longer build up churches or serve by preaching publicly. Someone commented that in the 20th century there were two great preachers in Christian churches around the world. One was Billy Graham, who preached to more people than anyone else in two thousand years of church history. Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle in London had no microphone and could host no more than two thousand people to listen to sermons. Yet with the help of microphones and modern audio equipment, Billy Graham’s preaching rallies often attracted an audience of a 100,000–200,000 people. It was estimated that all-told he preached to a live audience of over 200 million people. The other great 20th century preacher was Wang Mingdao. He barely preached in the second half of the century and the way God used him was through imprisonment. So, do you understand that something like this could also be of great service to the church? God can potentially use even your weakness and fall to serve Him. While Wang Mingdao no longer preached publicly, his Spiritual Food Quarterly fed the Chinese church ceaselessly from when he was 27 years old to when he was 55 years old.
Yesterday, someone posted a photo online of Hudson and Maria Taylor’s tombstone. There is a sentence at the bottom of the tombstone, which says: “Through their faith, though they died, yet they still speak.” So does Wang Mingdao. In the past half-century, he still speaks through his faith. A life of repentance. A life of belief. Whether in moments of danger or displacement, he held onto his faith.
In the 1950s there were both large-scale betrayals of the Lord and his church as well as clouds of witnesses. For example, Brother Bian Yunbo (1925–2018) who was recently taken to heaven by the Lord was one of those witnesses. He started to believe in the Lord during the college campus revivals in Chengdu and Chongqing in the 1940s and then offered himself to be a minister. He was arrested in 1949. Just before his arrest, he wrote a famous poem, “To the Unknown Preacher.” He was kept in prison until the late 1970s. He then went to the US where he discovered that his poem had been printed into countless flyers and pamphlets and was widely sung in the overseas Chinese churches. He had no idea that this poem written before his imprisonment had encouraged the churches for so many years and had fed so many people of God.
We mentioned last time that pastor Charles Chao was baptized at one of Wang Mingdao’s evangelical rallies. Pastor Chao came to the mainland in 1984 and visited Wang Mingdao in Shanghai. In 1988, after many years of effort, the TSPM was finally able to invite pastor Billy Graham to visit China. Therefore, the TSPM made a big deal out of his visit with huge publicity campaigns both inside and outside of the country claiming the existence of religious freedom in China. They actually took advantage of Billy Graham. But Graham also made a request to visit Wang Mingdao, which the government agreed to because they needed Wang for the United Work Front. Therefore, there is a portrait of Billy Graham with Wang Mingdao and his wife at their residence in Shanghai in 1988, which serves as a record of the only meeting between the two greatest preachers of the 20th century.
Charles Chao met Wang Mingdao again in 1984 and recorded some narration of his critical history. In this oral history, Wang Mingdao talked about his second imprisonment. After being released from his first imprisonment, he repented to the Lord and slowly recovered his faith and strength. Then, he voluntarily went to the local police station and said, “I want to take back the confession I wrote, because I was wrong about it. I had sinned and lied. At that time, I said I was guilty, but it was a lie.” At that point, the government decided to arrest both him and his wife. This time he was sentenced to life imprisonment and was imprisoned till 1980. Although he had no Bible in the prison, he had memorized major portions of Scripture. Micah 7: 7-9 was a passage that God used to give him significant comfort while in prison. In the interview, he told pastor Charles Chao that this was the most important piece of Scripture that the Lord revealed to him while he was incarcerated.
He had a very good memory and could recite many of the Confucian classics. So, in the 1980 he wrote many letters in his own defense to Jiang Hua (1907–1999), then president of the Supreme People’s Court, in which he quoted much from the Confucian classics. At that time, Wang Mingdao suffered from failing eyesight, to the extent of almost being blind and he could hardly read books. In those letters, he explained why he was imprisoned and why his imprisonment was wrong. His release at the time was also conspicuous because the Chinese economic reform was just beginning, and the government wanted to improve relationships with the United States. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping visited the US as the vice premier. The president of the US at that time, Jimmy Carter, was a person who was very serious about faith. Carter was not the smartest person, but his election embodies a critical change in US at the end of the 1970s: the rise of the evangelicals and the return of conservatism. After the Sexual Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the social trend of anti-Christian movements and dechristianization began to change.
This is an important piece of background information regarding globalization. The forty years of Chinese house church revival were directly related to the forty years of the rise of American evangelicalism. Without the rise of American evangelicalism, evangelism in the new era of China would not have had the same scale and strength, not to mention the important of the house church’s reliance on American churches for theological education over the past twenty years.
So, Carter made one request to Deng Xiaoping, to release Wang Mingdao before the Chinese New Year in 1980. Deng Xiaoping promised to do so without hesitation, saying: “No problem! We are in the process of correcting mistakes and restoring order anyway. We are sorting out many wrong convictions made in the past.” When he returned to China, Deng Xiaoping was going to release Wang Mingdao as he had promised. But there had to be a reason for the release, and legally there could only be two: either the government had to admit they were wrong and admit a wrongful conviction, vacate the case against the “Wang Mingdao Counterrevolutionary Clique,” and admit that he was not a counterrevolutionary, or the government had to hold on to its belief that it was right all along and the prisoner wang Mingdao had been reformed and could now be released before his sentence expired. The problem was that Wang Mingdao would not obey. He said, “I have not been reformed. From the beginning I have not pleaded guilty to my charges, nor would I do so now. Therefore, you should not release me before my sentence expires, which would be illegal, unless you admit that my conviction was wrong. Once you overturn the case, I will walk out readily.” The government had no choice but to trick him into moving out of prison under the guise of moving him to another prison. Once he walked out of the prison, they locked the gate behind him. Previously he was forced into prison, now he was forced out of it.
Wang Mingdao returned to Shanghai and kept sending petition letters to Jiang Hua, president of the Supreme People’s Court, telling him that he had been wrongly released. Wang argued that he had been imprisoned for all those years for one reason only: because he stood against the TSPM, and thus, for the faith. He had only been imprisoned for that, had never pleaded guilty, and had never been reformed. Thus far, the government has yet to overturn the case against the “Wang Mingdao Counterrevolutionary Clique” (the same situation as in the case against the “Watchman Nee Counterrevolutionary Clique”). At that time there were many who were arrested in connection to Wang’s case, including Allen Yuan and Samuel Lamb, who were Wang Mingdao’s much younger successors. They were arrested under the charge of being a part of “the gang of Wang Mingdao.” The government released Wang Mingdao but refused to admit to its wrongful persecution of Christianity. Therefore, it had to pretend that Wang Mingdao had been reformed in prison. Yet, like the child in the Andersen fairy tale who points out that the emperor has no clothes, Wang Mingdao persistently claimed that the government was wrong and that he had never been reformed.
Wang Mingdao’s life was unique. He essentially showed no interested in society and politics, and yet for all of his life he was protected by political powers. But this protection was not something he strived for in the least. Rather, it was due to the will and command of the Almighty God. At the beginning of the 20th century, he was born as a posthumous child at the US Embassy in China during the first massacre experienced by the Chinese church. At the end of the 20th century, he was released by the request of the US president after the second massacre experienced by the Chinese church. His life makes obvious that anything related to the church must be understood under spiritual authority and with a universal perspective rather than with a nationalist perspective. God is the king of the whole world. The growth and fate of churches across the world are well-connected and they are always working towards each other. The church does not possess political or financial power. Yet, all political and financial power is at God’s disposal. Our belief in this fact is exactly the reason we do not pursue such power.
Simply put, since 1955, Chinese house churches have always been Wang Mingdao’s accomplices, because the case against the “Wang Mingdao Counterrevolutionary Clique” has never been overturned. In other words, Wang Mingdao is still considered a criminal by the People’s Republic of China. As long as we hold to the same ground of faith as this criminal, we will be part of the “Wang Mingdao Counterrevolutionary Clique,” because the two cases against the Wang Mingdao and Watchman Nee Counterrevolutionary Cliques are the origin of the Chinese house churches. The only difference is that the crime is no longer called “counterrevolutionary” but “inciting subversion of state power” or “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Dear brothers and sisters, what an honor it would be to be charged with such crimes for the sake of the Lord! Until this regime overturns cases against Christians or changes its position on persecuting Christianity, these charges of crimes are the crown of thorns of Jesus Christ in China. We do not want to take this crown off immediately because God will take it off in His timing. Persecution is a gift from God, the church’s gymnasium. Persecution proves that our faith is real and that our faith in the Lord is true and certain.
Returning our focus to 1950, Zhou Enlai met three times with Y. T. Wu and delegates of the Chinese churches (all selected by the government). When Y. T. Wu met Zhou Enlai in Chongqing and said that Christianity and Communism were ninety-nine percent like each other, Zhou Enlai disagreed. Y. T. Wu greatly admired Zhou Enlai and believed in his promise of the “policy of religious freedom in the new China.” Therefore, he and the delegates travelled the country to collect cases where there was a poor execution of the policy of religious freedom, such as churches that were wrongfully occupied and not returned, party cadres who verbally insulted a pastor’s faith, or atheist propaganda posted in churches. When they returned to Beijing, they reported 500 such cases to Zhou Enlai in hope that the Premier would help implement the policy of religious freedom. In the end, Zhou Enlai took a look at the report and set it aside, saying that the main issue at the time is not whether the policy of religious freedom is being implemented, “but the problem of whether or not people would accept Christianity’s continued existence.” Why? Because Christianity had long been considered to be a part of imperialism. If the church did not denounce imperialism and eliminate the followers of the imperialists, the people “would not approve” and Christianity would no longer be able to exist in China.
This opinion sounded treacherous and unkind, and the pastors who reported to Zhou were all scared. Y. T. Wu rushed back and drafted, according to the principles of Zhou Enlai’s address, the “Three-Self Manifesto” and vowed to eliminate followers of the imperialists and denounce imperialism. After he turned in the manifesto, Zhou Enlai pointed out places for improvement. After three editions and signatures of forty church leaders, it was sent to churches all over the country to call for signatures. Within two months, 1,527 people signed it. It was published in full in the People’s Daily. Chairman Mao Zedong read it, had it broadcast to the whole country, and reprinted it in the Guangming Daily.
Chairman Mao Zedong also met Y. T. Wu four times and arranged for him to sit at the Gate of Heavenly Peace (tiananmen) during the founding ceremony of the People’s Republic of China. Seating at the Gate of Heavenly Peace at the time was very limited, and yet all three members of Wu’s family were able to sit there. His ticket was ordered by Zhou Enlai, and the tickets for his wife and his son were delivered by Rosamond Soong Qingling (1893–1981, widow of Sun Yat-sen and Vice President of China at the time). Wu was one of the first to be admitted as a member of the United Front Work. Chairman Mao even shook hands with him at the gate. In 1950, during the anniversary celebration of the founding ceremony, Chairman Mao shook hands with him again, saying, “You did well with the Manifesto. But we need more signatures. Some people will be against it, and we will call for more people to sign on it.” Therefore, from 1950 to 1953 the call for signatures to the Manifesto went out to churches all over the country until over 400,000 Christians signed it in betrayal of the Lord.
Dear brothers and sisters, if you are called to sign such a document, will you do so? It could be a fatal decision. Should you choose not to sign, you could be put into prison and forsaken by all of society. In the 1950s, Wang Mingdao and Watchman Nee fell, not to mention Jia Yuming and Yang Shaotang. In fact, the Chinese church as a whole fell through a large-scale horrendous betrayal of the Lord and of fellow brothers and sisters. During the early days of the TSPM, there were so many denials of the Lord, far more than Peter’s three denials. No matter how long the rooster crowed, people were still denying the Lord. Such a large-scale betrayal of the Lord has rarely been seen in the history of the church. A physical signature on a paper would clear one’s name, followed by the Accusation Campaign when Chinese pastors made accusations against missionaries, co-workers made accusations against pastors, and brothers and sisters made accusations against co-workers. An accusation might go something like this: “He is bureaucratic. The last time I asked him to print out a file, he would not do.” “He has Bourgeois thoughts. The last time believers of poor and lower-middle peasants passed by, he did not greet them.” “They are filled with fatal imperialist elements just like upper-class Chinese who stand against ordinary people.” These accusations sound like jokes, don’t they? Yet, when a political movement comes, such accusations could permeate our church as well. In a time like this, accusations like these could effectively act like swords that kill people. If there are already-existing complaints between believers and co-workers, when a political movements arises, the evil of Satan could be released within the church like the opening of Pandora’s box, resulting in the omnipresence of the kinds of accusations that subtly kill people.
Jia Yuming was the most important leader of the fundamentalist churches. He was Wang Mingdao’s senior and he held a higher reputation. In the beginning, he refused to join the TSPM before officials from the Religious Affairs Bureau spoke with him, possibly using threats and bribes. He was president of Shanghai Institute of Spiritual Formation, a writer and a theologian who was working on multiple books. Perhaps he was desperate to keep his ministries and his school going. He was told that once he joined the TSPM, everything would run as it had been. He could keep writing his books and running the school. But if he refused to join the TSPM, all would be lost. Therefore, if God were to remove you from your ministry or work, you should be grateful, because when the next wave of persecution comes, you’ll have one fewer thing to give up. If God removes your publications or your social status in advance, when a wave of persecution arrives, you will no longer be threatened by the world in regard to these things. The terrible thing was that God had not removed many of those things from Jia Yuming. Consequently, he ended up joining the TSPM. It was a big blow to the fundamentalist churches and countless believers fell because of him. After he joined the TSPM, the government treated him as a prominent figure and appointed him as vice president of the national committee. Yet a few years later, he gained sympathy for the fate of his fellow believers as his school was closed down and his books were no longer published. Late in his life, Jia Yuming suffered deeply because of his spiritual failure.
But the Lord Jesus Christ is worthy to be praised. After Wang Mingdao was arrested, there were still 100,000 believers nationwide who resolutely refused to join the TSPM or slowly left it after initially choosing to join. Every church at the time was part of the TSPM, and leaving it meant that you could no longer go to church to worship and that you would have to gather underground. Gradually house churches arose. In 1958 the TSPM did something even more evil, called “united worship.” This meant the break-down of all denominations and the gathering of all believers to worship together on Sunday. The idea was, “Since all denominations were brought to China by the western churches as a part of imperialism, now that we have denounced imperialism, why should there still be Baptist, Presbyterian or Episcopal churches in China? Aren’t they marks of imperialism? Since there is now only one ‘Church of the new China’ we should eliminate all denominations and worship as one.”
As a matter of fact, the “united worship” was merely a disguise. One hundred denominations meant at least one hundred church buildings. The purpose of eliminating denominations was to bring down most of the church buildings and cut down on the number of churches. In Shanghai the number of church buildings was reduced from 500 to 100. In Chengdu, the number was reduced from twenty-six to two, the Shangxiang Church and the Gracious Light Church. After the start of united worship, in most cities the number of church buildings was cut by ninety to ninety-nine percent. All denominations were eliminated, and most church buildings were shut down. United worship was a conspiracy to “murder the church.” At that time, more people left the TSPM to join house churches because there was no church building left for attending worship.
To summarize, with the rise of the TSPM, there were three waves of believers who left the movement. These all became part of the house church movement. The first wave took place between 1955 and 1956 when the arrest of Wang Mingdao and Watchman Nee lead churches and believers who identified with these two leaders to leave the movement. The second wave took place after the united worship movement, causing many churches and believers to leave the TSPM and worship at house churches. The third wave took place after the Cultural Revolution began when, if you wanted to gather and hold onto your faith, you would have to be a part of the underground house church movement.
One of Jia Yuming’s students wrote a memoir about him. After the Cultural Revolution broke out, he met Jia Yuming, who asked the student to pray for him. He asked him, “Teacher, you were the one who taught us how to pray. How would you ask me to pray for you?” Jia Yuming sadly said: “I have not prayed for a long time. I cannot pray and do not know how to pray. God no longer listens to my prayer and I can no longer pray. Please pray for me.” This great man of the Chinese church had failed to such a degree. We do not know his eternal destiny, which is only in the hands of God, and we cannot judge whether he was saved. But we have indeed seen that on the road to seeking refuge in Caesar, his spiritual life was broken to pieces. The same thing happened to Yang Shaotang. He suffered from verbal and physical abuse during the Cultural Revolution, was sent to sweep the streets in Shanghai, and died on the street after he fell on the ground. His son, senior house church preacher Yang Anxi, witnessed for him in his memoir and said that in the end his father had a clear understanding of the situation and held onto his faith. Yang Anxi said that as his son, he formally inquired of his father’s spiritual status before the end of his life and, consequently, inscribed the words “Faithful Servant of God” on his father’s tombstone.
What is awe-inspiring is that most church leaders who joined the TSPM did not live long and most of them died during the Cultural Revolution. But most of the house church leaders are still alive and all have made it into their eighties and even nineties. They were arrested either between 1955 and 1956, in the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, or before the Cultural Revolution, and were all released in the early 1980s. These saints, including Wang Mingdao, Allen Yuan, Samuel Lamb, Li Tianen (1928–2016), Xie Moshan (1918–2011), Bian Yunbo (who was overseas), Yang Xinfei (1928–2011), and Li Jinghang (1922–2016), were imprisoned for over a decade or even for dozens of years. There were nonutritious meals or workouts. And yet, God brought them long life. The youngest was Yang Xinfei who died at 84 years old. The oldest was Xie Moshan who died at 93 years old.
God’s immense grace is hidden in this period. Why? Because when the Cultural Revolution, the most severe persecution, arrived, these leaders of the pre-1949 fundamentalist churches were under God’s protection. They were protected in prison where they had long been locked up. Therefore, when the Cultural Revolution began, all of the church leaders who were verbally and physically abused to death by the Red Guards or who committed suicide were leaders of the TSPM who had not been imprisoned, while house church leaders enjoyed their sabbaticals in the prisons. Anyone who has been in prison would know that moving from detention center to prison was like moving to heaven because the prison was comparatively orderly. During the Great Chinese Famine between 1959 and 1961, tens of millions of Chinese died as victims of the famine, but few in the prisons died from it. When the Cultural Revolution began, the Red Guards did not break into the prisons to abuse prisoners. Therefore, the prisons became monasteries for house churches, and their preachers would have to be imprisoned to enjoy their sabbaticals. This was God‘s grace specifically preserved for the Chinese church. Elder Li JingHang of Lanzhou city was accused as a Rightist in the 1957 campaign and survived his time in the Jiabiangou Labor Camp. He passed away two years ago and went home to Heaven. During the Cultural Revolution, God took away the lives of many leaders of the TSPM but preserved these “criminals of the Republic” who made it to their nineties. Why? Notice that all the cases against leaders of the TSPM were overturned after the Cultural Revolution because they were seen as “contradictions among the people.” But no cases against house church leaders have been overturned because they were seen as “contradictions between us and the enemy.” Not only were they and their families blessed, but more importantly, God saved them for us. This serves as an inheritance, a bloodline for the Chinese house churches. God did not take them to their heavenly home until this inheritance had been firmly built up, just as the Apostle John was left to the end of the first century as a witness for the gospel. Without the renewed life of these fundamentalist preachers who were refined by their imprisonment, there would have been no revival of the Chinese house churches after 1980. They witnessed the revival of house churches until the beginning of the twenty-first century when the Lord took them to heaven. This is something for which we should be forever grateful. For only the Lord’s name is worthy of being praised.
