Let’s review what we have discussed since the very beginning. What was Session One about? Session one gave the background for China’s interaction with Protestantism in the two hundred years of the 19th and 20th centuries. What was Session Two about? Session Two was about the first fifty years of the 20th century up until 1949 when the two camps of the liberals and the fundamentalists were formed. What was Session Three about? Session Three was about the three political movements and their impact on the church and the formation of two ways differing methods of response from the liberals and that of the fundamentalists, or the way of the TSPM and that of the house churches. What was Session Four about? Session Four was about the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution. What was Session Five about? Anyone remember anything about Session Five? Just follow the timeline. Session Five was about the period between the end of the Cultural Revolution and 1989. Session Six was about the period between 1989 and 1998.
Therefore, today we will look at the period between 1998 and 2010. Since 1998 is very close to the end of the 20th century, essentially our session today is about the first decade of the 21st century.
We previously discussed the house church’s release of its Confession of Faith in 1998, the theology of K. H. Ting and the TSPM, and the official theology, which was in effect a heretical theology and served as a clear measure of the boundaries drawn by the government. Actually, the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, or the last two years of the 20th century until the first two years of the 21st century, saw a large-scale suppression of house churches. Of course, it was not only a strike against house churches, but a full-scale strike against all religion. The attack on Falun Gong began during that period. Alongside of Falun Gong, Christianity was another key target of that attack. While it is Taoism that has produced the most cults in Chinese history, the focuses of the attack on religion during those years were Falun Gong and Christianity. We’ve already discussed the lack of a legal system leading up to that time. At the turn of the century, the accusation of being a cult became very popular for use against both Falun Gong and Christianity. This accusation was used mainly to attack Falun Gong and house church Christianity in particular.
1997 and 1998 witnessed a first round of movements to destroy crosses and churches in Zhejiang. The movement to destroy crosses and churches in 2014 was not the first wave, but rather the second. The movement from 1997 to 1998 was the first wave. In fact there were more churches destroyed in that wave than in 2014. And its focus was not the crosses but the churches themselves. The legend was, and I am not sure about this, that Premier Zhu Rongji (b. 1928) visited Wenzhou and was very upset that the churches along the roads outnumbered even the convenience stores. He attributed this to the inaction of the local party committees. To appease him, a whole bunch of churches were destroyed by those committees.
Afterwards, this movement continued into the beginning of the 21st century. In fact, since the end of the 1990s, there were many years between the last time such a large-scale movement against house churches happened and the one starting in 2014 which continues today. The movement to destroy churches in Zhejiang from 1997 to 2002 was this sort of wave of suppression.
The most well-known case against house churches from that period was the case against South China Church, which was the biggest case since the 1980s. My personal belief in the Lord and calling by God to His vision for the church were also related to this case. From 2001 to 2002, three church leaders were initially sentenced to death, sentences which were later changed to life imprisonment. Also, twenty to thirty church members were sentenced with various prison terms, and over one hundred members were sent to re-education through labor. This South China Church was a branch of the Shouters Movement led by Xu Yongze out of the house churches in Henan province. It had spread into Hubei, then Guangdong, Guangxi, Sichuan, and Chongqing, in the end permeating nine provinces and claiming to have ten million believers. From 2003 to 2004, while the case was being decided, I participated in an internal investigation of the case which was requested by the church. At the time, I was a seeker since I had not yet believed in the Lord or been baptized. During those two years, I dug into the whole system of the South China Church, visited five or six provinces, including Henan, Hubei, Guangdong, and Chongqing, which I visited six or seven times each, and met many brothers, sisters, and co-workers for the purposes of the investigation. I saw a few things clearly that would also serve as God’s calling for me to believe in the Lord and which were also related to the common issues of the time since 2000.
So what did I see? First, I clearly saw the errors of the teachings in these churches. Of course, at that time I had not yet believed in the Lord, and the incident motivated me to study continuously. However, these churches were not heretical, because they basically used as their fundamental teaching the Chinese House Church Confession of Faith drafted by Pastor Jonathan Chao in 1998 for the Henan and Anhui teams. Pastor Jonathan Chao and his wife had taught and nurtured this church, and the whole South China Church used his “Threefold Vision” as the vision for their church. Their conviction by the courts was political in nature, and two of those charges were comical. That is to say that they were ridiculous and pathetic. One charge was political, the charge of counterrevolution. Why? Because the churches wanted to push the Kingdomization of the Chinese Church and the Christianization of Chinese culture. These accusations were literally written in the verdict against them. There were also accusations of activities related to the Kingdomization of the Chinese Church, which was the church’s guiding principle. They once gathered a great number of brothers and sisters into the mountains for military style exercises, days of retreat, and a roll call. As you know, the Bible uses many military terms, which, if read by someone who is not familiar with the Bible, sounds a lot like rebellion.
After years of investigation, we were able to identify, not with one hundred percent certainty, but as a whole, sins of both sexual immorality and the abuse of power within the leadership group of the church. The abuse of power was related to another situation in the church: the fact that this church spread over several provinces with tens of millions of congregants while remaining illegal and underground. To what did its underground status lead? Its underground status led to secrecy. Such underground secrecy also led to the strengthening of the leaders’ authority and emphasis on discipline and obedience, because everything was secret and dangerous, right? Everything about the church was concealed. At that time, the brothers and sisters in the Chinese house churches would never request that a church disclose its finances, because such an action might immediately lead to arrest. Thus, at that time, anyone who stood out to serve as one called by God took on a great risk. Whether financial officer or preacher, they were wanted by the government and took great risks. Therefore, one could not request financial disclosure. Everything had to be secret.
Therefore, with such secrecy, it became difficult and rare to provide theological training, to build relationships with other churches, to sustain connections with overseas churches, and even to study universal church traditions. Consequently, the church gradually developed into a new faction, which was bound to make errors because it had no chance for correction. Although it started with no major mistakes, yet in the end everyone becomes a tiny speck in the whole of church history. Are you that accurate on your own? You cannot be that accurate on your own. Therefore, without correction and study as an open, holy catholic church with a universal church tradition, the closed underground system was bound to run into errors and other internal problems with its leadership. That was what I saw happening in the South China Church.
How far did the abuse of power extend? Actually it is pretty simple. At the very beginning—you’ve probably never experienced this—in your village, your family are the only ones who are Christians, or maybe you are the only one in your family who believes, and when you attend a church gathering in the village, your family reports it to the government. Have any of you had this kind of experience? Your family reports you and the government sends people to arrest the brothers and sisters. Your family directly betrays you. What would you do? The harm would be incredible. So, to avoid this,the church requested that the brothers and sisters write down a pledge that their families would not betray the church. Then, what happens if some of the family members betray the church anyway? Afterwards, the church set up a disciplinary team. If the family of someone betrayed the church and the betrayal led to the arrest of other brothers and sisters, the disciplinary team would come to the family to warn them that it was wrong for them to betray the church. But these warnings would often lead to conflict. This sort of abuse of power was caused by government persecution.
Another factor was Eastern Lightning, which was very active in dragging people into their organization. As you may know, Eastern Lightning often resorts to violence. Sometimes they drug their targets and take them into the woods. This sort of thing happened to some of our church members a few years ago. One of their members came to them and asked if they would go to her home and share the gospel with her family because she could not convince them. Then, they were taken to her home in the suburbs only to find a room filled with people. She said that one was her uncle, one was her godfather, and so on, and they all just happened to be there. They all came since they had nothing else to do, right? Actually, the whole room of people were there to target our church members with tactics ranging from brainwashing, to drugs to spiritual coercion, all sorts of means, even sexual means. Once, in the 1990s, the Henan churches had a meeting of their leaders which served as a training session for preachers, the backbones of their team, similar to our joint Diaconate and Session meetings. While the team was meeting, they were attacked by Eastern Lightning, and half of the team ended up following Eastern Lightning and left the meeting. One can hardly imagine how weak a church’s foundation of truth has to be for half of the co-workers to be led away. From then on, the church had to take precautions against Eastern Lightning because sometimes Eastern Lightning would use violence. Therefore, the disciplinary team would be mobilized to fight against Eastern Lightning, even resorting to using weapons when they would clash. You could not report this to the police, because they would just arrest everyone.
Consequently, the church became an underground society, like a secret society in ancient China. The government did not worry about one secret society fighting against another; but once the government discovered it, it would arrest all of those involved. So, what happened in the end? In the end the church gradually went astray from the teaching of Christ. As it had to protect itself and survive, it would gradually start to draw from the resources of Chinese traditional culture and of a traditional secret society rather than the resources of the gospel of the catholic church.
Therefore, in that church I saw corruption, ruin, sin, mistakes or errors in teaching, which were all real. Yet from a legal perspective, these were not serious enough to be charged as crimes. That is to say, the whole case was a miscarriage of justice. The whole case was full of forced confessions that are beyond one’s imagination. Two sisters were beaten to death at the police station. We heard so many testimonies like this.
Therefore, my heart was greatly stirred. I prayed before God. I said: “Lord, I have not decided to believe in you, I have not been baptized yet, and yet you have shown me these things. Do you really want me to believe in you? How can this be? People usually only find the good in the church when they are baptized. It is only later that they discover the issues within the church. And while I am still seeking, you show me this?” Therefore, I struggled a lot before God.
However, during the process of my conversion, God let me see clearly, and when I was converted in 2005 I had a vision for church openness. The church has to be open and separate itself from that secret status—the status of a secret society. Everything about the church, church finances, church clergy, church teaching, church confessions, and church discipline, has to be open. The church has to the city on the hill, the children of light. During that process God led me, and from the very beginning of our church we have had that vision.
So that was the case against South China Church at the turn of the century. The case was an example of the suppression of the house churches that preceded the new waves of large-scale movements against house churches that began in 2014. From that time, 2002 to 2014, there were around ten years when the government went back and forth with the house churches, seemingly becoming more tolerant. Was there persecution? Yes there was persecution, but only in individual cases rather in national movements which would have brought about the arrests of many more believers. The types of persecution in that time were limited to individual cases sporadically spread throughout the country, with situations varying in difference places. Those ten years witnessed to that sort of nonuniformity, with rare cases of severe persecution, while the time of a nationwide movement of persecution against the church seemed to have passed.
So, what was the most important theme in those ten years? We could look at those ten years from a few perspectives. First, we can look at that period from the perspective of the church. As we mentioned before, by the end of the 20th century, the decline of rural churches was very obvious because the wave of urbanization had been irresistible. Therefore, the first ten years of the 21st century were the ten years when new urban churches rose up and became the main body of the whole Chinese house church. Those were the ten years when the center of the church turned again from the rural areas to the urban centers after the decades of post-1949 revivals. While this kind of change is still ongoing, it is more-or-less complete, since the traditionally rural Anhui and Henan teams have moved into cities.
This move into the cities was also related to persecution and urbanization. There is an old Chinese saying: “At times of small tumults, find shelter in the rural areas. At times of great tumults, find shelter in big cities.” Have you heard this saying? Whenever there is a small turmoil, you should rush to rural areas for shelter, and while there is great havoc, you should rush to big cities since the rural areas may not be safe. Therefore, the forerunners of the Henan church, preachers Wei Jindang and Zhang Heng, who we prayed for last session, told me that their church essentially developed under persecution. When they were under pressure in the villages, they moved into the towns and founded churches there. When they were pressured in the towns, they moved into the cities and founded churches there. When they were pressured in the cities, they moved into Zhengzhou and founded churches there. Both urbanization and church development went through the same process.
At the beginning of the 21st century, these leaders of the Henan churches were pastoring churches in urban centers. The same thing happened to the Anhui churches as well, as they themselves were also undergoing the urbanization process. So, first, the traditional house churches and their teams began to move into the cities and even into urban centers along with the urbanizing population to establish churches. Those churches and their leaders were urbanized. Second, new urban churches arose. The combination of these two factors led to that period being known as the ten years of the rise of the new urban churches. While most believers were still in the rural areas, the center of the Chinese house churches had shifted from the countryside to cities. So this is the first perspective from which to view that ten year period—the perspective of the church.
Second, from the perspective of theology and church development, we can define these ten years as the ten years when evangelical churches began. Or, as we defined the 1980s as the Fundamentalist Revival, we could define these ten years as the period when the fundamentalists shifted towards evangelicalism. Evangelical churches—a change from the traditional fundamentalist churches—began to appear within the Chinese church. And as new urban churches arose, theologically, they were basically evangelical churches. This process had been interrupted for decades within the Chinese house church.
We previously explained that before the 1940s the two terms “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” could essentially be used interchangeably, because the main task of that time was to oppose the liberals. When facing the liberal challenge, the conservatives could be called fundamentalists at some points in time and evangelicals at other points in time. The two terms were basically the same. However, after the 1940s, evangelicalism became a movement produced from within fundamentalism. In Western society, since the 1940s, reflection on the human tragedy and the evils of World War II and the church’s role in that tragedy brought about reflection on the traditional fundamentalist position. It was right for the fundamentalists to hold to the inerrancy of the Bible and the old gospel, but they did not care for society, they did not advance along with the age, and they did not show mercy to society. Instead, the liberals became part-and-parcel with the trends of the time, to the extent of becoming the creators and leaders of the trends of its time. Meanwhile, the fundamentalists set themselves apart as those of the holy side and gave the world over to the liberals, to the extent that they ended up facing a crisis of survival.
World War II was a tremendous starting point for the reflection on human society and the church’s relationship with secular society. But this reflection did not happen in the Chinese church because the connections with overseas bodies were cut off after 1949. Then, the government became like a tiger, with tyranny fiercer than a tiger’s. The government watched the church attentively and was ready to devour the church, and it did not make any difference whether you were a fundamentalist or an evangelical. It did not matter whether you cared for society. You were not allowed to care for the society anyway. There was no space to do so. Therefore, at that time, there was no need to differentiate the fundamentalists from the evangelicals.
In 2000, almost ten years after the economic reforms of 1992, besides the opening of a market economy, there was one global change that greatly impacted China: the rise of the internet. This facilitated and pushed globalization. Therefore, if the internal change was urbanization, and the external change was globalization, then the two interacted with each other through the internet. Before that time, unless you knew someone from a traditional house church, how would you hear the gospel? You could never find it in reality. It only existed in legends. When I was in college, I found a “mythical” Bible at a bookstall. And it was not until 2003 that I first met a “mythical” Christian. But when the internet appeared in 2000, it broke this deadlock. You did not have to know a Christian in reality. You could watch the sermons of Dr. Stephen Tong online. And at that time so much went online. The number of online materials grew exponentially.
This brought about a continuous change in the whole of the Chinese church towards evangelicalism between 2000 and 2011. That idea was that not only should we hold to the fundamentalist faith, but we should also reflect on the relationship between faith and culture, on church and society, and on our responsibilities to society.
In those ten years, there were three or four milestones. In 2003, a book and a film were released that greatly influenced Chinese house churches and overseas churches. The film was the documentary, The Cross: Jesus in China, produced by Yuan Zhiming. How many of you have watched it? How many of you haven’t seen it? Those who have not seen it, please raise your hand. You have to watch it, because it was the most important production of 2003. It changed the existence of the Chinese house church from a secret existence, unknown even among the Chinese, to a globally seen and known existence.
I remember in 2003, a group of my intellectual friends in Chengdu, Sichuan and I found that documentary and watched it at my home. A dozen of us watched it, one episode after another. We knew about the 19th century history that was depicted in the first couple of episodes because we had read books about how Christianity came to China, but we knew absolutely nothing about the last two episodes that described Christianity in China after 1949. We had no idea that the church or such a group of believers existed. We had thought that Gu Zhun (1915–1974) and Lin Zhao (1932–1968) (though I did not even know she was a Christian) were the most extraordinary intellectuals, some of the only such spirits in China, and yet this group of believers remained totally unknown to us. The faith of such a group of people who were unknown to Chinese society had a tremendous impact on me. At the end, the film said that at that time there were sixty million Christians in China. None of us believed it, since the number of CCP members was about sixty to seventy million and it was so easy for us to find a party member among us. If there had been sixty million Christians, how could it be that we knew none of them? Then one of our friends said: “I am a Christian”. All of us stared at him and said: “You are?! How could you never mention this?” He replied: “You never asked me about it”. Therefore, in 2003 this documentary revealed the existence of the Chinese house church to all of Chinese society. Of course, not everyone saw it, but it was seen publicly, and then globally by more and more people.
Around the same time, David Eckman, a reporter for New York Times who was based in China and who had spent many years in China, wrote a book called Jesus in Beijing. This book was published in the English-speaking world and was the very first book that described the Chinese house churches to the English-speaking world. Jesus in Beijing, the title, suggests that Christianity was in Beijing, but was sent back to the missionary sending countries after 1949. Those who came from the U.S. returned to the U.S., those who came from Britain returned to Britain, and those who came from Canada returned to Canada. Of course, the missionaries knew about the existence of the underground church. But this book allowed the whole western world to know about the existence of Chinese Christianity, the existence of the Chinese house church and the house church movement, while the documentary simultaneously brought the knowledge of the Chinese house church to the Chinese world, including Chinese society and overseas Chinese communities. Therefore, my conversion was closely related to this wave of materials. Otherwise I would not have known that Christianity existed in real life. 2003 was a year of milestones as the existence of the Chinese house church emerged from the underground, became known, and the knowledge of its existence spread through the internet.
The second milestone took place in 2006. It was not long after my conversion and less than a year after my baptism. Yu Jie (b. 1973), Li Boguang (1968–2018), and myself, three intellectuals from the Chinese house church, were attending a conference in the U.S. and met President Bush in the White House. This was the debut of Chinese house church Christians to international media and the first open contact for house church Christians with a foreign head of state. This incident caused a great disturbance, and to this day I am still being attacked for doing it. When Bush became President, he was concerned about Chinese house churches and wanted to support freedom of religion. When he visited China, he wanted to meet some Chinese house church leaders. So, the U.S. Embassy in China contacted some preachers of the house churches and Bush wanted to meet them at the Embassy. Yet all these preachers were arrested before they even arrived in Beijing and were sent back to their places of residence. Therefore, Bush did not meet them. He asked for their whereabouts and found out that all of them had disappeared. Then he wanted to visit a house church for Sunday worship to show his concern for the Chinese house church. The Chinese government would not allow that and took him to Gangwashi Church, an official church. Consequently, he could not meet Chinese house church Christians in China.
Then when we were in the U.S. attending this conference on religious freedom and regulations, some American pastors and organizations made efforts to prepare for a meeting between the President and us. That morning, as we entered the White house, before the meeting, officials from the U.S. National Security Council told us that they had received serious protests from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs that morning, and they requested to cancel the meeting because it would cause serious damage to Sino-U.S. relationships. They told us that the Chinese government questioned our identity as representatives of the Chinese church, that the Chinese government claimed China had its own official, legitimate church, and that the Chinese government would provide official representatives of the official church if the U.S. wanted to meet Chinese Christians. They also told us that the Chinese government had said that the U.S. President could not meet the three of us and they threatened that if the meeting did happen, the three of us would face great trouble once we returned to China. So the officials of the National Security Council told us that they respected our opinion and wanted to know what we thought. If we felt it dangerous to go into the meeting, they would cancel the meeting that morning. The three of us had a discussion about it and decided to meet the president anyway. For if Jiang Zemin could meet the U.S. president, we should be able to meet him as well. Each of us ought to have his own diplomatic activities. There are diplomatic relationships among nations on earth, and there should be diplomatic relationships among believers of nations within the Kingdom of God. So we met the president. We decided that it would be okay, and we would not worry about what would happen afterwards. Therefore, that meeting finally took place.
When we returned to China, it turned out to be an incident that greatly disturbed the Chinese intellectual community. I started to be rejected by the Chinese intellectuals. Many started to attack me, including a few friends in Chengdu who worshipped with me at the same church. They wrote an open letter as a means of separation from me. A few of them who worshipped at our church signed that letter. And the criticism from within the church was from the opposite direction. The Chinese intellectuals attacked us because they thought we should have strived for the liberty and democracy of China when instead, we ended up in Christianity, thus betraying the democratic cause of China. The church criticized us because they thought we ended up being involved in politics. We were criticized from both directions and had a miserable time. However, at that time, God led me through a great period of spiritual growth.
At the time there were two consolations, one from Dr. Stephen Tong who openly supported our meeting, and the other from Samuel Lamb. Someone took a report of our meeting to Samuel Lamb and inquired about his reaction. Samuel Lamb said that it was a good thing. These were approvals from two great forerunners. Therefore, when Dr. Tong and Samuel Lamb, one from overseas and another from inside of China, expressed their approvals, we were greatly consoled spiritually and felt that in the end we had not been rejected by the Chinese house church. This meeting was another milestone. After these milestones, the Chinese church began to shift towards evangelicalism.
The third milestone occurred in 2008. The great earthquake in 2008 moved the house churches from underground to above-ground. The churches in Shanghai held lots of joint prayer meetings. They were in a meeting for something else when all the sudden they heard about the great earthquake, so they rushed to the decision to come to Sichuan and help. Churches all over the country came. Churches from all around the world came to Sichuan. The churches in Sichuan experienced two historical revivals. The first took place during the Anti-Japanese War. As the Japanese army occupied most parts of China, all of the churches and Christian colleges moved to Chengdu. The second took place during the great earthquake when all of the churches came to help. This was a great grace and blessing of God to this region.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs had some statistics and claimed the year of 2008 to be the very beginning of the Chinese volunteer movement. It all started with the official volunteer movement for the 2008 Olympic Games. Its publicity campaign claimed to have over a million volunteers. In the history of China, there had never been volunteers except for the People’s Volunteer Army. While there were over a million volunteers for the Beijing Olympic Games, these were actually organized by the government. The true volunteer movement of 2008 happened during the Great Earthquake in Wenchuan. Over a million people from all over the country came to Sichuan apart from government or business organization to help with disaster relief. Among these one million people, the internal statistics of the Ministry of Civil Affairs revealed that there were six hundred thousand Christians. The percentage of Christians in the national population was about two to three percent. Yet, during the Great Earthquake of 2008, the percentage of Christians among the volunteers was sixty percent.
This witness was performed by the entirety of the Chinese house church. Of course, the TSPM also participated. In 2008, the Chinese house church was seen by the whole of society for the first time as it unprecedentedly stepped onto the stage as the focal point for the whole of society. During the 2008 earthquake, the house church’s participation in social service, its involvement in mercy ministry, and its emergence above ground all reached a peak. Meeting President Bush in 2006 was a rare case that involved a few believers and caused great disturbances. Our church has continually persisted in dealing with this. However, in 2008 the Chinese house church became nationally recognized.
There is one more milestone that occurred before 2008 that we missed, that being the Shouwang Church registration incident. We previously discussed how in 1994, the first Measures for the Administration of Religious Activity Venues was released. Ten years later, in 2004 the State Council released the Regulations on Religious Affairs. After its release, people were wondering whether the government would loosen its control on religion and allow house churches to become legitimate. Then Shouwang Church made an attempt and took the first step before any other Chinese house church. Shouwang had finished building its own church building, established its own rules and regulations, and elected its own elders, all prior to any of the other churches.
They started to work on the most important thing, which was to independently file a registration application with the civil affairs department. The civil affairs department replied: “To file a registration application with us, you will first have to be approved by the relevant authorities”. By “relevant authorities” they meant SARA. Every trade or profession had a relevant authority, right? A church’s relevant authority was SARA. After seeking approval, SARA responded: “How can you prove that you are a pastor and you represent a church?” This had to be affirmed by a trade association and Shouwang had to turn to the TSPM, who, as the trade association for pastors, had to affirm that Jin Tianming was a pastor. The TSPM was the only trade association for pastors, and it had to affirm the legality of the church and the pastor before SARA would approve their registration. Consequently, after all of their efforts, there was no way it to work out their approval. Without joining the TSPM, there was no way for a house church to be officially registered.
Then, Shouwang said: “We made an attempt to register in order to confirm that there is no way for house churches to officially register and to be able to tell this to all the other house churches throughout the country. We wanted to tell churches all over the country that this regulation is useless to help us register. Therefore, we should hold to the house church position that we will never join the TSPM. Without joining the TSPM, it is absolutely impossible to finish registration without compromising the essence of our faith.”
Shouwang made their attempt in 2005 and 2006, close to the time in 2006 when I met President Bush. After the meeting with Bush, I released a document, Six Points on House Church Registration, which clearly mentioned some ideas, including independent registration and registration as a societal group instead of as a venue. This marked another milestone.
2009 marked another milestone. In 2009, the government decided to deal with urban house churches in order to suppress the changes among the house churches. From a theological perspective, the decade of the 2000s was the period when the house churches shifted from fundamentalism into evangelicalism. From the perspective of church structure, churches moved from rural areas into the citiesand became urban churches. Another theme from those ten years was church organization. The churches began to transition from gathering assemblies to local congregations with confessions of faith, their own charters and regulations, their own election of elders, the establishment of offices, and internal and external disclosures.
When we established our fellowship in 2005, we applied online for an open website and then published our names, phone numbers and address. We might have been the first fellowship or church to do so in the whole country. Consequently, when people visited Chengdu and looked online for a place of worship, all they could find besides the TSPM churches was us. So, everyone came to us and that’s why we have grown so fast. People could not find other churches and we were bold enough to publish everything including our phone numbers. At that time, many churches were shocked, wondering why we did things that way. That is just what we did.
In 2008, when we were attacked by SARA during our retreat, we filed an application for administrative reconsideration. This was the first case of a Chinese house church suing SARA. Then in 2009 our case against the Civil Affairs Bureau was the first of a house church suing the Civil Affairs Bureau. In terms of urban church building, church-state relationships, disclosure, and the transition to evangelicalism, Shouwang Church and our Early Rain Church were the two iconic churches during that time.
Then in 2009, the government decided to select three churches in order to pressure them: Shouwang Church in Beijing, Early Rain Church in Chengdu, and Wanbang Church in Shanghai. The government announced a ban on these churches and ordered them to close down. At that time Shouwang Church in Beijing had a weekly attendance of between eight hundred and one thousand people. Wanbang Church in Shanghai had a weekly attendance of fifteen hundred people with three worship services. I attended their worship service, which was a lot like what I had seen overseas, very well equipped. At that time our church had a weekly attendance of only one hundred people. Nonetheless, the government claimed that we were still a bad example since I had met President Bush. These three example churches have taken different paths over these past ten years. Wanbang Church broke up into many smaller churches. Shouwang Church in Beijing started their outdoor worship during that year and have continued outdoor worship on and off since then. They continue to undergo the suffering on behalf of Chinese house churches.
Therefore, you should know that your margin is ultimately determined by others. You should not think that less aggressiveness might result in more peaceful times for our church. That is not the case. In today’s Chinese cities, a church with one hundred members might seem to enjoy peaceful times and it might seem impossible for any authority to bother them. That is because the church with eight hundred members has not yet been dealt with by the government. If all churches with two hundred members have been pressured, then it would become very dangerous for churches with one hundred members. If all churches with one hundred member were suppressed, it would become very dangerous for churches with fifty members. Right? This is how breathing room for house churches is sustained.
Therefore, all the Chinese house churches owe a debt of gratitude to Shouwang Church, who has taken on too many burdens and too much suffering. Their pastor has been locked in his home for seven years without the freedom to go outside. I think every Chinese house church and every Chinese Christian should remember them. We should earnestly pray for them.
So I once wrote a pastoral letter, explaining to you who pastor Jin Tianming was. Pastor Jin Tianming is my pastor and you ought to consider him your pastor as well. He has not preached in the past seven years. Every week, he writes his sermon notes and publishes them online for people to read. He has been locked in his home for seven years and cannot attend the church’s public worship. He has been used by God in this age to suffer for His church. Therefore, we pray for the Lord to remember Shouwang.
Of those three churches, our church is the only one that has not been suppressed. Many people are surprised at this and ask why we are still standing and growing. By now we have gradually grown to the size of Shouwang when their pressure began. The government gave us a big blow on May 12th but then pulled away after that. We are not certain of God’s will at this point, but God’s will is always good. After the incident in 2009, I visited pastor Tianming in Beijing and he said to me: “From now on, it’s up to you”. And I said, “Okay”.
Thus, the suppression of those three churches since 2009, primarily that of Shouwang church and their resulting continuous outdoor worship since that time serves as a milestone for Chinese house churches.
The next milestone came in 2010: the Lausanne Incident. This incident marks the formation of the urban evangelical churches and the evangelical movement within China.
In 1974, the evangelical Christians in the 1970s from all over the world formed the Lausanne Congress. Later, wherever its conference was held, this conference has always been known as the Lausanne Congress. This Lausanne Congress took a strong evangelical stance, supporting the idea that we should not only hold onto the old gospel, but also emphasize the church’s participation and care for society. It took on a global evangelical stance. The first Lausanne Congress was held in 1974, when China had not opened up yet and the house church forerunners were still in prison.
The second Lausanne Congress was also interestingly related to the second turning point for the Chinese house churches. It was held in July 1989 right after the June 4th incident as China closed its borders again. Therefore, there was still no representative of the Chinese church at the second Lausanne Congress. Chinese house churches had always been absent among the big family of global evangelical churches. But what happened at the Second International Congress on World Evangelization in Manila was moving. There was a large section of over one hundred seats left empty and reserved for the Chinese church. In other words, the Chinese church was considered to be a part of the global evangelical church although it could not send anyone to the congress. The whole congress prayed for the Chinese church in 1989.
Then the third International Congress on World Evangelization was held in Cape Town in 2010. Because of the 2008 earthquake incident, Chinese house churches had emerged from underground. Before that, there was no connection between churches and even among church leaders. There were connections from within church teams, but none between teams from different regions, and certainly no national network of churches. Yet because of the great earthquake in 2008, evangelical church leaders from all over the country had formed a loose network and knew of certain contacts in certain other cities. They could at least call some of the numbers they had and find a good contact in those cities.
Therefore, for the Lausanne Congress in 2010, some evangelical church leaders formed a group and selected about two hundred representatives from traditional house churches and urban evangelical churches from all over the country. These delegates who represented organizations and churches like the traditional rural churches and rising urban churches. Apart from the great earthquake of 2008, how could one have found these two hundred people in two years? You would not even have been able to find their phone numbers after consulting with a hundred friends. But at that time, the Chinese house churches were able to find these two hundred representatives, and were willing to pay their costs to attend the congress in Cape Town. Furthermore, to demonstrate that the Chinese church, with so many members, was not a weak or a small church, the Chinese house churches also promised to help raise funding for the smaller churches from neighboring countries.
It was at that moment that the government carried out the largest operation since 1949 to block its citizens from going abroad. All of these two hundred people were kept inside of China. Not one of them was able to leave. This was a very large-scale operation.
There were four of us who planned to leave from Chengdu. Some were arrested at home, some were arrested at the airport, some planned to travel within China to look for other opportunities to leave. But none of us was able to leave China, not one of us. When we arrived at the Chengdu airport, we saw a dozen people holding cameras at us and we knew that they were going to take action against us. So, I prayed before God and told my wife that I had made a decision: if they would go on to show me a warranty according to their legal procedure, I would follow them obediently, but if they were rude and did not show any papers or follow the legal procedure, I would react with civil disobedience. While I would not follow them, neither would I actively resist them. I told her that was what I was going to do.
When we went to the airport and cleared customs, the whole hall was empty except for the forty to fifty armed policemen waiting for us. Then some people came to me, took my arms and asked me to move. I asked them who they were and requested them to show their ID. No one answered me. So I closed my eyes and started my civil disobedience, meaning my refusal to use any of my strength to move. I collapsed like a pile of mud. They began to drag me and, since I was heavy, it took four or five of them to carry me. They dragged me through the elevator for a few hundred meters and then threw me onto a car, creating blisters on my feet. During the whole process, I closed my eyes and did not use even a tiny bit of strength.
You are the eternal Lord who gives us eternal hope. Everything, if it is not in you, will be fleeting. Even our faith, our following, our service would be fleeting, because if all of these were not from you, but from us, who could hold onto them? Who could protect them? Who could hold on to the end? Who can be saved by believing in himself? Lord, have mercy on us, help us, so that the Chinese church today might see your grace all along its way. Lord, our road overflows with your abundance. May your love remain in China, may your love nourish us so that we might continue to advance until the day when we return to the big family of churches from all over the earth, so that together with your children of all nations we might worship you, we might participate in the gospel commission to the end of the earth, and we can worship forever and ever. We thank you and praise you for listening to our prayer. We pray in the precious and holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen!
Please greet each other.
