After the Cultural Revolution, there remain almost forty years of contemporary house church history, which I divide into four periods.

The first period can be called “the Great Fundamentalist Revival.” After 1978, there were two milestones in Chinese house church history. The first was the June Fourth Massacre of 1989, which marked a turning point for the history of the entire nation, as well as for house churches. The second milestone was the passing away of Wang Mingdao in 1991. The three years between 1989 and 1991 were dark times. History and anything of value seemed to stop, almost as if the sun stood still in the sky. It was in those years that I was a youth. After 1992, China entered into another era of rapid development.

Our focus for the 1980s is the revival of rural house churches. This revival primarily took place in the countryside. This is where the center of the movement was located in terms of scale, the number of people participating, and the flow of people. Those living in cities were restrained by the registered residence system, the work unit system, and the communal system. Without the flow of people, there could be no gospel movement. At that time, the flow of people mainly took place in rural areas. Therefore, Reform and Opening also took place first in rural areas and then moved into the cities. Both the gospel movement and economic reform began their recoveries at the boundary areas of totalitarianism. Furthermore, Anhui province was important to both. The household responsibility system in rural areas started in Xiaogang Village of Anhui province, while the house church revival started in the Fuyang and Yishang areas of the province. The vitality of the secular world began in rural areas and gradually moved into the cities. The same thing happened in the house church movement as the revival began in rural areas and gradually impacted cities.

Churches in Henan, Anhui, and Zhejiang (primarily Wenzhou city) provinces were the most important locations for the Great Fundamentalist Revival. Alongside of these, there were also fundamentalist revivals in Fujian, Shandong, and Shanxi provinces, as well as in some parts of Northeast China. Thus, while the awakening of the church was essentially nationwide, Henan, Anhui, and Zhejiang provinces stood out.

Lighthouses in the Cities

Prior to 1949, Chinese churches were mainly located in cities, particularly those along the coast. There were relatively fewer churches in inland cities, and these were of lesser strength. China’s Bible Belt started from Guangdong and Fujian provinces in the south, moving upward to Zhejiang province and Shanghai, then further northward to Tianjin and Beijing, all the way to Yingkou on the opposite side of the Bohai Bay. Most of the servants of the Lord who were imprisoned in the 1950s and 1960s served in the big cities within this Bible Belt. As a result, the Great Fundamentalist Revival of the 1980s saw two characteristics stand out. First, all of the iconic leaders of the revival were preachers of churches in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou (“first-tier” cities in today’s terms). Second, the geographic center of the revival was located in the rural areas of Henan, Anhui, and Zhejiang provinces.

First, the iconic leaders of the revival were located in bigger cities. Wang Mingdao lived at his son’s home in Shanghai and no longer established or led churches. He was released before the Chinese New Year of 1980 according to an agreement between Deng Xiaoping and Jimmy Carter made during Deng’s visit to the U.S. In 1979. Soon after his release, he returned to Shanghai. During the whole of the 1980s, his primary influence on the Chinese house church movement was as a spiritual model. He no longer served as a pastor.

There were two other iconic preachers who continued to pastor their churches and had the greatest impact on the revival, one ministering in the south and the other in the north. Allen Yuan led the Bai Ta Si Church in Beijing. Samuel Lamb led the Da Ma Zhan Church in Guangzhou. Therefore, these two churches became lighthouses for the revival, one in the south and the other in the north. What I mean by this is that a lighthouse is meant to be in isolation, surrounded by the sea. Compared to churches in rural areas, these urban churches at the time were lone islands with not many attendees.

From 1978 to 1982, a group of preachers were released from prison successively in big cities. Some moved around and ended up overseas, but most of them remained in China. These senior servants became the backbones of the Great Fundamentalist Revival. Why are they called iconic figures? Because in that era, an imprisoned preacher was more influential than an entire church. Also, there was no value in arresting someone who had already been imprisoned for decades. If someone who had been imprisoned and released established a church, the local government would have to make do and turn a blind eye. A life testimony bears unconquerable strength. For example, Samuel Lamb’s Da Ma Zhan Church was said to be closed multiple times from 1982 to 1992. In 1988, the police summoned Samuel Lamb for questioning six times in six months. However, the church was never permanently closed, and it continued to draw more attendees. Thus, it became a lighthouse in the south.

This same thing could happen in any age if the church has to take the way of the cross to the extent that the world tolerates it. When you are willing to pay the price to the end, even with life and death, your opponent may then pretend not to see you. This was the case for Allen Yuan in Beijing, Samuel Lamb in Guangzhou, Yang Xinfei in Xiamen, and Li Tianen in Shanghai. These fundamentalist churches that lasted from 1949 to the 1980s were dead in the middle of that time period only to come alive again. Since their resurrections, they have yet to be eradicated.

One interesting thing is that this principle also relates to church property and personal property. Whenever I go to Hong Kong, I am always impressed by all the churches, Christian organizations, and church properties. Church buildings and lands are everywhere, and there are quite a few places with large church camps. Do you how they were built? They were not built with the contributions of the believers in Hong Kong. Around 1949, churches in the mainland moved to Hong Kong and brought with them part of their church property they had accumulated over a century. Therefore, they could buy land, build buildings, and establish schools. Thus, Hong Kong became a base for the gospel and a third of its schools were built by the church. Without this cross-generational accumulation, it could be difficult for the church to take root in a modern city like Hong Kong. Real estate prices in Hong Kong are as high as in New York, and real estate prices in Shanghai and Chengdu are also as high as those in Hong Kong. Even if the government allows us to buy land and build churches, do you know how much one acre of land would cost in the main urban area of Chengdu? Fifteen million renminbi. Even if the government allowed churches to own property, first generation churches would only be able to afford space in high-rise office buildings. They still would not be able to purchase land to build a church building.

Therefore, the church is not only a fellowship of the saints in one particular age, but it is also an accumulation of churches throughout the ages. Once, I visited Taiwan Theological Seminary. It was built on Yangmingshan Mountain, currently one of the most expensive pieces of land in Taipei. With its breathtaking views, students never want to graduate. Originally, missionaries purchased the land at a very low price because the area was covered with tombs and the locals did not want anything to do with it. Now it has become a blessing to the churches that came after. Furthermore, some cathedrals in Europe were built over the course one or even two hundred years.

Samuel Lamb, Yang Xinfei, and other preachers of their generation had lived in the same coastal port cities as their ancestors, and they offered their residence as the place of worship for their churches. Behind the church’s existence lies the accumulation of Chinese societal change over the past one hundred years. Although these leaders were imprisoned, they had big households with multiple floors and courts. They could host 500–600 people, with every room filled with people watching a live stream on a screen. Each of these big-city lone islands were an offering of an entire family who had large homes and family members imprisoned for the Lord. Without these qualifications, it would have been impossible for a house church in the 1980s and 1990s to survive. This was before the period of transition after 2000 when churches moved from homes into more public places of worship (which has happened only in the past ten years).

But these were cases of God’s special provision that could not be imitated by believers in other places. These were the lone islands in the big cities remaining after the pre-1949 fundamentalist churches passed through their trial of fire. Their task was to hold their positions, while the task to open up the gospel movement was handed to the churches in the rural areas that began to see a flood of people.

From Fundamentalists to Evangelicals

1989 is also a key turning point. After 1989, the Chinese church has been transitioning from fundamentalism to evangelicalism, a transition which is still ongoing. The transition resulted from reflection that originated from the despair, suppression, exile, and silence of the whole of society brought about by the June Fourth Massacre. Much like the division between Western fundamentalists and evangelicals created by two World Wars, the Cultural Revolution and the June Fourth Incident brought about the difference in fundamentalists and evangelicals in the Chinese church. “The failure of democracy and the rise of urban churches” would be the theme of the next ten years.

The Great Revival of the 1980s took a dramatic turn during this national suffering. Before 1949, there were two camps within the Chinese church, the fundamentalists and the liberals. This confrontation lasted until the end of the 1980s due to China’s seclusion and its persecution of religion. Yet on a global scale, after separating from the liberals, the fundamentalists, impacted by the Second World War, entered into a new stage and transitioned into the evangelicals. Or in other words, a difference in identification erupted between the old fundamentalists and the new fundamentalists (the evangelicals).

From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, the liberals took control of the churches in Europe and the United States. Then the fundamentalists stood up and said: “We believe that every word of the Bible is inerrant as God’s revelation. We believe in this old and transcendent faith, and that this world is God-revealed because God is in this world. This world is transcendent, not purely natural, and not a world in which everything can be understood with reason and science. Grace is transcendent and therefore, we believe in the virgin birth and the life and death on the cross. The purpose of history is also transcendent and therefore, we believe in the second coming of Christ and his judgment on the Last Day.”

In session …, we mentioned two characteristics of the liberals. First, they did not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and detached themselves from the authority of God’s Word and a transcendent faith. Second, they kept an extreme focus on social justice and hardship in people’s lives, and passionately longed for society’s moral renewal. Their problem lie in that whenever they faced an impact of an age or culture, they tried to manage it by modifying their faith.

The fundamentalists were the conservatives. In the confrontation with the liberals, their problem was a moralism that stuck to rigid rules without any adaption to change. It is good to remain unchanged in the foundation of one’s faith, but the fundamentalists ended up turning the conservative position into something like, “I won’t change anything. The church is the church and it must use pews. A church with plastic chairs is a modernist church.” For rigid fundamentalists, smoking, watching movies, having a choir, playing guitar, or engaging in lawsuits were all considered “modernist behavior.” Their protectionism permeated from the fundamental gospel truth to all of the cultural and life forms of the church. Meanwhile, their sensitivity toward things inside the church corresponded with their numbness toward things outside the church. Disinterest in society, in politics, or in culture was considered to be the most proper spiritual attitude against the world. However, if one does not care for anything in society, how could he care for souls? In the 1950s, this fundamentalist position saw a great many young people leave the church because the church could not teach them how to face Communism and a passionate red culture with the gospel. This was because the fundamentalists had never considered the sweeping waves of that age.

First, in every age the church needs to rediscover the gospel and continue to grasp and fix its eyes on the focus of the gospel. Second, in every age the church needs to discover the context and urgency of the gospel mission for that age. Some things will never change because they are the essence of the gospel. But in every age, the exterior of your spiritual life and the form of church culture have to be broken down so that they do not stand against the gospel.

However, the conservative fundamentalists did not respond to the issues of the age or care for justice in society. Do you understand how great the changes were that took place in the twentieth century? The twentieth century was an unprecedented century when everything was overturned. It was an age when all kinds of radicalisms and totalitarianisms came one after another. These ideologies rose in almost every decade and turned the mental construct of culture, society, politics, and souls upside down. How could the fundamentalists pretend that none of those changes had taken place? How could they, as a result, attach the old gospel to the old church forms of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the old ministry models, and the unchangeable theological expressions? This was impossible. For example, the Westminster theologians did not experience the challenges of the Enlightenment. But the theological expressions and preaching of today will have to respond to and refute the challenges of the Enlightenment. John Calvin did not face a homosexual culture, and so classical Reformed theology has never developed a mature theological defense that is related to the culture of gender expressionism. The same is true of the creeds of church history. Each one was a theological expression against the challenge of a particular heresy. Those creeds provided us with doctrinal positions rather than ready-made pastoral solutions for facing cultural challenges in every unique context.

In reality, those who held on to the fundamentalist faith were both correct and in error. Everything they believed was correct, but they wrongly thought that simply holding to these doctrines would be enough for a gospel movement. In other words, they mistook a necessary condition for a sufficient condition, and therefore gradually strayed from the gospel battle of that age. Facing the great sufferings of the age and the impact of the Enlightenment and rationalism on the whole of human life, they said that all the liberals’ responses were wrong, but they themselves did not bother to offer a response.

Thus, a great chasm between the liberals and the fundamentalists arose in the face of the mighty waves of the age. This also provides the spiritual background that helps us understand the apostasies of so many believers in 1950s. This critique is not a defense of those people in the TSPM camp and their apostasies, but rather an explanation of their tragedy. One brother said to me that he felt it strange that Yang Shaotang became a leader of the TSPM while his son became a forerunner to the house church movement, and that Wang Mingdao was the leader of the house church movement while his son did not even believe in the Lord.

This is also the background that helps us understand the Great Revival of the 1980s. The Communist takeover in 1949 separated the struggle and division of the Chinese church from those of Western evangelicals for over thirty years until 1980s.

Through the Second World War, the Nazis, and the concentration camps that killed millions of people, all sorts of utopias bred by modern society almost destroyed the entirety of Western civilization as it had developed since the Middle Ages. We know it was wrong. It was far from what God desires. And the fundamentalist church claimed that it had long predicted the situation. But you still have to convincingly prove that these utopias are wrong. Furthermore, you have to prove that all the humanistic and liberal reflections of these utopias are wrong, a mere opposite side of the coin bearing the image of Caesar.

When our children grow up and meet Communist revolutions or other radical waves, we hold onto the conservative fundamentalist faith and tell our children not to participate in political activities, not to read those books, not to watch revolutionary movies, and not to join the Youth League. These all seem good and right. But can these commands sustain the faith of this younger generation? No, they cannot. When the Communist party took power, prostitution and corruption all of the sudden disappeared, the whole of society was in a state of flourishing, and the younger generation’s faith collapsed because the fundamentalist faith of their fathers could not equip their souls and thoughts to face the kaleidoscopic nature of their modern society with confidence, dignity, and wisdom. Simultaneously, the Chinese church was separated from the global evangelical movement by China’s closure from the world and its persecution of religion and was left without the help of spiritual resources and fellowship with the universal church.

The evangelicals came on-scene after the Second World War. First, they held to the old gospel of the fundamentalists. Second, they would respond to societal concerns with the justice and mercy of the gospel and by critiquing the evils of society. However, they believed that the church’s concern for society is not to offer a solution based in this world, organize a political party, or set up a charitable organization in order to change society. In the Gospels, Jesus preached the gospel while healing diseases and casting out demons. He proclaimed the salvation of souls while sympathizing with and entering into the physical suffering of his neighbors. The church found that when facing the ills of modern society, the fundamentalists stood far away from the suffering of their neighbors. At the same time, Western fundamentalists did not realize that a “Christian society” in the cultural and social sense was long gone. The gospel movement faced a new cultural war in modern society. While the nature of sin has remained the same since ancient times, it has different expressions and forms different structures in different cultures. The gospel has to communicate to a modern ideology just as it communicated with Roman and Greek cultures. Modern rationalism and liberalism had stirred up sin and tried to destroy the gospel culture, while a modern nationalist ideology reestablished a Babylonian golden image. The fundamentalists nearly gave up the church’s role in Christ as prophet and king. They withdrew from public life and retained only the private role as priests.

For example, the Chinese church paid special attention the forbiddance of idol worship after conversion as taught by the Ten Commandments. If one believed in the Lord, the Guanyin statue had to be destroyed. This was right. However, the same church that strongly demanded that believers destroy Buddhist statues would allow believers to join the Communist party. Why? Because we did not have a sensitivity towards idols in the whole of society and culture and we lacked the ability to communicate about, differentiate from, and reject them. The fundamentalist faith could only deal with private and physical idols. If a believer had a Buddhist drawing at home, it had to be torn down. As far as participation in political studies were concerned, believers would have to ride the tide. However, political studies were much more damaging than Buddhist drawings.

In the 1940s, American evangelical Carl F. H. Henry wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, which was claimed as the manifesto of the evangelical movement. Afterwards, important evangelical institutions were founded, such as Fuller Theological Seminary and the Christianity Today magazine. Finally, in the 1970s, the Lausanne Movement came into being, which completed the transition from fundamentalism to evangelicalism. While all the house church preachers were still imprisoned, Chinese churches overseas sent their representatives to the Lausanne Congress. However, in the 1980s, Western evangelicals made another mistake in regard to their fundamentalist faith when many churches gradually blurred their understanding of the inerrancy of the Bible. In the 1990s, this blurring began to influence the overseas Chinese churches. Meanwhile, the Great Fundamentalist Revival was taking place in China.

God’s amazing work preserved the fundamentalist characteristics of the Chinese church from 1949 to 1979 and then until 1989. It seems unfortunate that the Chinese church did not experience the testing fires of the evangelical movement. However, in that era there it was not a problem for the church to ignore society because society would not allow the church to care for it, and also because the church had no capacity to care for others. The gospel task in China was hard-but-simple: if a believer was arrested, he or she simply needed to hold onto faith in Jesus. Therefore, in the past half century, God greatly used the fundamentalist faith in the culture of Eastern authoritarianism and atheism. For Wang Mingdao’s generation, one only needed to know faith in Jesus. Whether imprisoned or killed, the mission was to be faithful unto death. With that mission, the root of the Chinese church was preserved. This was the only thing necessary and there was no need to discuss the complicated relationship between the gospel and culture. Faith first had to deal with dry soil and sharp conflict.

Lamentations on the June Fourth Incident and the Gospel Movement

The June Fourth Incident in 1989 was a major turning point that broke the political tolerance and ideological enlightenment of the 1980s. There was a saying within the house churches in the 1980s and 1990s, “the three manys.” In Chinese Christianity there were many peasants, many elderly, and many uneducated. Many people came to church after retirement and so it looked as if churches were filled with old uneducated women. They would either go to square dance or come to church. At least that is what people thought at that time. Young educated urban Christians were rare at that time, mainly found within the sporadic lone island urban churches. Generally, the church had not advanced from rural areas into the cities because the flow of people and because the deregulation of cities would not happen until the waves of “going into business” came in 1992. There was no group of intellectuals or middle-class people within the church in China, because the Chinese middle-class did not come to exist until the end of the 1990s. In a word, as of 1989, the church had not yet entered into the mainstream population of Chinese society.

Between 1989 and 1992, attempts at democracy failed and the gospel advanced into the cities. The educated Chinese and the urban mobile population that slowly formed in the 1990s experienced a strong disillusionment with a government that left them feeling even more hopeless than in the Cultural Revolution. Namely because the Cultural Revolution finished with a thriving and prosperous panorama. The songs we sang in the 1980s were: “Let us meet in twenty years and our great motherland will be so beautiful.” But, after the June Fourth incident, the whole of society lost hope.

Thus, the June Fourth Massacre brought about the first post-1949 contact of educated Chinese with the gospel movement. The first group of educated Chinese to be impacted were the large group of exiles. After the incident, these elite intellectuals went overseas where God had prepared the Chinese churches for decades to receive them. Bible study groups had been spread from Hong Kong and Taiwan to North America for over twenty years. These churches had been waiting for people to come and had a burden for evangelism in China, but it was difficult for China to send people. The Lausanne Movement took place in the interim and produced the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism (CCCOWE) in 1976. In the 1970s and 1980s, overseas Chinese churches transitioned from fundamentalism to evangelicalism and were able to pastor and lead this group of intellectuals who would have been difficult to pastor in a typical house church of that time. Pastor Jonathan Chao also continued to talk about the “Threefold Vision” (the evangelization of the nations, the Kingdom perspective of the church, and a Christian culture) and emphasized the relationship between the gospel and culture. In 1989, Dr. Stephen Tong established Indonesia Reformed Evangelical Church and started to preach a Reformed gospel to the global Chinese community in order to break the deeply rooted tradition of a sacred-secular divide within Chinese fundamentalism. After 1989, each of these became blessings for the exiles from mainland China.

Upon landing at the airport, almost every exile was received into the church. Pastor Chu You-ming in Hongkong initiated “Operation Yellowbird” in 1989 and helped many exiles flee from the mainland through Hong Kong. He even mobilized the Triads to help the exiles. In one part of the Young and Dangerous film series, famous actor Tony Leung Ka-fai claims that the most wanted student protest leader Wu’er Kaixi fled on his boat. It was said that some leaders of the Triads who engaged in Operation Yellowbird later believed in the Lord and were baptized. It was like the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War when churches and pastors smuggled slaves from the South to the North. In the past twenty years, Korean pastors and churches also built up similar “Escape from the North” routes to help North Koreans flee through China. Quite a few Korean pastors were sentenced in China because of such activities. For the mainland exiles in 1989, many churches in North America and Europe were a help and shared the gospel with them. At that time, almost all of these exiles heard the gospel. While not all of them believed, this gospel movement within the exilic community was the first gospel revival to occur in the Chinese intellectual community after 1949.

Over the past twenty years, many exiles with backgrounds in the 1989 incident became influential overseas Chinese pastors. Zhang Boli and Yuan Zhiming fled from mainland China after the incident. Hong Yujian and Liu Tongsu were already studying overseas when the incident happened. Also, there were Wang Zhijun and Xiong Yan, who is now a chaplain in the U.S. Army. Among the twenty student leaders on the most wanted list, according to incomplete statistics, as many as twelve believed in the Lord and some have become pastors.

Pastors Jonathan Chao, Stephen Tong and Samuel Ling have all served and influenced this group. Namely, Pastor Chao, served every one of the exiles who went on to believe in the Lord and offer themselves to him. Dr. Stephen Tong recalled that in the beginning of the 1990s, Pastor Chao once invited him to fly halfway across the world to share the gospel with a dozen intellectuals in exile. He said he had never flown so far for a gathering of a dozen seekers. This was the surpassing grace of God. When they went into exile, churches in Hong Kong and Taiwan had already been waiting for them for decades. Once several of the exiles believed in the Lord and formed into a group of pastors from mainland China with a background in the 1989 incident, a new wave of Chinese immigrants followed. The timing was perfect. Pastors from Taiwan usually speak in a very gentle tone, while pastors from China all speak with a determined voice. Without this group of pastors from China, it would have been hard to reap a crop from China. Therefore, after 1989, God prepared a group of preachers from mainland China through overseas churches with Hong Kong and Taiwanese backgrounds. In the following twenty years, God used this group of preachers from mainland China to bring a second gospel movement among the intellectuals in the new waves of emigration from China. Since the year 2000 in particular, those from this second gospel movement wave have connections to the rise of the urban house churches. For example, in the early years of our church, many believed in the Lord because of the ministry of Yuan Zhiming and Zhang Boli.

The second factor for the gospel’s entrance into the city was its impact inside of China. Although most intellectuals did not flee from China, they still experienced an awakening from the 1989 incident. Many years ago, Liu Shahe (1931–2019) told me that he did not completely understand reality until the shooting occurred on June fourth, and the same is true of me. While we were decades apart in age, we could be counted as of the same generation, the generation of the 1989 Incident. But even if you were awakened by the incident, there was no real way out. At that time, very few believers were sharing the gospel. But gradually, the first group of intellectuals in big cities believed in the Lord. The conversions of those backbone pastors of the current urban churches in China could be traced to as early as 1989. Pastor Jin Tianming and Jin Mingri both began college in 1989 at Peking University and Tsinghua University respectively. After graduation, Jin Mingri applied to Yanjing Theological Seminary. People there were thrilled by his application, because after 1949, there had been no other graduate from a key university who would apply to study at the seminary. He was the first one to do so.

As an American Presbyterian missionary, Pastor Cha Young Gyu of Korean origin came to Beijing in 1990. He shared the gospel with college students and built up churches. He was one of the first missionaries who planted churches after the post-1989 gospel movement into the cities. Several house churches in Beijing were built up and influenced by Pastor Cha, including Pastor Jin Tianming and Pastor Gao Zhen. Furthermore, the Disciples Seminary founded by Pastor Cha is the oldest and comparatively most mature of the house church seminaries. In 1991, Pastor Peng Qiang from Chengdu was attending the China Youth University of Political Studies where he, in a period of depression with long hair and torn jeans, believed in the Lord. From this Marxist “seminary,” there came quite a few preachers.

Almost all first-generation believers and preachers from among the urban church intellectuals believed in the Lord after the June Fourth Incident. Apart from second or third-generation believers, it is almost impossible to find a believer who turned to the Lord before 1989, because in that age one would have to be related to Grandpa Lamb, Grandpa Zhang, or Grandpa Long to possibly hear the gospel and believe in the Lord. This was how the June Fourth Incident impacted the gospel situation.

This turnaround was critical for the urban gospel movement. In the urban centers of the 1990s, who would be the ones sharing the gospel with you? Principally, it would be missionaries working as foreign teachers. Teaching at universities was the only cover that missionaries could find to get access to China. This is what Pastor Cha did. In terms of evangelism, we can differentiate countries into three categories. The first category is made of countries where missionaries are able to enter and exit freely. Anyone who comes to do business or evangelize is treated equally. The second category is made of countries where missionaries could not openly enter for evangelism, but they might enter under a cover, dependent upon whether the government chooses to ignore them. Once identified, the missionaries could face deportation. The third category is made of countries where missionaries cannot enter, no matter their cover. Once identified, they could be arrested, sentenced, or deported.

China belongs to the second category. The marketization of the 1990s further opened the country, especially as China desired to join the World Trade Organization. To do this, the government made promises around the issues of migration and mobility. Consequently, in 1994 SARA passed the Provisions on the Administration of Religious Activities of Aliens, which banned foreigners from attending Chinese religious activities within Chinese territory. Yet in reality, there were many missionaries in China undercover and only a few were expelled. They all needed a cover, and the number one choice was to come as a teacher, just like Robert Morrison’s cover as an interpreter for the East India Company.

Therefore, practically all of the urban churches that began after 2000 were initially started from campus ministries. Outside of college campuses, where else could one expect to hear the gospel? At that time, it would be unlikely for one to hear the gospel in other social fields. For example, both Zion Church and Shouwang Church in Beijing, Song of Life Church led by Mr. Fang in Shanghai, Xunsiding Church led by Auntie Yang Xinfei in Xiamen, and Enfu Church, Xishuipang (By the Stream) Church, and Spring of Life Church in Chengdu all initially started from a campus ministry Bible study group. Our Early Rain Church also started from a campus ministry at Chengdu University. A sister named Lin Lu and I were both teachers at this school and she shared the gospel with me on a bus after we met at the school gate.

Five Teams and a Heresy Movement

The years between 1989 and 1991 were significant. Prior to that time was the Great Fundamentalist Revival. The period afterwards saw the transition of the Chinese church from fundamentalism to evangelicalism where it remains today. In 1991, Wang Mingdao was called to his heavenly home. In 1992 Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour ended the social atmosphere of suppression and hopelessness. People had no idea what direction the country should take, nor did the Communist party. That year, I took the college entrance examination. I had read some books and longed for the 1980s. Ultimately, Deng Xiaoping would say, “Don’t say too much or think too much about anything else. Everyone make money now!” This was incredibly shocking, as if someone at a funeral were to cough and say, “who wants to play mahjong?” People finally knew what to do. Following the dark period of the two and a half years between 1989 and 1991, the idealism and ideological enlightenment of the 1980s quickly turned to the marketization of the 1990s when “everyone looked to money.” God removed Wang Mingdao at this moment because his era had passed, and he had finished his race. The next era had begun.

The main force behind the Great Fundamentalist Revival of the 1980s was the indigenous itinerant preachers who were stirred up by the Holy Spirit. With the institutional loosening in rural areas, the fire of the revival started in Henan, Anhui and Wenzhou, and itinerant preaching was its way of gospel expansion. By the 1990s, five teams of rural house churches had formed. Sometimes, they claimed to have ten million congregants. There were two teams in Henan, the Fangcheng Team, which Sister Xiaomin belonged to, and the Tanghe Team. Both Tanghe and Fangcheng were small towns in Henan. The Great Fundamentalist Revival began from those small towns. Tanghe team was later renamed the China Gospel Fellowship. There were two teams in Anhui as well, the Yingshang team and the Lixin team. Both were small towns that belonged to the Fuyang area, and thus sometimes were combined to be called the Fuyang Team. The Chinese House Church Confession of Faith published in 1998 was signed by a representative of the Fuyang Team. The last team was the Wenzhou Team. Therefore, the five big teams of the rural house churches included one from Wenzhou, two from Anhui, and two from Henan.

The formation of these five teams was bottom-up, but it was also a result of the work of the Holy Spirit and the indispensable help of Jonathan Chao (1938–2004) in organizing their later stages. They had little connection with the few lone island urban churches (although the teams in Henan were closely connected with the ministry of Li Tianen). Ultimately, the Holy Spirit worked on both ends, holding up the urban churches while reviving the rural churches.

There is a spiritual rule that where the Holy Spirit is at work, Satan is busy at work as well. Therefore, before long, the churches in Henan became the center of a house church heretical movement. Almost all indigenous cults came from Henan. This in no way depreciates the churches in Henan. After all, Korea has produced the largest number of cults in Asia and the United States has produced the largest number of heretical cults in the world. Where there is revival, there must also be heresy. The house church movement experienced miracles, which were the special work of God. But the principle of idolatry and the essence of moralism is that the good often ends up opposite of the best. When churches lack a foundation of Truth, they start to pursue miracles, insistently ask for special grace, and end up departing from the right path.

In the early 1980s, Pentecostalism began to penetrate into the house churches. The spread of Pentecostalism in China can be traced through three (four?) threads. The first thread is the indigenous Pentecostalism primarily located in Henan and Anhui. This includes the influence of pre-1949 indigenous denominations such as the True Jesus Church and the Jesus Family. Their spiritual practices produced indigenous Pentecostalism. The second thread, and the first from the outside, was the American Pentecostal heresy that arrived in the 1980s and soon after linked with the churches in Henan. Many of these churches would say to non-charismatic churches, “What you speak about is what we experience.” Personal experience rose to doctrinal primacy as American and indigenous heresies joined hands. At its peak, there were training classes for speaking in tongues all over China. The third thread, and the second from the outside, came from Korea and spread southward. The fourth thread, and third external, came from Taiwan and spread northward from Guangzhou. Consequently, churches in Guangzhou and Shenzhen were once controlled by Pentecostalism.

We do not consider ordinary Pentecostalism to be heretical. But the combination of Pentecostalism and the rural house churches would finally produce a movement of cults, for example the Spirit Church that appeared in 1986. Another major force behind the cult movement was the Local Churches that were reintroduced from overseas and led by Witness Lee (1905–1997). Compared to the other overseas denominations, the Local Churches were more determined and were among the first to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the rural house churches. As early as 1978, they used a Hong Kong church on Observatory Road for a bridgehead into mainland China. Therefore, Witness Lee’s influence in China took place at almost the same time as the Great Fundamentalist Revival of the rural house churches in the 1980s. Watchman Nee as a preacher was greatly used by the Lord. While his theology was not mainstream, he and the Local Churches as a whole did not exceedingly depart. But after 1949, Witness Lee left the Local Churches institution, and once overseas, he departed from orthodoxy. At one time, the Local Churches was identified as a cult by mainline churches. The combination of Lee’s influence, the Pentecostal movement, and the deviation of the Henan churches produced the “Shouters” movement, a strange combination of Pentecostalism and legalism that holds some external, accidental, personal feelings and experiences to be signs of regeneration and salvation. This practice also led to the exaltation and consecration of the personal authority of the church leader.

The Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign and anti-crime campaign of 1983 saw the first large-scale suppression against house churches in the new era (under Deng Xiaoping). Around seven hundred thousand believers were arrested nationwide in association with the “Shouters.” According to the memories of the house church forerunners, among the arrested, fewer than ten percent of them actually belonged to the “Shouters.” After 1992, the “Shouters” were again identified as a cult and suppressed by the CCP. However, their heavy reliance on the teachings of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee should be classified as an extreme departure from orthodoxy rather than a cultic heresy. Yet, after the suppression of the “Shouters,” several variants arose the group’s remnants, including the Born Again Movement and the All Ranges Church (led by the brother-sister duo Peter Xu and Xu Yongling), the Three Redemptions of Jesus (also called Erliangliang or Mentuihui), the Established King (Beiliwang), and Three Grades of Servant Church, which in the end evolved into to Eastern Lightning. Most of these indigenous heresy movements stemmed from Henan and Anhui and the Local Churches system led by Witness Lee, and almost all of them were products of the “Shouters” movement. Such was the Great Fundamentalist Revival and the rise of the indigenous heresy movement in the 1980s.

The Door Reopened

Another engine of revival came from the mainland missions of the overseas Chinese churches. On June 18th, 1981, Open Doors International, a Dutch mission organization, organized the ambitious Project Pearl, aiming to deliver one million contraband Bibles from the sea into the Chaozhou-Shantou area. However, their ship was stopped by the Chinese military at a beach near Shantou. While they managed to throw bags of poly-wrapped Bibles into the sea and some were picked up by bold believers and fishermen, most were taken by the military.

How many of you have listened to the Voice of Friendship radio station in Hong Kong? Most of you have! It is an overseas gospel force that has greatly influenced many house churches. My wife, Jiang Rong, listened to that station when she was in middle school. A few times she wanted to write them but did not dare. In the Cultural Revolution, in order to transmit the Supreme Directives of the day and to reach every household, the production of semiconductor radios became a political task. Factories all over the country produced radios at rapid speed, which eventually helped to spread the gospel. In 1964 Voice of Friendship received their first letter from its mainland audience. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution broke out, but during that year they still received over one hundred letters from mainland China. In the next ten years, it continued to receive large numbers of letters from the mainland audience. In 1978, they received over two thousand letters from mainland China. In 1989, the number was over twenty thousand. In the thirty years until 1998, Voice of Friendship in Hong Kong received over one hundred thousand letters from its mainland audience.

Among the missionaries from overseas Chinese churches, Pastor Jonathan Chao was probably the first to come into China. He came to Guangzhou through Hong Kong in 1978. When China allowed overseas Chinese to return to their hometowns, he immediately came as a visitor. That year, he founded the Chinese Church Research Center, which was renamed China Ministries International. In Hong Kong, 1978 saw the founding of other organizations for the purposes of mainland ministry like the Far East Broadcasting Company Chinese Ministry and Christian Communications, Ltd. Pastor Chao had tremendous impact on the Big Five teams in Henan and Anhui and even ministered and taught in the Born Again Movement. Pastor Chao continued serving them until 1998, primarily providing church history training for leaders of the Big Five teams. When they met, Pastor Chao drafted a historic document, Chinese House Church Confession of Faith and another document, the Chinese House Church’s Attitude Towards Government, Religious Policy and TSPM, signed by all the participants of the meeting, which for the first time clearly proclaimed the evangelical faith and the reason why house churches would not join the TSPM or register at SARA.

This Confession was fundamentally an expression of Reformed theology, church-state relationships, and the Threefold Vision. Still, people were saying that church leaders in Henan and Anhui were signing it primarily out of respect for Pastor Chao because they trusted him and would have signed on anything he had drafted. Therefore, their signatures did not mean they had turned to Evangelicalism or Reformed theology. Even so, this is the first intergenerational statement of faith concerning house churches interaction with the country and society. It was also an open apologetical action. Likewise, this document had a tremendous impact on the spread of Reformed theology in China and the house church transition from Fundamentalism to Evangelicalism. Since Reform and Opening, no missionary has surpassed Jonathan Chao in terms of giving oneself to, understanding, caring for, and influencing house churches.

Change in Religious Policy

Our last point regards the Great Fundamentalist Revival and church-state relations. In regard to these relations, the year 1982 marked a major turning point. The years between 1979 and 1982 were a period when the churches grew the fastest under loose government control because the political trends of the time were focused on restoring order from chaos, overturning cases of wrong accusations, and ensuring the implementation of religious policy. A new religious policy had yet to be formed. In 1982 the Constitution was amended, and the new Constitution was called the 1982 Constitution. Therefore, prior to 1982, the new regime was not yet fully functioning and there was more room for imagination because no one knew the direction of church-state relations. It is fair to say that from 1979 to 1982, there was no difference between the TSPM and the house churches. All churches were legal and there was no persecution. People were not sure whether Wang Mingdao or Watchman Nee would be rehabilitated. In those years, efforts to recover of the church saw no interference from local authorities. The TSPM had only been recently restored. Wu Yaozong died in the Cultural Revolution and K. H. Ting (1915–2012) became his successor. Towards the end of 1980, the TSPM released policies such as the “Three Musts,” the “Three Nos,” and the “Ten Prohibitions,” which were not strongly enforced.

When K. H. Ting met foreign guests, he had to admit that there were two million Christians in China. Later the number from the official report was three million. After thirty years of persecution and eradication, the number of Christians grew from one million to three million. This had to be disappointing for the rulers, but the government would not allow this trend to continue. When the 1982 Constitution was released, Article Thirty-Six said, “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy the freedom of religious belief.” While this article marked a move away from the “militant atheists” that no longer dominated the government’s administration on religion, in the same year, the CCP also released Document 19 on religious works that defined its restrictive policy on freedom of religious belief. Before the New Regulation on Religious Affairs was released in 2017, this document served as the foundational policy for the Communist party’s religious work over the past forty years. It mentioned “gathering in homes,” and said, “technically Christians are not allowed to gather in homes according to their faith traditions. Nevertheless, this prohibition should not be enforced, but dealt with in appropriate ways through persuasion and education by patriotic religious workers.” Actually, the search for this “appropriate way” lasted until 2017 when the New Regulation of Religious Affairs suggested that the appropriate way would be to directly declare house churches to be illegal.

Document 19 meant that “enlightened atheism” replaced the “militant atheism” as the dominant position for religious policy. The soft goal of “restraining Christianity” or “urging withdrawal from Christianity” replaced the rigid goal of “eradicating Christianity.” The document proposed “four prohibitions” on the basis of “three designations” and defined the task of religious work to be to “gradually weaken the influence of religion and encroach on its ground.” The 2017 New Regulation of Religious Affairs was to a certain degree a negation of Document 19, just as the Constitutional amendments made in 2018 are to a certain degree a negation of the line taken by Deng Xiaoping over the past forty years. The proposal of the “Sinicization of Christianity” meant that the Xi regime admitted the failure of the goal to “restrain Christianity,” so through the “Sinicization of Christianity,” this goal has been intensified to “reform Christianity.”

In the past forty years, the basic attitude of the government has been, “We will not recognize the house church and we will pretend that it does not exist. We will neither approve it, nor strive to eradicate it.” Whenever a political movement came, house churches would be suppressed. When the movement ended, the government would then pretend that the house church never existed. The functions of restraining, guiding, and urging withdrawal were carried out through the TSPM. However, over these forty years, the more the restraints that were put on Christianity, the more the house churches developed. All of the efforts to urge believers to withdraw from Christianity only ended up attracting more people to Christianity. One million Christians has now grown into thirty or even eighty million Christians.

By 1982, the wave of revising policies and overturning wrongly accused cases had passed. From the 550,000 rightists who were charged, 553,000 cases were overturned. But the Central Committee retained ninety-six famous rightists whose cases could not be overturned. In rightist cases regarding Christianity, cases against the Wang Mingdao Counterrevolutionary Clique and the Watchman Nee Counterrevolutionary Clique could not be overturned. In terms of the republic, they were still considered counterrevolutionaries. Also, the role of the TSPM was made clear. It would remain in existence as the political tool used to both restrain and urge believers to withdraw from Christianity. Therefore, A gap reopened between the TSPM and the house churches. The TSPM was an organization involved in political movement with a bad reputation. So, the government established another organization, the Chinese Christian Council (CCC). Together with the TSPM, these two organizations were called the “Two Councils.” Its name suggested that the TSPM was a mass organization of patriotic Christians, while the CCC was a church organization. In fact, the two were one group with two titles. However, the situation differs from place to place. For example, there has only been a TSPM and no CCC in Chengdu. When it was announced that our church was banned, an official suggested that we unite with other churches and apply to establish a CCC in Chengdu since there was not one.

So, the TSPM began to work on its “three designations:” designated location, designated personnel, and designated area. Designated location means that religious activities must be carried out at a designated site. Designated personnel means that clergy must have licenses approved by the United Front Work Department (UFWD). Designated area means that religious activities cannot be carried out beyond certain designated ranges. This was a foundational and an evil policy designed to restrain the church. For example, if a preacher from Qingyang District wants to preach in Wuhou District, he would have to apply to the UFWD in Qingyang District through the TSPM. Then, the UFWD in Qingyang District would forward his application to the city-level UFWD, who would approve and notify the Wuhou District UFWD, who would then notify the preacher through the TSPM that he could and preach in Wuhou District (typically his application would be rejected). This policy meant that the church would be administered as a public institution. While the church still existed, its completely loses its self-sovereignty.

My first visit to Wenzhou was in 2010. The director of the RAB of Lucheng District in Wenzhou led a team to track me down. They finally found me at the home of a local church deacon. This director arrived with a band of policemen and told me that I was not allowed to preach beyond my designated area.

There is also another policy meant to urge believers to withdraw from Christianity. This policy prohibits baptism for minors under the age of eighteen. There are quite a few young people in our church who were from the TSPM. They had followed their families in believing in the Lord, but they were not baptized until they were eighteen and came to college in Chengdu.

Thus, the position of the house churches was clear: they could not in good faith join the TSPM, they could not forsake the sovereignty of the church, and they could not accept the rule of the RAB and the UFWD. There is no way we could accept the designated location, designated area, designated personnel, or the prohibition on baptism for minors under the age of eighteen, because we could only accept the Great Commission of Jesus Christ, that we should always share the gospel, in season or out of season.

After 1982, those house churches that decided not to join the TSPM were sometimes called “underground churches.” After 2000 when a movement began to make house churches known to the public, the name “underground church” was gradually removed. “Underground church” suggests either a hermit status, (which makes it easy to produce heresy) or an amateur status (which makes it easy to form clubs). Christians who have believed in the Lord within the past five years would not say that they belong to the underground church. Ten years ago, believers would have said this, but today there is no “underground church” in China. All house churches are open house churches, although the levels of publicity may be different.

In 2004, before I was baptized, I was involved as a legal scholar and lawyer in the investigation of a church case. I was on my way to Hubei province to represent Huanan Church, which was established through the pipeline of the “Shouters” in Henan province, later becoming part of the Born-Again Movement and then becoming part of the All Ranges Church. The leader of the church was Gong Shengliang, who was sentenced to death with reprieve. In the early years he had a close relationship with Peter Xu and his sister. Later, pastor Jonathan Chao and his wife helped him turn to the Reformed faith. I went to one of their places of worship along the Yangtze River. At midnight I got up and went to the restroom, which was on the third-floor rooftop. The rooftop was flat like Jewish houses in the BIble. I saw a brother who was there until daybreak for night watch. I asked him, “Brother, did you get up so early for morning prayer?” He replied: “No, I’m here for the night watch.” From the rooftop, he could see across the Yangtze River. If the police came, he would be able to spot them and report to others. Up until 2005, many rural churches under persecution still had this sort of practice. Whenever they gathered, there would be people on watch by the riverside or at the village entrance. If there were suspicious people approaching, they would immediately report it so that the believers could retreat in time.

Such practices did not only exist during the Cultural Revolution. From the 1980s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, underground churches always kept these practices. It typically gets dark earlier in rural areas, so believers would enter the village after everyone in the village had turned off the lights and fallen asleep. They could not enter the village at six o’clock. Otherwise they might be discovered by the villagers. So, they normally entered the village between seven and eight o’clock and then start their gathering. When the meeting finished, it would be pitch dark out and believers would quietly sneak out of the village. Similar things would happen in urban churches. When the gathering ended, we would say, “Do not leave together, leave separately. One person walk out every two minutes.” This is how the house churches survived those years.

Although our church established the way of public worship as a house church from the very beginning, I still remember a sister whose words touched me many years ago. She was born a believer and was about eighteen years old when her prayer touched me deeply. She said, “Lord, why should we pray to you only after we have locked the door tight and closed the curtain? Why should we keep our voices down when we sing and lock the door tight before we are able worship you?” When I heard this, I felt so sad.

Brothers and sisters, half of you did not experience the era of the “underground church.” May the Lord show us that in this age we will have to fight the good fight for the Lord. Do not take all of these benefits for granted, but rather know that we have come to this time and to this position to be even more out of our minds for the sake of the gospel. Do not view our external environment today as indispensable, and under the pressure of persecution, do not easily give up the freedom to openly worship God that came at the cost of many tears and prayers of house churches.

Let us pray:

Lord, we thank you and we praise you that you revealed to us that the greatest thing that has taken place in China since 1978 was not Reform and Opening, not the economic revival of society, but the revival of your church. From several hundred thousand Christians during the Cultural Revolution, to two to three million Christian by the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the tens of millions of Christian today, this is your most amazing work in China. You made all things worked together for this cause. No work is more glorious than this, and nothing is more important than this. Lord, let us see your glory. Help us, Lord, in this era, when the church is a little more open, while we are not under such strong persecution, and while we have a slightly better situation than those generations before us. Lord, let our hearts not faint because of this, but let us be strong and courageous and imitate the cloud of witnesses you put among us and together with them imitate our Lord Jesus. As Christ said, those who serve you will also follow your way. Lord, where you go, we’ll go, because the Heavenly Father will bless those who faithfully serve the Lord. Thank you, Lord for listening to our prayer. We pray in the precious and holy name of our Lord Jesus. Amen!