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Ji readily acknowledges his debt to Nee and the Little Flock. But he also points to a turning point when he was 15: "My family had regular gatherings for prayer and Bible reading, but most of the time I was passive and only had a vague understanding of what was going on. I attended out of obedience. Nothing was going on inside. I had no enlightenment. But I remember one family gathering, when during the prayer, I felt a need for a Savior. A kind of transformation took place in my heart. After that, I felt like I had a real relationship with God. So I then asked to be baptized."

From that day on, he's been involved in the church, first with the Little Flock, and today with the official Chinese church—except for the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the decade when Mao Zedong, to "purify" China, encouraged Red Guards to attack traditional and "bourgeois" values and test party officials by publicly criticizing them. Many elderly people and intellectuals were verbally attacked, physically abused, and some were killed.

Like nearly every other Christian in China, Ji suffered for his faith during that decade—though he didn't have as hard a time as some. He was sent to the countryside "to receive re-education from poor farmers and peasants," he says. Though the peasants received him with sympathy, he and his wife were forced to do heavy manual work everyday. He hinted that though there were times of sorrow and even anger, "This 10-year time is quite special to me because God made me learn many lessons." Besides, he wrote to me in a recent e-mail, "We have too much to do in life today [than] to harbor the grudges of the past."

Too much to do, indeed. The registered church, like the rest of the country, is still recovering from the Cultural Revolution. Ji noted that the TSPM/CCC is working overtime to meet the pastoral, theological, and educational needs of some 16 million Christians in 50,000 churches spread over an area the size of the United States.

He's been doing this sort of work for almost 30 years now. After the Cultural Revolution, he committed his lot to the TSPM—partly because he was convinced that the Communist government was really trying "to serve the people." But also because he believed in the Three-Self idea for the church, that it should become "self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating." This idea was first set forth by missionary Henry Venn in the 19th century, and was endorsed by Watchman Nee. It is no wonder that Ji warmed up to it. Like most believers in most countries, he doesn't see a necessary contradiction between being a good Christian and a patriot: "A Christian is also a citizen and thus has responsibility towards his country."

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November 2004, Vol. 48, No. 11