At 5 a.m. every day, Lü Xiaomin kneels on the floor in a dimly lit room of an apartment in northern China. She sings a hymn aloud, reads a passage of Scripture, and prays to God. Sometimes, she meets other believers online or in person to read God’s Word together. After breakfast and a short walk, her schedule fills with ministry work, like sharing her life testimony with people or preparing Bible studies.
Lü’s lifestyle embodies the signature worship song she composed in the early 1990s, “Five O’clock in the Morning in China.” In a lilting melody, the song declares,
At five o’clock in the morning in China,
You hear the sound of people praying.
Prayers bring revival and peace.
It brings unity and victory …
Soaring over lakes and mountains,
Melting the coldest of hearts.
Lü’s vocation as a hymn writer might seem surprising, as she never received any formal music training and learned how to write Chinese characters from a dictionary while shepherding sheep in a field. But her songs have made her a household name—“Sister Xiaomin”—among Chinese Christians worldwide.
“I don’t really understand music theory, but I know the Spirit gives the song, and I just write it down when I receive it,” Lü said. “I am a grassroot, a grassroot filled with the Holy Spirit.”
Lü was born in 1970 to a non-Christian Hui-minority family in Fangcheng, a county in northern China. Her parents planned to give her away to another family when she was 10 days old, but a big flood occurred on the day this was going to happen. “It was God’s blessing to our family,” her mother said in the 2000 documentary The Cross: Jesus in China.
In junior high, Lü had a chronic sinus infection and constantly felt dizzy and nauseous. She decided to drop out of school and began working as a farmer. As she grappled with her poor health, her aunt encouraged her to come to church and told her that God would heal her.
“Often, I sat down and looked at the sky, the birds, the flowers, the trees, the grass, and the fields,” Lü said in the documentary. “In my heart, I knew all these were the works of a creator, but I didn’t know who he was and what his name was.”
After the conversation with her aunt, Lü realized that God was the creator she had been searching for. She rushed to her aunt’s home, interrupted her dinner, and asked her to bring her to church immediately. The 19-year-old accepted Christ that very night.
The following year, Lü joined the Fangcheng Fellowship—one of the largest house church networks in China—and became a lay evangelist. One night, after encountering the Holy Spirit during a rural house church revival meeting, she felt restless and could not sleep. Suddenly, the melody and lyrics of a song came to her in the middle of the night, and she burst into spontaneous worship.
This tune became the first hymn she wrote: “Bring Your Joy,” which exhorts believers to lay down their burdens and live out the gospel together. This song also sparked the stirrings of a movement known as Canaan Hymns: a collection of more than 2,200 songs with catchy, colloquial lyrics set to emotionally stirring melodies in the style of a Chinese folk song.
Lü’s initial hymn-writing endeavors were born out of the revival of Christianity in China between 1989 and 1998. This was a golden period where the faith spread outward from rural areas as believers shared a fervent commitment to telling people about the gospel, even amid suffering.
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Hundreds of believers from around the country would travel to Lü’s town to worship together in the small house and courtyard of a host family. These meetings were often vibrant, overflowing with the power of the Holy Spirit, Lü recalled.
When the meetings ended, believers would take home recordings of Lü’s hymns on cassette tapes to share them with their communities. Itinerant preachers also brought her songs to other parts of China, like Yunnan and Xinjiang. Many of these preachers had little or no financial support. Whenever they met each other, they would often sing the hymn “Lord, May You Hold Our Hands” with tears streaming down their faces as they petitioned God loudly for strength and tenacity.
In the early aughts, Lü’s hymns moved from lyrics that pleaded for divine intervention and mercy to ones that professed God’s unconditional love as the church grew into maturity. For instance, the song “There Really Is a God Who Loves You” affirms that God bestows breath on us and forgives us each day. In 2002, Chinese Canadian composer An-lun Huang created formal musical scores for these hymns, helping them to gain wider recognition in churches across China and the Chinese diaspora.
From 2009, Chinese churches gradually shifted from rural house churches to more urban dwellings. Lü recognized widening divisions in believers’ demographic profiles and denominations. Her conviction to compose hymns to unite people with a common vision of their mission grew.
During this time, the Chinese church rekindled the Back to Jerusalem movement, encouraging believers to share the Good News from the east to the west as a means of fulfilling the Great Commission. Lü’s hymn “Mission of China: Preach the Gospel” captured this sentiment well: “The wheels roll, the road is long, and the Chinese church must preach the gospel. … The Holy [Spirit’s] flame has been passed down to this day, miraculously guided by the Lord.”
As Lü’s fame spread, she experienced many trials and was often the subject of nasty rumors. Once, she heard gossip that her son had a foreign father because of her trips for overseas ministry. Other times, she faced pressure to curb her efforts to share the Christian faith. Some people she shared her faith with, however, ended up watching The Cross documentary about her life and unexpectedly decided to pray to God.
Lü also came to realize she had often overwhelmed her husband with her expectations of ministry life by pressuring him to read Scripture, pray, and attend gatherings. Yet he faithfully supported her ministry and did everything with patience and dedication. She resolved to embrace gratitude and humility and view life and service from the Lord’s perspective.
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Some believers find Lü’s hymns too China-centric. The lyrics of one hymn say, “China, facing the baptism of life and death / You must be in awe. Only then will China be most beautiful.” Another hymn declares God’s power and sovereignty over the entire country.
Lü is dismissive of this criticism. “China carries a double debt—not only to Jesus but also to the missionaries who once shed their blood on Chinese soil,” she said. “Why did God love China so much as to send so many missionaries here?”
Other believers feel that Lü’s hymns sound too old-fashioned. But Lü reckons that hymn writing is not about honing an artistic product to perfection in a bid to please listeners. Instead, the hymns she writes should be a channel of confession, intercession, evangelism, and mission in and through the church.
“When songs become too polished, they lose their earthiness and originality, and brothers and sisters struggle to follow [the lyrics],” she said.
Wu, a pastor in his 40s from the eastern part of China, grew up listening to Canaan Hymns. He continues to cling to these songs, as they remind him to have steadfast faith in God. The first 200 hymns Lü composed are especially moving to him, and the congregations he planted regularly sing these songs in their gatherings.
Some younger Chinese believers are committed to making Lü’s hymns sound more contemporary. In July, Christian worship group Deep Spring Band released a music video featuring Lü’s hymn “We Are Dear Brothers.” The group performed the song while beating large drums on the banks of the Yellow River, singing, “We are brothers, forever inseparable, / One Lord, one faith, one baptism, sealed with the Holy Spirit.”
Two years ago, the band recorded a music video for another of Lü’s songs, “Blessings to You, the Campus in my Heart,” which described God pouring out his love over schools in the country.
“We love Canaan Hymns because they touch our souls deeply, regardless of age,” said Yao, one of the band members. “We want [her songs] to reach out to the young generation of the digital age with this music video, as many are lost in isolation and depression.”
Lü’s hymns continue to be popular in Chinese diasporic churches in the US and elsewhere. Congregants at a Chinese church in Australia frequently sing these songs as they resonate with the lived experiences of their brothers and sisters in Christ from Mainland China, said Tin, their 60-year-old lead pastor.
In the last five years, Lü’s hymns have adopted a more prophetic tone, often urging believers to live with a sense of eschatological urgency amid worldwide crises. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across China, she wrote “Wuhan, Wuhan, You Are Not Alone” to encourage people in the city to persevere. Another song, “You Are the Ark in the Great Flood,” proclaims God as a refuge in disaster, a beacon of light, and a home for prodigals.
More than three decades after she penned her first song, Lü continues to get up at 5 a.m. daily to pray, read the Bible, and write hymns for the Chinese church. Her greatest longing is to lead people to know Jesus more intimately.
“I must keep learning—Scripture, worship, service—not to please anyone but to obey the Spirit’s prompting,” she said.
