China’s Three-Self Congress Makes Rehabilitation of Religion Official

After a 20-year lapse, China’s Three-Self Patriotic Movement held its third National Christian Congress. The 176 representatives from 25 of China’s 29 administrative districts who gathered in Nanjing (Nanking) during October were all Christians. But was their movement predominantly a religious expression or was it basically a political apparatus?

Observers said they could discern both elements from reports of the congress issued by the New China News Agency. On one hand, the congress “proclaimed its support for the process of modernization and the efforts to bring Taiwan back into union with the mother country. The delegates affirmed their support for the struggle for world peace and opposition to hegemony and aggression.” On the other hand, the congress pledged to continue “to make all efforts in defending the religious freedom of the public,” and to “help the government to fully implement its policy of religious freedom.”

The Three-Self Movement (for self-government, self-support, and self-propagation) was organized in 1951 to serve as a liaison between the government’s Bureau of Religious Affairs and the Protestant churches. All of China’s non-Roman Catholic denominations were forced to unite into the movement during the 1950s, and it functioned as the national church structure for about 15 years. During the mid-1960s, when the Cultural Revolution broke out, the movement was deactivated. Many of its leaders and functionaries were humiliated and even imprisoned.

But as the government’s policies on religion have changed in the past two years, the movement has reemerged. The Chinese authorities, recognizing that religious believers had been alienated by a suppressive policy, decided to bring them back into the mainstream of national life. They needed the Christians’ full support in achieving national goals of construction and modernization. “To do this,” comments Wing-on Pang of the China Research Center in Hong Kong, “religion must first be granted recognition and disgraced religious leaders rehabilitated. Religion must then be organized and controlled so that its strengths may be channeled in the desired direction.”

The congress was part of that process. It was to elect new national leadership (the Three-Self president, Y. T. Wu, had died last year), draft new policies to fit the “united front” strategy, and set up a national structure to care for the administrative functions of the church, and services such as ministerial training and publishing.

In a parallel action last May and June Chinese Catholics, meeting in Beijing (Peking), reactivated a national church structure and elected a new primate. This Catholic counterpart to the Three-Self Movement, after which it was modeled, is called the Catholic Patriotic Association.

The Protestant gathering had been postponed several times, leading China watchers to deduce either disagreements between Three-Self leaders and others in the churches, or difficulties in winning widespread participation. In China, they say, open meetings are mere sounding boards for what has already been agreed on behind the scenes.

The congress announced formation of a Chinese Christian Council intended, it is believed, to serve as the right hand of the movement by helping it to implement its policies. Delegates elected Bishop Ding Guangxuan (K. H. Ting), who had been acting chairman of the movement, as president of the council. (Wu Yi-fang, former president of Jinling Women’s College, Nanjing, was elected honorary chairman. She is 88 years old and is expected to be no more than a figurehead.)

The delegates also adopted a council constitution that, according to the New China News Agency, “describes the tasks of the council as supervision of the work of churches and clergy, training of candidates for the Christian ministry, publishing the Bible and other devotional materials, and consolidating links among all churches and believers in China.”

These priorities point to the rather anarchic situation both within the Three-Self churches, as well as between them and the informal Christian gatherings known as house churches. Among the leaders of the movement, pastors of the official churches, leaders of the house groups, and individual lay people, there is no single overall channel for exercising control of the religious scene. Apparently the Three-Self Movement and the Chinese Christian Council are entrusted with the mission of correcting this situation.

A resolution of the congress that Chinese churches should continue to hold to the three-self principles was noted especially by the news agency: “The delegates … stated that they would oppose any form of interference with, or control of the Chinese church by foreign sources … nor should any group be allowed to use the name of the Christian church for illegal activities.”

Activities declared by the government to be illegal were not enumerated at the congress, but what are reported to be published guidelines for reopening churches in China (received by a member of a Hong Kong Christian study group that met with movement leaders in six cities) prohibit:

• Propagating religion to youth and children under 18 years of age, and to government personnel.

• Giving speeches or publishing catechisms and religious educational materials without prior approval by the Religious Affairs Bureau.

• Making any contact with religious organizations outside China or accepting any financial help from them.

• Propagating religion or holding religious meetings outside of approved church buildings.

Observers say these guidelines are not being applied uniformly. They also note that listening to Christian radio programs is not prohibited. Nor is it illegal to take Bibles into China (therefore, they maintain, claims about “Bible smuggling” are misleading, even though larger quantities are sometimes confiscated).

A statement issued at the end of the congress said that the Church of China, while maintaining its “three-self, patriotic course,” is willing to have “equal and friendly communication” with churches outside mainland China, to promote Christian fellowship “under the principle of mutual respect.”

Tens of thousands—including evangelicals who desire to maintain a witness within the official churches—attend the 27 churches that were opened by the movement during 1980. But much larger numbers attend house meetings, especially those located in the rural areas where there was far less disturbance than in cities during the Cultural Revolution, and where as yet there are hardly any official churches.

The biggest obstacle to reopening church buildings for worship is finding alternative accommodations for the factories, schools, and warehouses that took over those buildings, according to Arne Sovik, a Lutheran World Federation China expert. “In any event,” he maintains, “there still wouldn’t be enough churches to accommodate the present number of Christians, which is much larger than 30 years ago.” He said there are now Christian groups in many places where previously there was no church building.

Some members of house groups also meet in the Three-Self churches; others’ understanding of Scripture and the nature of the church prohibit them from worshiping in the Three-Self churches. They distrust Three-Self officials as those who previously betrayed them to the authorities. They are just as suspicious of the movement’s theology, which they consider liberal. They insist, however, that their unwillingness to attend the open churches is not for political reasons. They are often known for their hard work and commitment to a strong and stable Chinese society.

During the Cultural Revolution, when all religious organizations were closed down, the house groups multiplied. The most conservative experts say that there are now more than the 20,000 Protestant places of worship that existed in 1949. House groups are scattered throughout China and range in size from 5 to 20 members to groups with more than 1,000. The largest groups must use schools or other public buildings, now with the full consent of local authorities. Thus, it is inaccurate to call these house meetings “underground” churches. Only very small family groups can meet without the knowledge of local officials.

How to deal with these unofficial groups is the delicate question that now most occupies the authorities. Bishop Ding, the newly confirmed Three-Self leader, delivered a significant speech at the recent government Political Consultation Meeting, of which he is a member. “The mission of our Three-Self Patriotic Committee,” he was quoted as saying in the September 9, 1980, Peoples Daily, “is to unite all the Christians in the country. We cannot consider the house church Christians as a separate party. As one of the leaders of the Three-Self Committee, I cannot comfortably say that the house churches are illegal.”

Some house group Christians in China have rejoiced over Ding’s statement, which seemed to affirm the legality of the house churches. Other believers remained skeptical. Ding implied that all house churches must be absorbed eventually into the Three-Self movement. He went on to say, “we cannot merely organize the Three-Self Patriotic Movement among a tiny minority. We should unite with and incorporate into our movement the millions of believers.”

Researcher Wing-on Pang comments, “After what [the house groups] have gone through all these years, they have no confidence in anything that has any connection with the authorities.” He predicts that “as long as these memories last, there is likely to be either great reluctance to develop a unified Protestantism or a tendency toward something analogous to the Baptist churches of the Soviet Union, where unrecognized groups live in insecurity and some suspicion of the recognized church which has accepted government registration.”

On their part, the house church Christians sometimes forget that among the Three-Self pastors, too, are some of evangelical faith who were imprisoned for their faith and had their churches closed before the Cultural Revolution had run its course.

Evangelism

Las Vegas: Graham And The Mgm Grand Hotel Fire

Evangelist Billy Graham rarely returns so soon to the same city for a preaching crusade. But some called it providential that Graham’s November 19–23 meetings in Las Vegas, Nevada, coincided with the disastrous fire at the MGM Grand Hotel.

The early morning fire on November 21, which claimed 84 lives and 700 injured, added a certain urgency to Graham’s usual salvation message, and the evangelist served as an unofficial chaplain to some of the survivors. He prayed with, and encouraged burn victims, who were stretched out in long rows in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Later that night, in the section of the Convention Center where all the meetings were held, Graham changed his sermon topic to discuss God’s purpose in tragedy and his reasons for allowing it.

Graham had preached a six-day crusade in Las Vegas in 1978, but because of the city’s responsiveness his team decided to accept the local committee’s invitation to come back. “We felt that we left an unfinished task,” Graham explained. This time, the evangelist paired his Las Vegas visit with a preceding November 13–16 crusade in the northern Nevada city of Reno—also a gambling resort.

In Las Vegas, the audiences were smaller than in the earlier crusade: 62,000 total for six meetings in 1978, compared with about 42,000 for the five meetings in November, said the local crusade chairman, First Christian Church pastor Ken Forshee. However, audience response measured higher. Graham called the ratio of inquirers to attenders in Reno and Las Vegas “the largest we have ever had in the United States in the history of our crusades” (about 9.5 percent in Reno, where audiences each night filled a 5,500-seat auditorium, and spilled into a closed-circuit TV viewing area).

Las Vegas volunteers tried “telephone visitation.” Using 30 telephones in the local crusade office, they methodically went through the telephone book, inviting some 80,000 to 100,000 persons to the crusade. Some of the 100 participating churches did door-to-door visitation in assigned neighborhoods. Only about one-third of the 450,000 Greater Las Vegas population is churched, said Forshee; these are equally divided among Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons.

Reno crusade organizers felt particularly pleased with local church cooperation. Local chairman and First Baptist Church pastor Edmund Irvin said about 115 area churches participated in some form. The city’s churches traditionally have been infected by the go-it-alone “rugged individualism that won the day in the West,” he said.

The Nevada crusade received the full support of Governor Robert List, a Presbyterian layman. Las Vegas Mayor William Briare, described by local chairman Forshee as an active Catholic who is “evangelical in spirit,” sat on the speaker’s platform each night. Greater Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce President Frank Johnson heartily endorsed the crusade, noting the positive image that the 1978 crusade gave the city.

(Of the 50 states, Nevada has the nation’s highest suicide rate. Government figures show 24.8 suicides per 100,000 residents—double the national average. Joan Kember of the National Center for Health Statistics attributed this “astounding” figure to the gambling houses and easy divorce laws that attract people to the state.)

In interviews during the Nevada crusades, Graham supported creation of a federal law requiring that religious organizations and parachurch groups file annual financial reports with the Internal Revenue Service. And in a governor-mayors prayer breakfast—in the MGM Grand Hotel just prior to the Las Vegas crusade—Graham warned of the day’s urgency. After citing inflation, world turbulence, and other problems, Graham said the result for the U.S. may be that the next four to five years will become “the roughest period in history since the Civil War.”

Religion in the Schools

New York’S Seekers Have Found School Access Key

About 75 Yonkers, New York, high school students showed up in the auditorium after school for the movie. The Cross and the Switchblade. They generally were orderly, although some hooted and added novel sound effects. Afterwards, members of the sponsoring school club, the Seekers, seemed pleased. They had advertised TV star Erik Estrada in the role of gang leader Nicky Cruz, rather than WASP-y looking Pat Boone as preacher David Wilkerson—being mindful of potential Hispanic attenders. Seekers president Cindy Pagán talked of sponsoring another Christian film at the school later on.

Campus ministry isn’t easy, especially in New York City. In many schools, hallway policemen get more respect than the teachers.

Yet for the past 10 years, a unique, mostly student-led organization known as Seekers Christian Fellowship has worked in the area’s high schools and colleges. Until Youth for Christ started two Campus Life clubs last fall, Seekers was the only established Christian group in the city’s high schools; clubs are presently active in 14.

Also, Seekers function in eight colleges. (Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship has chapters in some city colleges as well.) Last spring, a Seekers club started in its first junior high school: Stephen Decatur, located in the rough Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

Charismatic in orientation, but drawing students from many church and ethnic backgrounds, Seekers clubs make contact with literally thousands of students by sponsoring concerts, films, and other activities. They also provide Christian fellowship and discipleship for members.

The clubs have survived despite today’s challenges nationwide that on-campus Christian clubs violate the constitutional separation of church and state. The main reasons Seekers has avoided criticisms seem to be because the clubs rely on student leaders, rather than outside professionals: members have provided a stabilizing influence in rough school situations: and the groups avoid hard-sell proselytizing.

(Its on-campus presence was challenged in 1974, but Seekers got a favorable ruling from the city’s board of education, which said Seekers is not a church. This established a favorable precedent that has lasted.)

Whether or not Seekers clubs get into a school depends on the attitude of the administration. Some high school principals forbid the clubs, while others have allowed them in, saying, “If even one student is helped it’s worth it,” said Seekers executive director Faith Brown, 37, formerly a high school sociology teacher in Colorado.

Brown said Seekers clubs generally start through the initiative of students: one tells a friend at another school about Seekers, who telephones Brown to ask how to form a club at his own school. She helps secure the administration’s approval and a required faculty adviser.

If there are no Christian teachers present or willing to sponsor a club, she will try to find any interested faculty adviser. In fact, several Seekers advisers are Jewish: “They just like being with the students,” Brown said. (The advisers don’t usually take a leadership role, so Christian advisers aren’t that crucial. However, in schools without Christian advisers. Brown makes sure members are “mothered” a bit more than those in other schools.)

The Seekers began in 1970. A Hispanic, Pentecostal student at New York University, Ben Alicea, couldn’t find a fellowship, so he started his own. Its success spawned groups at other campuses, and Alicea asked David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge to provide funds and help coordinate activities of the various groups.

Alicea later joined the Teen Challenge staff, and worked in its campus ministry program along with Brown, who had moved to New York to work with Wilkerson’s drug rehabilitation program.

Teen Challenge terminated ministry in 1977 in a disagreement over “indigenous leadership.” Seekers staff preferred training students as club leaders.

However, the program didn’t die. Pastor Ezra Williams of the Pentecostal, and predominately black, Bethel Gospel Assembly Brown attends, took the lead in securing financing. Today the church provides half Brown’s salary. A legal umbrella was formed, Urban Youth Alliance; Brown, Alicea, and Williams are its top officers.

Since the organizational shuffle, the Seekers have operated on a tight budget. Last year, $15,000 covered Brown’s salary and limited overhead costs. She works out of her Brooklyn apartment, and has a part-time staff assistant.

In some respects, the forced cutback has been a blessing, says Brown. The urban poor and ethnic minorities sometimes distrust big, establishment groups with fancy budgets and high-rise offices. By attending a black church and having worked on the street with drug addicts, Brown is better able to relate cross-culturally and to urban problems.

The organization’s primary role is conducting discipleship training for the student leaders, and for organizing inter-group events. It won’t pump time and effort into a dying club, although it will help students who are interested. “It’s between the students, God, and the principal,” to keep a program

Student leaders encounter a variety of problems. Wilda Acosta at Herbert Lehman College laments the difficulty of getting students to join clubs—let alone a Christian one. “Even the gays’ club has more members than we do,” she said.

Many Hispanic students come from families involved in spiritism, called “Santurismo.” Some of the blacks support a “black Jesus only” concept. Many Pentecostal members come from legalistic storefront churches, which distrust ecumenical activity, and forbid girls’ slacks, make-up, and short hair. These groups, in addition to whites who hesitate to join a Seekers group that is predominantly black or Hispanic (as many are), make for an interesting blend and a challenge to Christian unity.

Only about half of the Seekers clubs are located in so-called ghetto schools such as Stephen Decatur Junior High. Teacher Joan Schwartz felt called to the city, and moved there with her husband from Minnesota. She started a faculty prayer group, out of which came the idea last spring to start a Seekers group. Since, two of the school’s faculty have become Christians, the club has grown to 10 members, and administrators detect a “real change” in atmosphere, Schwartz said.

Seekers clubs are also in upper-class, exclusive schools, such as Art and Design High School. There, in the middle 1970s, a Seekers club provided the spark for a mini-revival, in which about 65 students were “soundly saved” over the course of two years, Brown said.

Correction

The following members of Congress were erroneously identified in the congressional religious census published in the December issue: Rep. Benjamin Rosenthal. D-N.Y., who should have been listed as Jewish; Sen. Jennings Randolph, D-W.Va., as Baptist; and Rep. Thomas Petri, R-Wis., as Lutheran. Sen. Ernest Hollings should have been identified as Lutheran and from South Carolina. Republican Rep. Hal Daub should have been listed as from Nebraska. The accompany article should read that all women who ran for House seats won, instead of all women who ran for Congress.

Seekers’ activities depend on additional funding. Brown hopes to find an office away from her home. There is talk of eventually forming a group for international students, a Christian teachers coalition, and of moving into more of the city’s 100 high schools and 50 colleges.

Many secular-minded educators and leaders have tolerated the program, and in some cases supported it. Brown said. However, she added, some in the city would just as soon see Christianity stay confined to the “storefront and Riverside Drive.”

JOHN MAUST

The Press

Local Churches Back Publishers Into Corner

After getting pressure from the “local churches” of Witness Lee, Christian Herald Books ceased distribution of author Ron Enroth’s book The Lure of the Cults, while it excised all mention of the local churches in the book. (The coalition of about 70 churches prefers a lower case spelling.)

Christian Herald, which issued a revised edition about a month ago, apparently acted to prevent being sued. It decided upon this course of action after a September 16 meeting in New York City with several local churches representatives. As a result, the local churches—in an October 6 letter signed by Witness Lee and several elders—agreed not to press legal suit against either Christian Herald Books or Enroth.

In his book, Enroth had described the local churches as an “aberrational Christian group,” meaning one outside the mainstream of organized evangelicalism. Local churches are angry with evangelical publishers and writers who depict the group as outside orthodox Christianity.

They allegedly threatened legal action against Moody Monthly and Eternity magazines for statements made about them. Local churches took exception to their depiction in Enroth’s 1979 article, “The Power Abusers,” in Eternity, and were allowed to have a multisignature statement printed in the October 1980 issue, testifying to “our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ” and clarifying its practices and structures. Elsewhere in the same issue. Eternity editors said: “We have funds for the basics—production of a magazine—but no funds for such luxuries as costly litigation with aggrieved groups. This may help you understand the rather unusual space given to the statement …”

Local churches allegedly threatened InterVarsity Press with a libel suit for a book which still has not been published. The publisher has delayed the scheduled publication of the book for 12 months, and has been consulting with attorneys.

Last summer the local churches filed three law suits totaling more than $37 million against Thomas Nelson Publishers and author Jack Sparks for allegedly libelous statements in his book. The Mind Benders: A Look at Current Cults. Sparks referred to the group as a cult. Although the case still has not reached a court, Thomas Nelson and Sparks have had to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to prepare their defense.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.