The church in China not only suffered persecution but experienced the most remarkable growth in 2,000 years.

Since the reopening of the People’s Republic of China to the West in the early seventies, the condition of the Christian church there has been a question of both critical interest and controversy. In the following report based upon conversations with persons involved in both the house-church movement and the government-approved Three-Self Patriotic Movement, Sharon Mumper, associate director of the Evangelical Missions Information Service, provides an updated look at the complexities and challenges facing Chinese Christians in 1987.

Pastor Chen was in for a shock when the doors of his Chinese prison finally swung open. As he stood on the threshold of freedom, anticipation mixed with dread. It had been 18 years since the Communists had wrenched him from the church he loved and the 300 people he had faithfully served. Since then, a violent revolution had ravaged the church. Perhaps only a few members remained.

Chen, however, stepped into the sunlight of a new, more liberal day for China—and into the arms of a church that in his absence had grown to 5,000. Today, some 20,000 believers meet in homes throughout the area.

Chen’s experience is not unique. “The first thing I had to do was repent,” said a pastor from Yenan Province, who was released in 1981 after more than 20 years in confinement. In prison, he had mourned for his church, imagining it scattered and frightened. On his release, he found a vital, growing, witnessing church that had multiplied in size many times. Today, his church serves as a base of outreach to the entire countryside.

Pastors who were torn from their churches during the tumultuous decades of the fifties and sixties can hardly be blamed for their lack of faith. The last missionaries were forced out of China in the early 1950s. Ten years later, the Cultural Revolution (an ultra-Left attempt to rekindle revolutionary fervor among Chinese youth and to stamp out remnants of precommunist Chinese culture) unleashed a torrent of violence against the church and other social institutions. The Christian world looked on in dismay—and all but gave up the church for dead.

In 1966, public worship ended in Shanghai as the last church was forcibly closed, and a prominent Hong Kong newspaper carried the announcement that the last chapter of the church in China had finally been written. That announcement, as it turned out, was premature. The church not only survived, but it experienced what has been called the most remarkable growth in 2,000 years of church history.

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When Mao Zedong claimed China for communism in 1949, more than 100 years of missionary labor had produced some 700,000 Protestant believers. Although there are no official statistics on the number of Christians in China today, most evangelical China watchers place the number of believers at 50 million—although estimates range from 4 million to over 100 million.

Merely nominal church membership is largely absent. “The people who come here to worship today really mean business with God,” a Beijing pastor told James H. Taylor III, general director of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF) and former missionary to China. Persecution has winnowed the church like a threshing machine, separating committed believers from opportunists.

Today, the church continues to experience rapid growth. But it also faces limited freedoms and internal dissension.

Miraculous Manifestations

One of the main factors nourishing church growth in the midst of difficulty and persecution has been manifestations of the power of God. “When there was no hope from a human point of view, Christians in China’s house churches saw God revealing his power and overruling in the history of their day,” wrote former China missionary David H. Adeney (now professor of Christian mission, New College, Berkeley, Calif.) in China: The Church’s Long March.

And Jonathan Chao, director of the Chinese Church Research Center in Hong Kong, says, “They experienced remarkable healings and deliverance in response to their prayers. In the house-churches they grow by leaps and bounds because of the signs and the miracles.”

Chao says many Chinese Christians experience Pentecostal and charismatic manifestations. “They don’t call themselves that,” he says. “They don’t even know the terms.” He says that while in some places he has heard leaders exercise the spiritual gift of tongues, in other places it is apparently uncommon. “There is no division among them because of that,” he says.

The evidence of supernatural healing and other miracles has been a key component in the spontaneous growth of the church in many areas:

  • In Asian Report (Nov./Dec. 1986), Marjorie Baker tells the story of Hannah, a Chinese lay worker who spent 23 years in a forced labor camp. After her release, Hannah renewed her acquaintance with an elderly woman who was now blind. Eye specialists at three hospitals had turned the woman away without hope for recovery. After three days of fasting and prayer, Hannah went to the woman’s home and prayed for her healing. Her sight was miraculously restored, and as a result her family and some 30 others in the village were baptized.
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  • According to Chao, in 1976 a Christian man in charge of security at a coal mine felt the Spirit prompting him to pull the alarm—even though there had been no signs that disaster was about to strike. When the men assembled on the surface, they thought a mistake had been made—until moments later when the earth rumbled and a large section of the mine collapsed. Some 400 miners turned to Christ after the Lord intervened miraculously to spare their lives.
  • Chao also tells of a young woman on her way home from an evening prayer meeting who was accosted by three would-be rapists. She dropped to her knees to pray, and the attackers froze. When she opened her eyes, she found they were unable to move. Hurrying back to the prayer meeting, she returned with several elders to where the three still stood paralyzed. The young men were ready to repent and be saved when the elders prayed for their release. “As a result, a great awakening took place in that area,” Chao says.

The Impact Of Prayer

Chao believes the demonstration of God’s power that is evident in China today is largely the result of a prayer movement that began about 1970.

“It was illegal to believe or to hold meetings,” he says. “So the survivors turned to prayer. Even today the church in China is a praying church.”

Writing in Chinese Around the World (Sept. 1986), OMF’S Taylor says, “We must not underestimate the impact of prayer worldwide in the dynamic growth of the mainland Chinese church.” Taylor credits the remarkable growth of the church to the faithful perseverance of lay people. At a time when missionaries had been expelled and many pastors imprisoned, ordinary Christians took responsibility for the church.

Even today, trained leaders are in short supply, and lay people carry heavy responsibility. One layman who was released from prison in 1982 was unable to find another Christian in the vicinity of his home. He began to witness, and within three years saw 7,000 people turn to Christ.

The lay movement is still dominant in the church, says Chao. The movement is built on the church’s experience during the Cultural Revolution “when everyone suffered.” “Suffering transformed the Chinese church from a timid church to a vibrant, growing one,” he says.

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This fact is acknowledged even by government representatives, according to David Wang, executive vice-president of Asian Outreach International, Ltd. He says one official told him, “The Gang of Four [the four Chinese leaders who led the country into the Cultural Revolution] destroyed the Communist party, but they built the Christian church.”

While Christians often were purified and strengthened through the suffering they experienced, non-Christians were devastated by their experiences.

“The suffering endured by Christians in China has enabled them to draw closer to non-Christians, especially to intellectuals, who were also suffering,” says Adeney. “Certainly the suffering … prepared the hearts of many to seek true meaning to life.”

The desperate epoch of the Cultural Revolution, now denounced by the government as a near-fatal mistake, also opened the eyes of many young people to the futility of placing faith in ideology.

“Young people are disillusioned with their leaders and with the ideology of their nation,” says Taylor. “But they are seeing that Christians are dependable citizens.”

Today, order has returned to Chinese society, and the living standards of most Chinese have improved. “In spite of this fact, people are finding that in any society there is a spiritual hunger or yearning that cannot be satisfied by a political system,” says Bishop K. H. Ting, president of the China Christian Council (ccc), a body of officially recognized Christian groups, and chairman of the national committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), the government-church liaison organization.

Many people find in the message of the Christian faith the thing that can give them peace and rest,” he says.

Crossfire Among Christians

Unfortunately, while many individuals find peace, it eludes the church in China as a whole. Both inside and outside China, controversy is fed by conflicting claims and allegiances.

On one side are the so-called open churches and house churches associated with the CCC and the TSPM. On the other are independent house churches that refuse to link with those it regards as little more than agents of the Communist government.

The independent house-church movement began in the early 1950s, as institutional churches increasingly were brought under the control of the newly formed TSPM.

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“During the early 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party eventually clamped down on all existing independent religious bodies and brought them under TSPM control,” Adeney writes. “Church members had to attend political training classes in the churches, and were ordered to criticize not only themselves, but others too, at special self-criticism meetings.”

Pastors who refused to cooperate eventually were arrested and jailed. The number of churches was dramatically reduced as TSPM officials sought to eliminate denominational worship, uniting congregations of various denominations into one body. Church attendance waned, and by 1958 only 4 of Beijing’s 64 churches remained open. Shanghai s 200 churches were reduced to 23. Other major centers had only 3 or 4 churches.

With the closing of churches during the Cultural Revolution, there was no longer any need for a liaison organization between government and church, and the TSPM disappeared from view. But by the time the Revolution closed the doors of all remaining institutional churches, a secret house-church movement already was under way.

When the TSPM resurfaced at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and began once again to open church buildings in China’s major cities, the stage was set for controversy. Some pastors welcomed the opportunity to preach openly in a legall

y approved setting, even though they might face restrictions. Others rejected government registration as suspect and compromising.

What’s The Difference?

One key difference of opinion between proponents of official and independent house-churches is rooted in world view, according to Ralph Covell, academic dean and professor of world missions at Denver Theological Seminary. Many who are part of the ccc believe God is using the Communist government to accomplish his purposes. They believe the church is obliged to support and work with the government wherever it can.

On the other side are those who see the atheistic government in prophetic terms as a tool of Satan. “They believe they must keep their distance … having nothing to do with it,” says Covell.

Chao, of the Chinese Church Research Center, views the primary difference between the groups as disagreement on the issue of who is the lord of the church. “Is it Christ or the state?” he asked. Chao adds that another point of departure is whether one can preach the gospel according to the Great Commission.

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Officially, public evangelism in China may be carried out only by recognized leaders within the confines of registered buildings or meeting points approved by the TSPM. Subjects such as the Creation or the second coming of Christ are not considered appropriate sermon topics, and must be handled, if at all, with considerable care. (Proclaiming God’s role at the beginning or end of human history is contrary to basic Marxist teaching.)

TSPM officials frown on the practice of praying for healing and exorcism, and discourage the exercise of charismatic gifts. Nevertheless, some open churches report the occurrence of healings and other supernatural signs among their members.

The major open churches in the cities are controlled by the ccc and the TSPM, Chao charges. Yet, in rural areas, he says, “churches that join the TSPM conduct themselves just like those that don’t.”

At the grassroots level, believers in all of the churches are intensely evangelical, according to Asian Outreach’s Wang. Many pastors of churches associated with the TSPM preach sound, Bible-based evangelical messages, he says.

Most preachers in large churches affiliated with the TSPM were trained many years ago by mainline denominations, and today preach the kinds of messages common in those denominations in the 1950s and 1960s, according to Chao. There are few who dare to preach liberal sermons. “No one would listen to them,” Chao says.

In some cases, the differences between the groups that will and will not associate with the TSPM are no longer clear-cut. “It has become increasingly difficult to make general statements about the relationship between the two,” Covell says. “In some places, the groups are as polarized as ever. But in other places, there is a good deal of intermingling.… It depends on the local situation.”

How Many Are There?

Today, some 4,000 church buildings are open for worship, and tens of thousands of Christians meet in home meetings described by Bishop Ting as “very much a part of the CCC.” Outside the auspices of the CCC and the TSPM are Christians described by Bishop Ting as “scattered small groups.”

These “scattered small groups” are described by most evangelical China watchers as making up the majority of the Chinese church. “There are 200,000 to 300,000 independent house churches that refuse to join the TSPM,” says Chao. “This is about 95 percent of the Christian population of China.”

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Chao’s organization and other evangelical research groups based in Hong Kong are a thorn in the flesh of TSPM officials. A work report prepared at a conference last year by the standing committees of the TSPM and the ccc censured Chao’s organization and two others for “anti-China activities.”

TSPM authorities object to the aid supplied to the house churches by Chao’s organization and others outside the country. Hong Kong, the British colony adjacent to China’s Guangdong Province, serves as a base of operation for a plethora of church and parachurch groups that supply Bibles, reference books, teaching tapes, broadcast programming, and financial support for itinerant evangelists.

Such activity is viewed by top TSPM leaders as foreign interference and a violation of the movement’s principles of self-support, self-government, and self-propagation. Evangelical groups outside of China, however, say most Chinese Christians do not have access to resources produced within China, and are eager to get whatever resources may be available from any source.

After nearly 40 years of careful regulation of foreign contacts with the Chinese church, Bishop Ting says Christianity has lived down its reputation as a foreign religion. He believes this has contributed to the growth of the Chinese church.

And On The Left…

Some evangelicals, however, believe that today China’s officially recognized church lags behind its own government in openness to the resources available from the outside world.

“China observers say that Bishop Ting in his public pronouncements seems to be more to the left of government policy than secular officials in his reluctance for Chinese to be exposed to foreign influence,” says David Aikman, former China bureau chief for Time magazine.

Aikman says that while the TSPM discourages Christians from listening to Christian broadcasting from outside the country, secular leaders do not seem to care if people listen to foreign broadcasts. He says the attitudes of secular officials toward Christians vary, but that at the politboro level, the approach to Christianity in recent years has been “extraordinarily undogmatic and pragmatic.”

“Chinese Communists are not eager to convert all Chinese religious people to atheism,” Bishop Ting says. “What concerns them most is to unite the people.” Nevertheless, he says, over-zealous local officials who do not understand China’s policy toward religious freedom constitute a major problem for the church.

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Many evangelical China watchers agree with his assessment. Some add that officials associated with the TSPM are sometimes part of the problem, and that at times they have helped security personnel apprehend uncooperative Christians.

Many, if not most, of the pastors and Christian workers who were imprisoned before and during the Cultural Revolution have now been released. However, other Christians arrested within the last few years are still being held.

“An unceasing problem is the persecution of itinerant evangelists,” says Chao. “Thirty-nine evangelists from five counties were in prison six months ago. Now there are 17, and they have been in prison for two to four years.”

Another serious problem faced by the church is the scarcity of trained leaders. The rapid growth of the church has outstripped its ability to disciple its converts. “What do you do when 400 miners join the church in one day?” asked Chao. “You have instant churches. Now how do you pastor them?”

“During the 1950s and 1960s, there was a period when we couldn’t train leaders,” says Bishop Ting. “Our main job now is to try to produce the future leaders of the church.” In the last six years, 300 pastors have been ordained. Some 500 students now attend ten two-and four-year seminaries. In addition, 40,000 lay leaders receive quarterly correspondence material developed by the CCC.

Some independent house-church organizations have developed ministry training institutes and seminars, many of which, because they are not official functions of a recognized church, are held secretly. One well-organized group that fields 400 full-time evangelists now maintains seven short-term training programs called Seminaries of the Field.

Sharon E. Mumper is associate director of Evangelical Missions Information Service in Wheaton, Illinois. She has been writing about the church in China for several years and has visited that country three times.

Q: Is China’S Bishop Ting Courting American Evangelicals?

A: Yes, he is, say evangelical China watchers like author David Adeney, who believes Bishop Ting’s Three-Self Patriotic Movement needs the support of evangelical churches outside China. “They want to be able to demonstrate there is no doctrinal reason why their organization should not be accepted as the unifying force in Chinese Christianity,” he says. But he warns that full acceptance of the government-authorized group would make it easier for the government to pressure unauthorized house churches.

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Evangelicals sympathetic to the independent house-church movement say the government-recognized groups seek to influence Western Christians by inviting them to attend carefully orchestrated China tours and Christian conferences. Bishop Ting and other approved leaders write magazine articles and go on speaking tours of Western countries. A good communicator, Bishop Ting speaks the language of evangelicals. The question is whether he is in China what he appears to be to outside observers.

“Bishop Ting’s public theology has become increasingly evangelical and conservative,” says Time correspondent David Aikman. Bishop Ting’s early theological writings identified the Communist revolution with biblical redemption. But Aikman says the bishop’s theology has changed as Communist party leaders have come to see that evangelicals play a major role in forming American opinion about events in China.

Q: Do The Government-Authorized China Christian Council And Three-Self Patriotic Movement Really Represent All The Christians In China?

A: Neither the ccc nor the TSPM is a church. They do, however, represent the churches with which they are associated, totaling approximately four million baptized believers.

There are churches in large cities that are controlled and directed by ccc and TSPM. But in the countryside, some churches that have joined the organization pay their dues, but do their own thing. Not surprisingly, those who sympathize with the house-church movement say that most of China’s Christians may be found in churches outside the purview of the TSPM and the CCC.

Q: Are Official Reports Of The Number Of Christians In China Grossly Underestimated?

A: Bishop Ting reckons that his estimate of close to four million baptized Protestants may be conservative. House-church observers say it is absurd. Figures most frequently floated by evangelicals sympathetic to the house-church movement hover between 30 and 50 million. Bishop Ting brands such estimates as “not true.”

In statistics released at the beginning of the year, world church statistician David Barrett said surveys indicate China has a total of 81,600 worship centers with 21,500,000 baptized adult believers and a total Christian community of 52,152, 000.

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China watcher David Wang believes Bishop Ting cannot reveal the true size of the church in China, because “the government would have less confidence in the TSPM, because they are not controlling that many.”

Leadership training is an important ingredient in the fight against the heresies that have sprung up in the absence of Bibles and other Christian resources. Many, if not most, Bibles were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. But some 2.1 million Bibles have been printed in China in the last six years, according to a TSPM report. More than a million others have been carried into China by visitors, according to Chao. And nearly a million were deposited on China’s shores in a daring and controversial sea mission by Open Doors with Brother Andrew.

If there are at least 50 million Christians in China, as many evangelical estimates claim, then most Christians do not have a Bible. Many would not even have access to one.

Pastors who came blinking out of the dark night of prison into the brightness of a new China in the late 1970s and early 1980s were thrilled to see what God had done. Nevertheless, their most challenging years may lie ahead.

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