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Whispers of truth from China

Jinling Three Self Church in Shanghai has a worship service that is Western in style: A choir in white robes sings, The Lord’s Prayer is rumbled by all and a sermon is preached. This Sunday, the preacher is an overseas Chinese professor from Canada, who has lectured at Nanjing Theological Seminary. His message, “We overseas Chinese love China and support your government”, is a racist diatribe. He doesn’t mention Christ once, and God only twice. A 75-year-old house church leader in the southern city of Kunming finds “bags and bags” of Christian literature at his doorstep. He says if it were good literature, he would not mind so much. “It’s dreadful stuff, written by American prosperity gospel preachers, which is so unhelpful in a Chinese context right now.” None of the deliverers have the courage to ring his doorbell. They find their contacts unwilling to receive their cargo and they don’t want to return home without off-loading it. This is what he does with it: “If anyone is short on fuel for their fire, I give them the books. Otherwise I have to lug them onto a bus and go outside the city, and then burn them myself.” He would love to receive good Christian literature. There is a great shortage of it. In a village about 70 kilometres outside Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, two women built a church for 20,000 yuan. To compare, the congregational offering each Sunday comes to 20 yuan. They were forced to register it with the Three Self or face its destruction. “We are a long way from any supervision, so we do what we like,” one said. They go to the local hospital and find out whom the doctors have given up on. They visit these people and ask God if it is His will to heal the terminal cases. “If we hear God saying ‘yes’ then we tell the person they will live if they let us pray for them, but after they are healed they must convert to Christ and bring their family to church,” said one. Over a year they prayed for 20 such cases. All were healed, mostly of cancer, and the church is now 200 strong where there were no believers before. In a large industrial city is an official church. Western-built, the old wooden church had been converted into a school during the Cultural Revolution. In 1999, it was restored as a church. Soon there was a thriving congregation of 800, with the preaching done by students from a nearby seminary. However, a Three Self leader was cutting a deal with the Religious Affairs Bureau chief to sell the property to developers. The leader was up front about it, saying, “This is a prime business location. We will take the money and build a better church elsewhere.” No one trusted him since he had done the same thing two years earlier in another location. That congregation still did not have a building, and he was driving a nice car after the sale of the property. Now the police were called in. The students bolted the doors and there was angry yelling and shouting. The police were supposed to storm the building. After a three-month stalemate, they allowed the church to be developed. The pastor of a Three Self church of 2,000 in a large coastal town is only 30 years old. His challenge was to incorporate a 90-member house church that was being forcibly merged with his congregation. He was required to make weekly reports on them to his overlords who passed them on to the Religious Affairs Bureau. He made a cursory report that they were all attending the church, but kept them together for a Bible study at the church. At first he presided, but then appointed their pastor to lead them. While visiting his parents, he preached in a house church. Word got back to a member of the local Christian Council, and he was told to answer some questions as to his conduct. The easy way out was to say he was not aware the meeting was unregistered. The tough way was to be honest and say that he reserved the right to preach anywhere God called him. The day of his meeting his three-year-old was sick, and his wife implored him not to make trouble or they could lose their allowance. His Bible passage that morning was Ezekiel 3:4-9, “I am sending you to the people of Israel . . . but they won’t listen to you . . . They are hard hearted and stubborn . . . I have made you as hard as rock . . . So don’t be afraid of them or fear their angry looks.” After confirming he had preached in an unregistered meeting, he was asked, “Do you repent of what you did?” He replied, “I cannot repent to taking any opportunity to teach truth and oppose heresy.” They seemed to like that. But one member asked, “Do you support those in the house churches?” He chose his words carefully: “People must meet to worship God where there are no churches reopened yet.” The member seized his opportunity: “Do you oppose the existence of house churches where the Three Self already has a presence then?” He was impaled. If he said, “I oppose them”, then he would deny his principles. If he said, “I do not oppose them”, he would be censured and possibly lose his job. He said in a conciliatory tone, “I think the house churches need the help of the Three Self. They need our theological guidance, and it would be better to preserve links with them than oppose them, which only serves to drive them away from our influence.” After letting him sweat for four months, he was told, “Your monthly salary has been halved to 300 yuan, and you must accept a new pastor over you. He is younger than you, but more trustworthy.” Now he can only preach once a month, and will never – as long as the present conditions hold – be the sole pastor of a Three Self church again. He said, “I lie awake at night tormented by one wish, that I had lied to that Council and kept my job. I stood up for the truth, but it got me nowhere. Now I wonder if God is really there at all.” The sentencing of six Protestant house church leaders to hard labour last December and the arrest of six more leaders of the Roman Catholic underground church are not common, but police beatings of evangelists and illegal actions of police are. More than 30 leaders were arrested in Henan province in August 1999. Although most were released after paying fines of up to 10,000 yuan ($1,200 US), six leaders were sentenced to one, two or three years hard labour. Said a Fuchou-based leader, “Out of every 50 arrests I hear of, barely two or three get hard labour, but most get a severe beating in jail. The police are a law unto themselves.” The 1999 crackdown on the indigenous religious group Falun Gong has the house church leaders very uneasy. An immediate consequence is greater surveillance of religious Web sites. A new Chinese Christian Web site was closed down. Falun Gong is organized primarily by e-mail. Another consequence is that the definition of a “cult” is becoming more elastic, with local officials often erroneously thinking that there is no difference between the network-type house churches and Falun Gong.

 – Compass Direct

A week in the life of a Chinese seminary student The official Protestant church of China, the Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), has over 12 million members but only 1,500 clergy. About 1,300 pastors are being trained in four-year courses at 18 seminaries across the country. When they graduate, they will head straight for the pastorate where many will be responsible for large congregations. Three Self pastors must preach, lead worship and administer the church. Everything at seminary is designed to give students competence in these three areas. Most students are in their 20s. One 21-year-old described a typical week at seminary. Monday – Friday: 5:30 a.m. Personal Bible study 6:30 a.m. Prayers and breakfast 8:00 a.m. Lectures 12:00 p.m. Lunch 2:00 p.m. Lectures 6:00 p.m. Evening meal 6:30 p.m. Prayers, followed by organ practice because we must all learn to lead worship and singing. Most students don’t attend house churches. The house churches don’t trust seminary students. I wish I could learn Greek or Hebrew. They only teach those subjects at Nanjing seminary. There are no teachers here who can teach it. One lecturer lent me his theology textbook, the one he teaches from, and I managed to understand a lot of the words. It was called Systematic Theology by Augustus Hopkins Strong. My lecturer said the book was from the last century, and that he does not speak English very well. He has no foreign contacts that can send him more recent theological works. On Thursday, I met my uncle for lunch. He is a Three Self pastor in a nearby city. He is very corrupt, however. He earns over 1000 yuan per month, lives in a big apartment, and I know he helps himself to a portion of foreign donations, which enables him to run a taxi business on the side. He also informs on house churches, forcing them to merge with Three Self congregations. Most of us students pray for such people. We ask God to judge them. We also ask that we will not be tempted to follow them. They give the Three Self a bad reputation, and faithful people are filled with disgust for their pastors – a situation that cannot glorify Christ. Fortunately, they are the minority. On Friday, Bishop Ding visited the seminary. He tells us not to be afraid to say that Jesus did not rise physically from the dead. I heard later he was annoyed that none of his works were on sale at the bookshop. Our teachers are evangelical and don’t like Ding’s liberal theology, so they tell us quietly to make no fuss and just forget his teaching. We can access some of the books in the seminary library on weekends. Weekdays they are all locked up. The foreigners are generous in sending us English-language theology books, but none of us students are advanced enough to read them. The Chinese ones are very old. On Saturday, I must prepare my sermon for Sunday. We are sent out to different churches each weekend to preach. I also finished learning John’s Gospel by heart. Now I can recite all four Gospels, 40 Psalms and Genesis chapters one to three. I will start to learn Deuteronomy next. You never know when your Bible may be taken away in China. On Sunday, I preached to a packed church three times. It’s a small one, only 300, and mostly peasants. I had to travel the night before on a bus. I preached a sermon I heard from another preacher in my city about living for Jesus. Living for Jesus involves humility, prayer and dying to self. We have to preach for at least an hour or the people feel we are not really trying. I return to the seminary ready for another week of study and ministry. I cannot wait to have my own church, but I will not make that an idol. If God wants me to work with the house churches, I will go, though that will be a harder call.  – Compass Direct

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Last modified May 5, 2000.

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