Tony Lambert OMF International

The new church shimmered in the heat, an unlikely neo-baroque structure painted pink and white. It occupies a prime site opposite the main market where women in sarongs sell mangoes, pineapples and all the exotic produce of this tropical paradise. Earlier this year I was visiting a town in southern China on the banks of the Mekong River, just 20 miles from the Burma border. 

The elder of this church explained how American Presbyterians had brought the gospel to this remote area some 70 years ago. They had struggled to make inroads against entrenched Buddhism and animism. Then came the catastrophe of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The church dwindled to just a handful of faithful souls. Then in the early eighties as China opened up again to the outside world they began to meet in homes. They numbered about 20 believers. Over the last 20 years vigorous personal evangelism has seen an explosion of the number of Christians in the town and surrounding villages to over 2,000. At the old brick-built church on the riverbank there were about 1,000 attending the Sunday service. As this church was too small they had obtained permission from the authorities to build a new church opposite the market. However, they were only allowed to use it on one Sunday. The authorities changed their minds and insisted the Christians, who had already given sacrificially to build the church, should also pay an exorbitant tax. So the gleaming building remains unused, under lock and key until the dispute with officialdom is settled.

The elder told me: ‘Please ask people in your country to pray that we can gain entry to our church.’ 

This story symbolises the contradictions and tensions in this amazing country. On the one hand there is often staggering church growth and lively witness and evangelism, which would be the envy of most pastors in Britain, but on the other there is continuing harassment and even persecution. 

According to this year’s official Chinese government statistics there are now 15 million adult, registered Protestants in China. Yet when the Communists took power in 1949 there were only 700,000 Protestants. Twenty years later after savage persecution, numbers had dipped even further. All the growth has taken place over the last 25-30 years. This means, on government admission, that the number of believers has grown at least twenty-fold over that period. These figures do not include vast numbers of unregistered house-church Christians. Some of their networks are very extensive with thousands of meetings nationwide and a detailed system of church leadership involving hundreds of pastors, elders, evangelists and systematic, if clandestine, Bible training. 

Signs of vigorous evangelical life and witness are to be found on every side. Believers flock to huge Sunday services in both the countryside and the cities, where congregations of over 1000 are commonplace. The preaching of God’s Word is generally Biblical, and sermons rarely last under an hour. 

Certain leaders in the State church are currently seeking to force an unbiblical, liberal theology on pastors and on the many theological students in the twenty officially-recognised Bible seminaries. Justification by faith and the uniqueness of Christ as the only way of salvation are under attack.  However in many areas this politicised campaign, which has the backing of high officials in the Communist Party, is being stoutly resisted. In Wenzhou on the southeast China coast, one young church leader pointed to a biography of Martin Luther in Chinese in the church book-room. ‘That’s the theology we like here!’ he told me unashamedly. Wenzhou is a centre of revival and evangelism. At least 10% of the population are openly registered as believers. The real figure is much higher, as there are also many unregistered house-churches. These send out many evangelists, often young men who are active in business, to remote areas of the country, such as Tibet and also to the Muslims of the north-west. 

Evangelicals who choose to work within the State-registered churches have to accept certain Communist Party restrictions. Active evangelism and Sunday School work among young people and children under 18  is forbidden, although some churches quietly hold ‘crèches’ for the children while the adults attend Sunday worship. Restrictions vary widely. Sometimes police raid house-churches and fine everybody large sums which they can ill-afford. In extreme cases, Christians (generally pastors and evangelists) are beaten up and sentenced to prison. In general, coastal areas and cities frequented by foreign tourists and businessmen have greater freedom. In some northern and interior provinces there is still quite fierce repression of house-church meetings. 

Compared to the days of Mao there is now generally a great deal of religious freedom. But compared to what we are used to in the West, China still has a long way to go. The more Maoist officials in the Party regard the growth of the church with fear and suspicion. They dismiss it as ‘Christianity Fever’, ignoring the fact that whereas the gospel first spread among the peasants, now it is attracting many intellectuals and students. However, Christianity is legally registered, thousands of churches are open and, while street evangelism is forbidden, gossiping the gospel even to strangers is commonplace. In these respects, the churches in China have far more liberty than many churches in Muslim lands. 

The strengths of the Chinese churches are many. There is a deep spirituality, especially among the elderly saints who suffered decades of atheistic indoctrination and suffering for Christ in prisons and labour camps. There is a hunger for the Word of God and deep respect for the Scriptures, and a zeal for evangelism and witness. There are also weaknesses such as a lack of theological training, which results in the spread of strange cults (the most bizarre and at present most dangerous is ‘Lightning from the East’ which targets evangelical churches and preaches a female Messiah.)  Some 28 million Bibles and New Testaments have been printed legally in China but there is still a dearth of most other Christian literature. There is also a tendency to legalism in some churches. 

About 500,000 new converts are baptised annually and added to the registered churches. Probably more are added to the house-churches. At this rate of growth China will soon overtake the United States (if it has not done so already) to become the country with the largest evangelical constituency. In this we see the sovereign grace of God at work. It is easy to become overly pessimistic about the future of the gospel if we only focus on the general state of affairs in our own country. The truly remarkable growth and revival of the church in modern China in a society that only recently emerged from total atheistic darkness under Mao is a beacon of encouragement to the power of the gospel. The total closure of all churches and eradication of all institutional religion in China miserably failed to destroy the gospel of Christ. God is not mocked!

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