A Church in China

David Aikman

Independent, But Not Underground

“Sauna City” is a commercial building in the Asian Games district of Beijing that is only a few years old but already is beginning to look distinctly shabby. The main entrance to the building has a sign over it, “Night Club,” and there are advertisements for various kinds of bath-house activity; it doesn’t look like the most salubrious location in the Chinese capital. But as a visitor approaches the right-hand-side front entrance, his attention is captured by a most unexpected sound wafting down from somewhere above: Christian hymn singing.

On the building’s fifth floor, the mystery is revealed. Occupying seats with the fold-down minidesks often found in college classrooms are about two hundred people singing Christian hymns with all their hearts. Most of the songs are unfamiliar Chinese melodies, but suddenly “Amazing Grace” in Chinese pops up.

A glance around shows even more interesting sights. The congregation is almost all young, professional-looking, smartly-dressed, and attentive. There’s a portable pulpit in the front of the room, and on the right-hand side in the L-shaped section up front something quite unexpected, a twelve-member male and female choir in pink and black robes that would not be out of place in a Presbyterian church in Peoria. The service proceeds with a slide show, to the accompaniment of contemporary Christian music, revealing the highlights of the year just passed: a mission outreach to ethnic Koreans, a women’s retreat, a men’s retreat, a Thanksgiving celebration, several pictures of church baptisms—the sprinkling kind, not immersion—in short, a church year that would be considered entirely normal anywhere in the U.S.

Only, there is nothing “normal” about this church. It is, in fact, a Chinese urban house church. Unlike house churches made typical in many books and articles about Christianity in China, this one is not underground at all. In fact, it is quite open—welcome to Zion Church, a six-month-old “independent” church in the capital city of China that occupies a strange legal no-man’s-land. It is not officially registered with China’s official Protestant umbrella body, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, but it is not technically “illegal” either. “The government is not very well prepared,” says this morning’s preacher, Wang Dong, who completed a three-year theological training at a Chinese seminary in Los Angeles. “They don’t quite know how to cope with us.”

Indeed they don’t. The church’s founding pastor, Rev. Ezra Jin (the Chinese name for his ethnic Korean name, Kim), is a graduate from the Nanjing Theological Seminary, China’s premier “official” Protestant seminary, and of five years of graduate studies at California’s Fuller Theological Seminary. In fact, he was ordained by the TSPM and is thus fully qualified to be a TSPM pastor in one of China’s 13,000 or so “open”—i.e. registered and legal—Protestant churches. But when he returned from California he decided he didn’t want to be part of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy that is heavily politicized and totally opposed to evangelism outside of church property. So he founded “Zion Church” and set about organizing it much as any independent pastor might organize a start-up church in the U.S.

Visitors to the church are asked to provide e-mail and phone contacts and to indicate whether they belong to any other church body and whether they wish to be involved in the activities of the church. During a portion of the service, their names are read out, and they are asked to stand up and be identified. Then they are provided with a Gospel tract in Chinese in exactly the same solicitous manner that a newcomer to an American church might be. After the service, there is a newcomers’ meeting with the pastor over coffee. Everything is done to make them feel welcome and appreciated, and, indeed, encouraged to bring their friends next time around.

“The Christian movement in China has now become an urban movement,” explains Wang Dong. “We believe that Beijing will provide the model for urban churches in the rest of China and we hope our church becomes the model for Beijing.”

He elaborates, “I believe a big Christian change is coming over China. In 2008 because of the Olympics, all kinds of foreign influences will be coming into China, both good and bad. Things will not be the same in China after 2008. Perhaps if the Chinese government had known what would come into the country, they wouldn’t have competed so hard for the Olympics.”

During his well-prepared and stimulating 25-minute sermon, his tone was equally self-confident and optimistic. “Jiang Qing [Mao Zedong’s wife who was arrested in 1976 and later committed suicide] said [in 1975] that Christianity in China had already been put into a museum and there were no more believers. But now China is one of the biggest Christian countries in the world. There are about 70 million believers.” At this the congregation tittered, apparently unaware of this figure. Wang also quoted a recent poem by China’s Premier Wen Jiabao,

As I look up into the starry expanse
It is so vast and so profound
That infinite truth
Makes me struggle to seek and follow it.

“In light of what God has done in China,” Wang went on in his sermon, “can you say that God cannot change our church, change me, change my husband?” He then answered his own rhetorical question. “2008 will inevitably be a different kind of year,” he said. “The environment will change, you will change, the church will change, China will change.”

That’s a mighty bold prediction, but it’s not at all extreme. A senior party official told me that the country’s leadership understood that Christianity was good for China, but they still didn’t quite know how to cope with it. “China is brittle right now,” he said. “There is a growing gap between rich and poor, and a lot of corruption.” In his view, in fact, from a strictly utilitarian perspective, Christianity ought to be encouraged within the country.

What is clear is that China’s Christian community, which only a decade ago was overwhelmingly rural in composition, is now increasingly urban. A Chinese house church pastor in Beijing said that the city now had at least 1,200 independent congregations, most of them quite small and hidden, but a few, like Zion Church, open and public. And bold.

Stay tuned.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

3 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Faiths and Worldviews, Global Culture, Wed 16 Jan 2008