IN CHINA, PEWS ARE PACKED

By Robert Marquand

Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

12/24/2003

(XIAMEN, CHINA) China’s first Protestant church is still located on a winding back alley of fish markets and fruit stalls in this old port city. A crest atop the brick colonial structure reads 1848.

Yet the Xinjie Church here is hardly a museum piece. Every Sunday it literally overflows with more than 2,000 attendees during its two regular services, with more people coming during the Christmas season.

This church - with an alter flanked by blinking conifers - and the four other government-sanctioned churches nearby, are home to rising numbers

of worshipers. Christianity - in both the official and unofficial churches - is again

gaining momentum in China, and is a source of some consternation for the party leadership. Being Christian; is fashionable, with young people sporting crosses as a mild form of dissent, and others feeling the faith has a certain international cachet. But something more is at work. In many interviews, congregants say the deity they worship  communicates, and has power in their lives, especially now when China

is going through immense, jarring economic changes that upset older social contracts.

People in China have a spiritual hunger, very much so, says an official church pastor in Xiamen, and there is a need for that to be filled. I think this is the main reason why we continue to have larger services.;

Congregations in China comprise all ages, with younger people popping up during the service to take cellphone calls outside - this being Asia.  Last Sunday, several Xiamen churches held a Christmas party, notable because preaching took place. The gathering at an ocean-side exhibition center was so large that 300 people were turned away. In Quanzhou, north of Xiamen, church members tore down an 800-seat edifice, and have nearly finished a 2,500-seat $1.6 million new church which is 90 percent financed by the 3,000 congregants there.

Along the easy-going southeast coast, Protestant worshipers pay little attention to China Shanghai-based official church hierarchy. They hold Bible study groups, have choir rehearsals, and gather in volunteer groups. We have to join the [official] church, but then we do and say what we want, says a local pastor. We preach the living God. Still, what is happening around Xiamen is a far cry from the way Ji Lu

worships in Beijing, the center of political power. Mr. Ji helps lead prayers in an unofficial church - where 20 people gather in a room so small that when they share tea and cakes afterward, all must stand.

Ji is one of an estimated 30 to 60 million unregistered; Christian believers. His sect is made up of nearly a hundred other small groups around Beijing - part of a range of illegal evangelical sects in China, some extremely devout, who say the church fills a \spiritual void in their lives.

The rising evangelical movement in China is creating a complex and dynamic set of tensions, as individual longings challenge a state operating for a half century on principles of collective social order.

Not only are there renewed government efforts to curb Christian churches, policies to stop Sunday schools, restrictions on the movement of pastors from one city to another, attempts to dilute theological content, and efforts to stymie new church applications with red tape, but tensions and suspicions have also been growing between official and unofficial home church; Christians as well.

One expert says the home church-official church split is more serious in the long term than Beijing scattered, stop-and-start efforts to rein in religion. A lot of Chinese are becoming Christians, argues the US-trained theologian. But the biggest problem is between unregistered and registered churches. There is a lot of antipathy between the two, a lot of water under the bridge.

Christianity in China began to flourish after the Opium Wars, as European and American missionaries set out for the Orient. ;In 1842, the Gospel of God was disseminated in Xiamen, according to the Xinjie Church council here. Xiamen is one of the original five treaty ports negotiated with China imperial court. Churches grew rapidly throughout China, and have been regarded by officialdom and locals as a mixed blessing ever since.

When the communists consolidated power in 1949 under Chairman Mao Zedong, religion was reorganized. Missionaries were largely driven out.

Catholics, Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants, and Taoists were brought under government control, and they remain the five officially sanctioned religions in China today. Protestants found themselves gathered under one roof called the Three Self Patriotic Movement; - whose purpose was to bring the Gospels into the service of the state.

According to the official Xinjie church records, In 1966, owing to the Great Cultural Revolution, church services came to a halt. This situation lasted 13 years. Since the 1980s, as China liberalized, churches were again allowed to open. But a burst of religious expression brought a series of tighter controls whose actual enforcement has varied from province to province - with urban areas such as Beijing and Shanghai drawing more oversight and intervention than rural China and the south.

Churches in the city of Wenzhou last year conducted a campaign of civil disobedience in response to official efforts to stop the teaching of Sunday School. Evangelicals in Henan Province have been targeted, as have home-church prayer leaders in Shanghai, who have been sent to labor camps in recent months. Church building is constricted. A government official in Fujian says one reason for so many home churches is that official services are overflowing. It is very difficult to

register any new churches right now, says the official. There has always been a policy not to allow more churches, but now it is being enforced. The government wants to stop the evangelical growth.

Estimates of Chinese Christians vary widely. The official figure is 15-20 million unregistered, 1.8 million registered. Some Christians with access to unpublished figures in Beijing say the number is 85 million unregistered, 5 million registered. A recent graduate of Nanjing Theological Academy, considered the center of official Protestantism, gives a figure of 60 million. Jason Kindopp, a visiting scholar at George Washington University says the figure is at least; 30 million, and possibly 60 million.

In some ways, the efforts of the government in recent years has been to offer greater support to official churches - while making efforts to undermine the evangelical fervor found in home churches.

For the majority of Christians in home churches, the basic question is how or whether to worship in an official church, which they see as woefully compromised by state rules. Ji, the home-church believer in Beijing, for example, jokes about one leading theological institute as a place where first-year students believe in God. By the second year, they are merely good men.; By the third year you become a ghost who no longer believes in grace or being saved. But you are a ghost with a car, a salary, and a job.

END