IN CHINA, PEWS ARE PACKED

By Robert Marquand

Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

12/24/2003

(XIAMEN, CHINA) China first Protestant church is still located on a

winding back alley of fish markets and fruit stalls in this old port

city.

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’s 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 voidin

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 varies 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 over flowing. 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.

Typical of what Ji objects to is a 1998 policy (recently given new

prominence) known as the Theological Construction Campaign. It is

promulgated in leading Chinese seminaries - and can be summed up by what are known as the Four Againsts: the Bible is not the revealed

Word, Jesus was not born of a virgin, the resurrection is a myth, and

there is no second coming. Along with this view is a strong push

among official Protestant church leaders to eradicate the concept of

individual salvation. To the essentially conservative Chinese

Protestant mind, such ideas are an effort to de-Christianize

Christianity, says one Guangdong pastor.

Such liberal views do not yet predominate in official churches,

especially in rural areas. But what separates Christians in China runs

far deeper, and is reflected by fears on both sides. In numerous

interviews, official church pastors said they couldn’t currently engage home-church brothers and sisters (as they are known to each other) due to legal constraints.

Official clergy say that home-church Christians simply cannot forget

the Cultural Revolution period and its attendant horrors. Yet from the

home-church view, to blame the Cultural Revolution for all problems, and to assume that all is forgiven, is too easy and too risky. In their memory, Protestants underwent more than a 10-year persecution - but they have been targeted since 1951. Land was taken, purges and self-correction campaigns were conducted, patriotic loyalty tests were prescribed, overseas support was cut, churches were closed, and pastors were demonized as imperialists or parasites. Moreover, they point out that evangelical Protestants are still arrested, and that campaigns (like the new liberal theology) are still powerful in official circles.