Cycles of Persecution and Calm

Believers in Zhejiang gather for the funeral of a church member in the 1990s.

The 1990s commenced with the growth of Christianity in Zhejiang continuing full steam ahead. With an estimated three million Evangelical believers in the province at the start of the decade, the Chinese government was deeply alarmed, especially when the churches started to send evangelistic teams to other parts of the country.

In a bid to counteract the expanding influence of the Zhejiang Church, the authorities took a variety of approaches, and the 1990s was characterized by fluctuating periods of intense persecution, followed by times of calm. Christians learned to be watchful, discerning the latest season and adjusting their behavior accordingly.

Churches in Wenzhou City had enjoyed a relatively trouble-free existence since the mid-1980s, and had used the peaceful period to construct hundreds of new church buildings, some with elaborate designs resembling European cathedrals. Things were about to drastically change, however, and by the end of the decade hundreds of those same buildings had been bulldozed to the ground by an angry government determined to keep the lid on Christianity.

The tide in Wenzhou unexpectedly turned in September 1991, during a large baptismal service attended by 2,000 Christians from several unregistered house churches. Witnesses said that during the meeting,

"A large band of Public Security officers suddenly stormed into the church and began firing pistols into the air. Some officers ran onto the platform and began beating the pastors who were conducting the service. Several pastors were arrested and taken to a detention center.

House church Christians were surprised and angered by the unprovoked attack, which was conducted without search or arrest warrants. A large group of local Christians went to the Wenzhou Public Security Bureau to protest the assaults and arrests, but authorities there denied any knowledge of the incident.... Several who were injured in the assault were left in poor condition."1

Revival comes to the Three-Self

Worshippers at the Ningbo Three-Self Church. [RCMI]

In the 1990s a new dynamic began to take place in Zhejiang, which caught both the authorities and many China Church watchers by surprise. The government had expended much time and energy trying to induce Christians to submit to the authority of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and many hundreds of congregations had registered. If the government assumed that the spiritual life and vitality of those churches would be contained, it was mistaken. The King of Kings refused to allow His blessings to be confined to just one type of believers in Zhejiang, and the wind of the Holy Spirit also began to blow powerfully on the Three-Self churches in the province. Revival broke out in many registered churches, accompanied by countless healings and other miracles, and the salvation of hundreds of thousands of people.

The Three-Self Church had notoriously reported low figures in Zhejiang—perhaps not wanting to alert government officials in Beijing to the true size and influence of the Church—but even those official sources revealed that the number of adult, baptized Three-Self church members in the province grew markedly from 900,000 in 1990,2 to 1.2 million in 1994,3 and 1.3 million in 1997.4

In addition, the Catholic churches in Zhejiang also grew at a startling rate. The previous reliable survey of Catholics in the province was conducted way back in 1937, showing a total of 100,236 believers in Zhejiang.5 Finally, after a gap of more than half a century, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated that Catholics in the province had grown to 700,000 by 1992.6

Revival comes to the Little Flock

The Little Flock was founded by Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng). It expanded into Zhejiang in the 1930s and flourished, especially in northern parts of the province. The official name for this church movement is the Local Church, but many Christians came to call it 'the Little Flock' as its congregations used a hymnbook called 'Hymns for the Little Flock'.

The government was confused as to why the movement exhibited such strength and unity among its members, and in 1995 a scholar from the Center for Ethnological Studies was dispatched to Huzhou Prefecture in a bid to understand the phenomenon. His report was most revealing:

"Between 1982 and 1989 the number of Christians in the Huzhou region increased six-fold to about 25,000.... We visited villages inhabited by the Little Flock.... They admit they are not as well educated as Christians in southern Zhejiang, where Christianity has a history of over a century compared to only ten years in their district. But 'grace grows from suffering', and they proudly told us that their spiritual development is higher than those living in materially better-off regions. In all simplicity they believe in the power of prayer and that one must 'in all things pray'.

While praying, they experience the filling of the Spirit who guides their every word and action. In order that someone is healed, several (and sometimes dozens) of villagers will assemble for days of prayer and fasting....

Originally, the Little Flock in Huzhou was part of the TSPM, but in 1985, because of many differences, they decided to separate. Today their suspicions and lack of trust in the Three-Self are shown by their belief that Jesus is the Head of the Church, not any man. The Church should not be led by the government, but the TSPM churches...are arrogant, ignorant of the Scriptures, and not rigorous enough in morality....

In Xiaoshan City near Hangzhou there are 80,000 Christians, of whom 70,000 belong to the Little Flock. They believe their patriotism should be shown in their work-places and not in church, so they refuse to join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement."7

With such a strong foundation in the Scriptures and zeal for God's work, it's not surprising that believers from the Little Flock congregations in Zhejiang began to send missionaries to unreached areas of China. Starting in January 1991, many members of the Little Flock felt that the return of Christ was imminent. As a result,

"After earnest prayer, several went to Guangxi and Hunan provinces to preach. Soon they returned with the good news that several dozen people had been converted. This electrified dozens of house churches in Xiaoshan who caught the vision to evangelize. In each church between six and several dozen young Christian men were sent out. Most were farmers, and the mainstay of their families, but they gladly sacrificed their work-time and income to preach the gospel. They set off in pairs in March 1991 for Hunan, Shandong, Jiangsu, Sichuan and other places all over China. Those left at home were fully behind the young evangelists. They set up 24-hour prayer chains with 12 bands of prayer warriors each praying for two hours every day."8

The success of the Little Flock missionaries was extraordinary. A report from Xiaoshan in May 1991 said:

"It seemed that the brothers just had to open their mouths to speak and people would express a desire to receive Christ. One pair of preachers after just a few days reported that 300 people had turned to Christ. When the two dozen evangelists from one house church returned, they reported that 1,300 people had received salvation. This was the power of God, as how else could so few cause more than 1,000 people to believe?

Young evangelists from another church had never preached like this before, so when they arrived at their destination they knelt down and prayed fervently. Then they preached to the bystanders and on the first day, 40 believed. On the second day more than 200 turned to Christ....

By the end of May 1991, most of the evangelists had returned to Zhejiang. Although no direct count was made, they estimated that over 10,000 people had been saved as a result of this two-month evangelistic outreach. The house churches in Xiaoshan continued to send workers to do pastoral and follow-up work. Older, more experienced brethren were also dispatched to conduct baptisms and to oversee the establishment of churches."9

Growing Pains

Miracles continued to occur regularly throughout Zhejiang as the gospel was proclaimed in the 1990s. Unlike in some parts of the world, where only ordained ministers are expected to pray for the sick, in Zhejiang even young children preached the gospel and saw the Holy Spirit move powerfully. In a village near Hangzhou,

"An eight-year-old Christian boy was playing with his young neighbor when the latter unwittingly poked him in the eye with a sharp bamboo spike. The boy lost the sight in his left eye, and he and his family were so grief-stricken that they were, at first, unable to forgive their neighbor. However, through prayer they were filled with a spirit of forgiveness and over several weeks the boy's eyesight returned. The whole village was amazed at his unexpected recovery, and many accepted Jesus as their Savior because of this testimony."10

In another part of Zhejiang, a man with a serious heart disease had spent all of his money on medicine, but his condition had gradually worsened. One day he heard that whoever believes in Jesus Christ will have eternal life. Knowing he would soon die, by faith he asked someone to drive him to a believer's home. After hearing the gospel, he repented of his sins and surrendered his life to God.

The Christians took turns praying fervently for him throughout the night, and seven days later the man felt that God had healed him. He returned home and made his house available as a meeting place for God's people. Because of this, 90 percent of the people in that village turned to Christ, and within weeks he had 200 people meeting regularly in his home.

Despite the many evidences of God's grace and mercy being poured out among the people of Zhejiang, the Church faced many large and important challenges. The most desperate need was the lack of trained Bible teachers in their midst, which threatened to derail the revival in its tracks.

With even the government-controlled churches growing strongly, a massive shortage of trained church leaders arose throughout the province. Rural house church meetings often took place without a leader, and preachers were asked to travel around a group of villages and towns holding meetings, which believers were encouraged to attend. This chronic shortage of leaders, coupled with a low rate of literacy in the countryside and a lack of Bibles, created a toxic cocktail which resulted in many thousands of professing believers falling away from the faith. The void in solid biblical teaching also gave rise to cults and heresies. One report highlighted the seriousness of the problem:

"Simplistic and literal interpretations of the Scriptures have led to cases of women attempting to sacrifice their sons in an imitation of the Old Testament account of Abraham and Isaac. In blind faith, others have drowned as they attempted to walk on water as Jesus did.

The yearning for the Second Coming of Christ brought its share of problems. One church in Zhejiang predicted Jesus would return on April 18, 1991. Farms and crops were abandoned and animals were slaughtered and eaten.... April 18 passed, leaving the confused and disillusioned group of men and women on a hillside, gazing heavenward."11

The Storm of 1997

Before and after pictures of Wenzhou's Christ Church, one of 400 churches in the city demolished by the government in 1997. [VOM]

Incredibly, the 'registered house church' phenomenon in Wenzhou had mushroomed to such an extent that by the mid-1990s more than 2,400 congregations in the city had registered as independent churches. Some had seating capacity for several thousand people.

Indications that the government's tolerance of Christianity in Wenzhou was coming to an end surfaced in April 1996, when a house church believer in his mid-forties was arrested near Wenzhou for illegally printing Christian literature. He was beaten to death by the Public Security Bureau. Two other men were sentenced to three years in prison.12

In early 1997, Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited Wenzhou, and was apparently shocked by the enormous number of church buildings in the city, each adorned with a red cross on the roof. For a man who had first joined the Communist Party as a college student and had risen up the ranks during Mao's rule and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, such a bold display of religious faith was humiliating and intolerable.

Later that year the Religious Affairs Bureau was directed to cut down the profile of Christianity in the city. In one six-week period in November and December, more than 400 church buildings were bulldozed to the ground throughout Wenzhou. During the demolition process more than 50 pastors were arrested. The persecution quickly spread to other house churches throughout Zhejiang, with one pastor reporting:

"The angry waves attacking the Chinese Church have grown higher and higher. Since March this year we have been engulfed and the Church has entered a period of intense suffering. Many leaders have been arrested, especially in Wenzhou, Rui'an, and Yongjia (in southern Zhejiang), and in Cixi, Ninghai and Dongtou (northern Zhejiang). Some have suffered physical pain. Whole families have had to flee. Just in the town of Tangxia in Rui'an County, 32 house church leaders have been arrested. Others have fled the area.

The persecution is even worse than during the Cultural Revolution. At least then they searched homes while the head of the household was present. Now they smash down doors and ransack homes even when the owner is away. They come in police cars, sirens blaring, and surround Christians' homes as if they were robbers, arresting them as 'counter-revolutionaries'.... Please pray urgently. I am on the arrest list and have had to leave home."13

The storm of persecution slowly passed over Zhejiang Province, as the government shifted its attention to other matters. At the start of 1998, however, dozens of Christian leaders remained in prison and tens of thousands of believers in Wenzhou had seen their places of worship reduced to rubble.

Missionaries meet Resistance

The 1990s saw the first serious attempt by Zhejiang house churches to send missionaries to other parts of China and even to other countries. Wenzhou believers gladly took the lead, using their wealth and experience gained as entrepreneurs to spearhead the effort. In 1996, a church leader summarized the different stages of growth that the body of Christ in Wenzhou had gone through to reach that stage:

"The revival in the 1970s initiated the present church growth in our area. In the 1980s a lot of people gathered in houses, sometimes over 200 people in one house. As a result we started to build church buildings in each area....

This decade is characterized by evangelism and mission efforts outside of our province. Now, our church sends evangelists to other provinces such as Heilongjiang, Henan, Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan, Anhui and Jiangxi. We send our workers to these provinces every year. This year we have sent 40 and the results are extremely good. For example, in Jiangxi, 169 people were baptized....

We send our people to where pioneer work is needed. If weak churches need our help we are willing to go and help them develop. For example, in early 1995 we sent workers to Heilongjiang and pioneered 18 new churches in areas where there weren't any. But we also helped 38 existing churches. One of them had only about ten Christians to start with, but since our workers went there the congregation has grown to over 200."14

By the mid-1990s, the Wenzhou churches had sent missionaries to the ethnic minority groups living along China's borders with Myanmar and Russia, and had mission teams ministering in several foreign countries including Thailand and Vietnam.

Predictably, many of the Wenzhou missionaries experienced persecution as they took the gospel to previously unreached areas of China, but they were also surprised to encounter resistance from some of the house church Christians in other parts of the country. The massive house church networks in Henan Province, which by then numbered millions of believers, struggled to accept the Wenzhou evangelists. They differed in doctrine and practice, and even the linguistic differences between Wenzhou and the rest of China created misunderstandings.

The resistance experienced by the Wenzhou workers appears to have been primarily cultural and social. Wenzhou Christians are generally highly educated, successful at business, and well-dressed. In Henan, however, the mighty revival that had swept millions into God's kingdom was largely among poor, illiterate farmers. Although each side acknowledged one another as fellow believers in Christ, no close working relationship was formed.

Peter Xu Yongze, the founder of the large Born-Again Movement, candidly shared his unflattering impressions of Wenzhou believers at that time. He opined, "The Wenzhou Church has a lot of spiritual pride. They see themselves as the heart and soul of the Church in China, and can never accept that there are more believers in provinces like Henan and Anhui than there are in their area."15

Sister Ding Hei, a well-known evangelist with the Fangcheng house church network, also based in Henan, echoed these concerns about the Wenzhou Christians. When she was asked her thoughts on the government's demolition of hundreds of churches in Wenzhou, she replied,

"I believe this was the will of God. I have seen that most of the churches in Wenzhou are filled with pride. In 1981 I visited there for the first time, and have returned almost every year since. In the early years the Wenzhou churches experienced the Lord's blessing in a mighty way, but in recent years they have become legalistic and performance-orientated. They appear to be very open to the Lord but in reality they look down on pastors from Henan and consider themselves better than others. The leaders often point at us and say, 'You Henan leaders are uneducated. How can you come to teach us? We have been Christians for more than a century. You should come and learn from us.'

In my experience, many of the Wenzhou pastors are good men who love the Lord. The teaching in the church is good and accurate, but they receive no vision from the Lord. They have the basics correct, but they have no power. Not receiving vision from the Lord is the worst kind of suffering a Christian can experience.

Many of the Christians in Wenzhou are wealthy businessmen, so they have used their money to build expensive church buildings. I see the destruction of their church buildings as God's chance for them to get back to the basics of following Him again. The Wenzhou Church will survive, but not their buildings. If the Wenzhou believers had the same kind of suffering as we have in Henan, the growth of the gospel would double throughout China."16

Footnotes:
1. China News and Church Report (November 22, 1991).
2. China Notes (Spring and Summer 1990).
3. Amity News Service, April 1994.
4. Cited in Lambert, China's Christian Millions, p. 202.
5. "The Vincentian Missions of China," (14th Year), 1937.
6. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, 1992.
7. Ji Zhongwen in Zongjiao [Religion], cited in OMF International, "The Local Church," China Insight (July-August 1998).
8. Lambert, China's Christian Millions, p. 163.
9. Lambert, China's Christian Millions, pp. 163-5.
10. Su Shan, "The Children of the Kingdom," Asian Report (March-April 1993), p. 3.
11. "Reaching and Teaching," Asian Report (July-September 1992), p. 20.
12. China News and Church Report (August 9, 1996). See also Open Doors News Brief (August 1996).
13. Compass Direct, July 1997.
14. "Only by Grace," Asian Report (April 1996), pp. 8-9.
15. Peter Xu Yongze, personal communication, October 2003.
16. Ding Hei, personal communication, March 2001.

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