How the Church in China Survived Extinction

Christianity went completely underground for many decades of the 20th century. Why did it begin to boom again in the 1980s?

I think you can point to a lot of different sociological reasons. On the one hand, I think there was a lot of disillusionment within China. Disillusionment with the communist ideology, especially with Tiananmen Square and post-Tiananmen.

There was very much a whole generation who were looking for answers beyond what China was providing. China had essentially eradicated all of their core fundamental beliefs as a culture. They eradicated Confucianism, they eradicated the traditional Chinese religions, and then communism failed.

And so there really wasn’t an underpinning as a society, and there weren’t answers for the kind of big questions of life. There was a lot of moral failure. And so, when you talk to a lot of Christians—people who became Christians in the 80s, 90s and beyond—they will often talk a lot about the kind of social and moral fallout in China that happened in these decades. And how that has caused a lot of people to seek. 

But you also have to look at the re-entrance of missionaries into China.

What effect did that have?

I don’t think they would want me to go into a lot of details, but from the moment that China reopened, there really was just a very significant effort to go back in and to evangelize. And I think that right now we’re beginning to have second and third generations of Christians.

But still, generally speaking, most believers within the house churches are first generation Christians. And many of them, especially in the urban areas, first heard the gospel at university. Whether through teachers or foreign students, both from the United States and Korea, there was just a massive, massive effort to evangelize within China.

So, you have these kinds of sociological answers, but ultimately I think it’s because the Lord wanted to work. The Lord wanted to bring in a great harvest in China. I think there’s not, at the end of the day, a really great human explanation for it.

I think it’s just one of the most remarkable stories in church history. There was so much effort by the West to convert China before 1950, and when you look back, there’s middling success. It’s a complicated story before the rise of the Communists. And then there was this period where it went silent and no one knew what was happening, but God was at work.

What about the last few years? I know the Communist Party enacted new restrictions for religious groups in 2018, and it seems like COVID made that even more difficult? 

So, there’s one story of a church in a city that had been under lockdown during COVID. The church had been meeting digitally, but they hadn’t had communion with each other for a while. And the lockdown was lifted, so they rented a hotel meeting space to gather together and have communion with each other. And while they were gathering, the lockdown was put back into place.

So they weren’t breaking a regulation when the service started, but by the time they finished, they were now breaking a regulation. And that kicked off direct interference with the church, and multiple people have spent time incarcerated because of that. And so that’s just an example of how COVID, mixed with the religious regulations, kind of intensified everything. 

Additionally, the Communist Party used COVID to implement facial recognition across China. You cannot go into China right now and not deal with the realities of facial recognition. Every single apartment building, every neighborhood, it’s everywhere. 

And this is also now a reality the church navigates. The ability to hide and be unseen as the church is really more or less gone. And so the question is not really can you hide, but what can you do or what should you do to not make yourself open to interference?

It sounds like that question is a point of debate among Chinese Christians, but whatever the case, most churches still deal with real pressures. How do they keep pressing on?

It’s just really amazing watching and seeing how much renewal and the understanding of God’s grace has really empowered a lot of the churches as they go through this uptick in persecution again. And this understanding that the only difference between them and their persecutor is the grace of God in their life. They are not better people than their persecutors. They are not any different in the end from their persecutors, apart from the grace of God. 

And so there’s one pastor in particular that I know, and he talks about using the car ride to the police station as a time to repent of his own personal idols. He repents of his idol of the comfortable middle class life, and he’s able to face his persecutors with grace and love because he has spent that time preparing by repenting of his own sins and his own idols.

But I’m sure none of this is easy.

I try to say this as much as possible—house church pastors and house church Christians are not heroes. And I really mean that, even though people often get their feathers ruffled when I say it.

I think everyone wants a hero, and everyone wants there to be Christians out there that are like “the right church” or the Acts church. We can look to them and be inspired. I’ve just spent a lot of time talking about how great they are and how much I love them, and how there’s so much we can learn from them. 

But the point is not that they are great. The point is not that they are holier. They are a messed up group of people. They deal with all of the same fights and struggles that we deal with. They fail as Christians constantly.

I think the real difference is what Jesus is doing among them. And so we don’t look to them as heroes. We look to Jesus as the hero. And that’s really, really important when engaging the persecuted church. Because it does not help them to make them heroes, and it does not help us to make them heroes. 

The hero of this story is Christ. The hero of this work is Jesus. It is his church, and he is doing the work. And I think we can look to the Chinese house churches to be encouraged by what the Lord has chosen to do among them. 

But the question is not: How do we become more like the Chinese house churches? The question is: How do we become more like Jesus, and how do we look at what he’s doing in their lives and ask him to do the same thing in our lives? 

I think humans are always just so tempted to make other humans an ideal, and that’s always going to disappoint. But Jesus doesn’t disappoint—and it’s his work.