Whenever I field questions about the church in China, or anything related to China for that matter, I invariably find myself responding, “It’s complicated.” I encountered the truth of this assessment during my last trip to Beijing in December 2019. .jpg)
On a very cold Sunday morning I made my way across town to attend services at the Haidian Christian Church, one of the city’s largest registered Protestant churches. While waiting in the plaza in front of the church between services, I snapped this photo which captures the complexity of Christianity in China: the Chinese national flag, a neon sign, a giant cross, a political banner next to the church, a surveillance camera, and Santa welcoming parishioners at the front door! Topping it off, the sermon, which was being broadcast into the public square was about counting the cost of following Jesus.
Despite what is widely believed outside of China, it is not illegal to be a Christian in China. Protestant Christianity and Catholic Christianity are both legally recognized and sanctioned religions in China. That said, believers in China have never had religious freedom as it is understood in the west. The state and religion have never been separated, not during imperial times and not under Communism. The government stance can best be described as, “You can believe what you want, but we get to set the boundaries for religious practice.” The result is a system that prescribes what types of religious practices are permitted and where and how they can be carried out. The problem is that those boundaries are rubber, invisible, and they tend to move, depending on the political climate.
When we talk about “the church” in China, it is easy to over-simplify and thus fail to recognize the diversity that exists. Broadly speaking there are registered churches and unregistered churches. Registered churches are legally sanctioned and under the supervision of a religious affairs bureaucracy. These churches can be found in nearly every city and medium sized town. According to government statistics, there are 36 million members of these churches. There are also unregistered churches as well, congregations that for a host of historical and political reasons, choose not to register with the government. They are often referred to as house churches or underground churches. Although they are technically illegal, tens of millions of Christians are part of these congregations. While both registered and unregistered churches (with a few exceptions) claim to be non-denominational, in fact it is possible to find churches in China that would fit any of the following broad descriptions: fundamentalist, charismatic, evangelical, reformed. Further, on the margins there are groups that can and are considered to be cults.
Beginning in the 1990s, there was a looser political environment for religious life that allowed for greater tolerance and openness, both for registered and unregistered groups. This meant that Christians found space to engage in more outreach, Christian education, and to engage in religious expression online. Many unregistered churches, particularly those in urban areas, operated openly and publicly. So long as they didn’t cause trouble, local officials looked the other way. In other words, the boundaries for religious expression were expanded.
Unfortunately, the past few years have seen a significant tightening of restrictions in China, not just for religious belief, but for all walks of life. Some of it is a result of the Communist Party’s re-assertion of control over every aspect of life, and some is part of a general “clean up everything” campaign in the run-up to important events, such as last year’s 100th anniversary of the Party’s founding and this year’s Party Congress in the Fall.
For Christians the tightening has come in the form of new religious regulations. This has made it more difficult for unregistered congregations to meet in large groups. Christian schools (which sit outside of the law to start with) have experienced increasing crackdowns. Many Christian public accounts on WeChat, China’s dominant social media platform, have been shut down. Yet, as a Beijing-based friend remarked to me recently, “while people outside of China focus on the things that Chinese believers cannot do, believers in China are busy actually doing things.” These include online training programs, as well as online evangelistic and prayer meetings. Christians are also thinking about and discussing what church should look like in an environment that is much changed from the past two decades, with some advocating (by necessity) a return to the smaller house church model of the past, and a focus on being salt and light in neighborhoods and communities.
The changes are also forcing those in the China ministry community to re-think our roles. As a community of people who care about and serve churches in China, we tend to focus on needs that we can meet. Do they need training? We can help. Do they need resources? We can help. Do they need models and paradigms and structures? We can help. Unfortunately, sometimes our desire to help keeps us from seeing how much we can learn from our brothers and sisters in China. Writing for ChinaSource, Chen Jing, a U.S.-based Chinese scholar has suggested that a key lesson Chinese believers may have for the global church is how to live as a faithful minority in a hostile environment.
Despite the changes that are making religious life more difficult for believers in China, one thing we know for sure is that God’s love for and faithfulness to his church in China has not changed.
May those of us in the global church be open to listening and learning from our brothers and sisters in China.
To learn more about what God is doing in and through his church in China, please visit www.chinasource.org.
