A CHURCH GROWS IN CHINA

...Underlying Beijing’s uncertainty about how to deal with the country’s fervent Protestant community is its astonishing growth of the house church in the last two decades...

...Several million strong, this group takes its name from the county in Henan province where Zhang preaches...

...The housechurch movement took off, entirely outside official channels...

...The authorities are also made nervous by evangelical preaching not tailored to the restrictions imposed on the Three-Self Patriotic Movement...

...Despite China’s increasing openness in the last 20 years, the repression of religious believers has not abated...

...Zhang, who never finished elementary school, has had firsthand experience of persecution...

...Ye himself, in June 1997, described unregistered house churches as “evil, illegal organizations that undermine social order...

...In our opinion, the scope of illegal religious activities in our town is increasing rapidly, the spread is getting wider and wider, there are more and more people taking part,” griped a party screed about Protestant evangelism in the town of Hua Dou in Guangdong province last June...

...4. We call on the central leadership of the Chinese Communist party to begin a dialogue with representatives of the house church in an attempt to reach mutual understanding, to achieve reconciliation, to lessen confrontation, and to begin an open-hearted exchange...

...One development that seems to have spurred the house-church leaders to issue their public appeal was the intensification of arrests and persecution after President Clinton’s summit visit to China in June 1998...

...Other Christians told of being beaten up in prison by other inmates on orders from prison guards or tortured by electric shock...

...We have been persecuted so long that we have to fight [as if this were] the last fight,” he says...

...After Mao Zedong’s death and with the ascendance of reformer Deng Xiaoping in 1976, social controls all over China relaxed...

...Others of the leaders had similar tales...

...human-rights commissioner Mary Robinson was given the house-church appeal both in the original Chinese and in English translation...

...It should reflect international standards and not whether people attend or don’t attend Three-Self churches...

...That assertion may reflect an oversimplified view of Chinese politics, but its urgency should not be dismissed...

...But the repression doesn’t seem to be accomplishing its purpose...

...The meetings sometimes last all day, and the shortest ones are around three hours long...

...U.S...

...The 22 million people of Taiwan can no more represent mainland China’s 1.2 billion than the Three-Self church can represent all Chinese Christians...

...Though often sincere Christians, TSPM pastors are obliged to keep their preaching generic, mainstream Protestant...

...2. We call on the authorities to release unconditionally all house-church Christians now serving in labor-reform camps...

...But by speaking out, and by putting their names and faces on the line, they have demonstrated a kind of courage, that, if history be any guide, can have a lasting impact on their country...

...We had come to observe the deliberations of seven key evangelical leaders and their assistants, representing by their estimate some 15 million Chinese Christians...

...One fear voiced in both the official press and internal party documents in the early 1990s was that Christian activity might generate opposition to the regime and eventually undermine Communist rule in China, as it did in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe...

...In prison, Zhang was handcuffed and beaten with sticks and the stock of a gun to force him to deny his faith in writing...

...Among others, long-imprisoned pastors and evangelists were allowed to go home, and when they got there, they trained young followers and sent them out in turn as itinerant evangelists all over China...

...During one stint with 30 other Christian leaders in Henan’s Xinyang Re-education Through Labor Camp, guards beat him with his own crutch...

...China’s housechurch Christians may not gain respite from the current crackdown soon...

...He didn’t give in...

...The appeal—of which a slightly abbreviated text appears nearby—calls on China’s government to take cognizance of the growth of evangelical Protestantism in recent decades, to release all Christians imprisoned for their faith, to begin a dialogue with house-church leaders, to stop harassing the house church, and to David Aikman, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., is a veteran foreign correspondent...

...The Christian leaders we met with implored us to ensure that their appeal reached the highest levels of government in China and outside as soon as possible...

...The current crackdown on housechurch Christians has been underway for at least four years, since Communist authorities became worried about the rapid growth in the number of zealous Christians deep in the countryside...

...By government estimates, some 10 million Chinese belong to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement...

...6. We call on the legal authorities to cease their attack on the house churches...

...In official documents, Communist party officials often express bitterness about what is happening...

...The country’s president, Jiang Zemin, told a meeting of the Religious Affairs Bureau in 1995, “We are engaged in a secret struggle against the church...

...It did...

...officials believe that Ye, whose attitude toward religion may have been reinforced by a tour of duty in Tibet, is digging in his heels with the support of other senior party hardliners, despite signs in other areas of Chinese life of a cautious opening up to political reform...

...But the number of Protestants who refuse to have anything to do with any government organization is far larger—estimates range from 20 to 80 million...

...Shen Xianfeng, 41, of the China Gospel Fellowship, also based in Henan, has rheumatoid arthritis and walks with crutches...

...In addition, there may be as many as 8 million underground Catholics loyal to Rome...

...Most of them were men, in their forties or older...

...But the persecution continued...

...One leader from Henan Province said that some 30 of his fellow prisoners in Xinyang Re-education Through Labor Camp were Christians imprisoned for unauthorized evangelism...

...What especially irritates the authorities in Beijing is the house church’s independence...

...It consisted of three clerics: National Association of Evangelicals president Don Argue, Catholic bishop Theodore E. McCarrick, and New York rabbi Arthur Schneier...

...Whether this paper commitment has any substance, time will show...

...Zhang Rongliang explained, “The American government put pressure on China, and the Chinese government got angry and decided to crack down on Christians...

...Chinese officials, including Jiang, received them politely and listened to requests to free imprisoned Protestants and Catholics named by the delegation...

...For this audacity, house-church leaders pay the heavy price that we have noted...

...Henan, August 22, 1998 dynasty in the mid-19th century, or the Boxers, defeated only after a 55-day siege of Peking in 1900...

...His actual offense: evangelizing the peasantry and organizing new Christians into churches that refused to cooperate with China’s official Protestant church, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), so named because it is independent of foreign missionaries and thus supposedly selfsupporting, self-propagating, and self-managing...

...By contrast, house-church evangelists wander all over China preaching the Gospel as boldly as they can...

...As a result, these leaders, for the first time ever, chose to speak out, addressing their own government and the world, using their own names, and allowing themselves to be photographed for publication in the West...

...Even if it is getting worse, we would like people in the outside world to know that we are holding on to our faith...

...After two days of prayer and discussion, they drafted a “United Appeal of the Chinese House Church” and asked that it be given the widest circulation in China and beyond...

...In 1995, a year after the enactment of strict new regulations requiring registration of all Christians, a tough-minded atheist, Ye Xiaowen, was put in charge of the Religious Affairs Bureau, the party-controlled agency responsible for supervising religious activity in China...

...Only the presence of two American reporters was unusual...

...His only means of communicating with other Christians and family members is a cell phone, which he quickly replaces when any of his house-church contacts is arrested...

...History has proved that attacks on Christians who fervently preach the Gospel only bring harm to China and its government...

...Just as she set off for China two weeks ago, U.N...

...Every time we are not defeated, we grow stronger...

...Said Zhang Rongliang, “The Chinese church is like the Book of Acts...

...Arrested again in 1990, he was tortured by guards who stood on his legs, stretched wide apart...

...Several carried cell phones, the ubiquitous sign of serious business in China...

...Prodded by members of Congress, President Clinton finally raised the issue of China’s persecution of Christians during President Jiang Zemin’s visit to Washington in November 1997...

...The dozen or so participants came one by one, over several days, to a spacious, sparsely furnished suburban house in one of China’s most populous provinces...

...All those imprisoned for the sake of the Gospel should be released...

...7. The Chinese house church is a channel through which God’s blessing comes to China...

...This is the first time that we have talked openly,” said Zhang Rongliang, 48, a long-established leader of the Fang Cheng Fellowship...

...The seven had come together out of desperation...

...5. The definition of “cult” must be spelled out...

...One Christian leader, who belongs to the “Born Again” house-church group (numbering possibly 2- 3 million), said simply, “The Chinese house churches have been persecuted for a long time...

...Robinson’s visit is connected with China’s agreement to sign the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights next month—a public affirmation by Beijing that China takes human rights seriously...

...it operated on the principle that, as one itinerant evangelist in Zhejiang province put it, “believers absolutely cannot be controlled by non-believers...

...The Christian surge in China became evident in the late 1970s...

...Though it is impossible for an outsider to verify the reports of miraculous healings associated with certain preachers, they are so widespread that Communist- party officials have publicly complained about them...

...He was also beaten with a rubber nightstick...

...They were dressed in simple slacks or shorts, with well-worn open-necked shirts and sandals...

...Indeed, these leaders confirmed that repression is worse now than at any other time since the vicious campaign against “spiritual pollution” in 1983-84...

...In response, Jiang agreed to receive a White House-sponsored delegation last February...

...Certainly, words can have tremendous power...

...In particular, Protestant Christians who spurn government-approved congregations and meet instead in private “house churches,” known collectively as the “house church,” are continually threatened...

...In parts of China, it is more intense now than at any other time since the last years of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s...

...Officials in Beijing say that some 4 million Chinese belong to the Catholic Patriotic Association, a party-supervised church set up in the 1950s to control Roman Catholics...

...A Christian since the age of 12, he was first arrested in 1974 and jailed for six years on the charge of “counterrevolution under the guise of religion...

...The persecution of God’s children blocks this channel of blessing...

...3. The approximately 10 million members of Three-Self churches and the 80 million believers who worship in house churches are all part of mainstream Christianity in China...

...Things are still very backward here...

...officials of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement say that the increase may have been tenfold in certain regions...

...A particularly vicious device used against Christian prisoners in China, as well as against Tibetan Buddhists and other dissidents, is what the Chinese call dian bang (“electric stick”), an electrified police baton designed to inflict pain and terror...

...Preachers taught a dynamic and radical faith modeled on Biblical accounts of early Christianity...

...Since another 14-day arrest in 1994, Zhang has combined two lives: that of a fugitive, keeping one step ahead of China’s Public Security Bureau, and that of a minister, traveling with other Christian leaders to as many as 20 provinces on leadership and training missions for the church...

...Actual figures are impossible to verify...

...They are specifically forbidden to discuss issues like abortion, for example, and are discouraged from bringing up politically incorrect teachings such as the Second Coming of Christ incompatible with Marxism...

...Another concern was that China might fall victim to another religion-based peasant rebellion like that of the Taipings, who nearly overturned the Qing A UNITED APPEAL OF THE CHINESE HOUSE CHURCH (slightly abridged) 1. We call on the government to admit God’s great power and to take account of the new growth of Christianity in this generation...

...He was released from prison last February only after fellow Christians and family members forked over some $135, and he has been on the run ever since...

...cease using terms like “evil religion” and “cult” to designate orthodox Christian believers simply because they won’t join the official church...

...More than three quarters of the house-church activists encountered on a 10day reporting trip to five Chinese cities said that they would be immediately arrested if they were spotted by police...