There is another area of the world that is about to surprise the western elites with its Christianity.  It is China.  Beginning in the desperate years of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the Han people have experienced a vast religious awakening that is only now coming to light.  It has been reported by David Aikman in Jesus in Beijing.  At the turn of the twenty-first century there are perhaps 80 million Christians in China including 70 million Protestants, chiefly members of the house church movement.  Actually, nobody knows for sure, since the unofficial “house churches” function outside the law, defiantly separate from the government-sanctioned, government-controlled Three Self Patriotic Movement (of Protestants) and the Catholic Patriotic Movement. 

All we know is that Christianity has grown at a staggering speed since 1979, when China began to relax the fierce restrictions on religious activity that had been imposed during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s (Aikman 2003 p8).

Paradoxically, the twentieth century convulsions of revolution, civil war, invasion, and economic failure seem to have provoked China into a Christian outburst, by purifying its existing Christian culture into a refiner’s fire.  The western missionary presence, symbolized for us by Eric Liddell, the muscular Christian missionary athlete of Chariots of Fire, was severely damaged by the Japanese occupation of the 1930s and 1940s (Liddell, for instance, died in a Japanese internment camp in 1945).  It was finished off by Mao’s victory in 1949 when westerners were chased out of China and all religious activity was subsumed under the totalizing political power of the Chinese Communist party.

But the precipitate from all this violence was a residue of extraordinary Christians, the generation of “patriarchs:” Wang Mingdao, Allen Yuan, Samuel Lamb, Moses Yie, and Li Tianen.  To read of their sufferings—the imprisonments, the beatings, and the humiliations—is to understand the power of the human spirit.  When Mao had finally brought China to cultural despair under the rule of teenage gangs in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, the Chinese people ached for something to succor them in their need.  These brave Chinese Christians lighted a fire of hope that has burned brightly ever since.

One of the sparks that began the fire landed in Fangcheng County in the province of Henan.  Christian conversions began in the 1940s, but the new Christians suffered extreme persecution in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution.  The intensity of the persecution only served to encourage them into secret meetings in their homes for prayer and worship.  Then there were miracles: the boy lifted up by “a man in white” after falling down a well.  And there were “healings” of people who recovered after being prayed over by their Christian fellow villagers.  In 1970, the “patriarch” Li Tianen traveled through Henan after his release from labor camp training a new generation of Christian leaders.  Then things started to get out of hand.  By the 1980s local “Communist cadres would commonly refer to Fangcheng county as ‘the Jesus nest’ and the whole problem of rapid evangelization in the rural areas as ‘Christianity fever.’” (Aikman 2003 p77)

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill