A Note on the Numbers
Any article on house churches in China and Iran must begin with an honest admission: the numbers are unknowable with precision, and that is the point. An unregistered church is unregistered precisely because it does not wish to be found, counted, or monitored by a government that is hostile to its existence. Every estimate in this article is derived from missionary organisations, academic researchers, persecution watchdogs, and defectors — none of whom have free access to the countries in question. The Chinese Communist Party publishes its own figures, which it controls. The Islamic Republic of Iran publishes nothing about Christian converts at all, since conversion from Islam is officially apostasy. With those caveats plainly stated, the broad outlines of the story are not seriously in dispute: in both countries, Christianity has grown enormously under persecution, the house church is the primary vehicle of that growth, and the Baptist and evangelical traditions are disproportionately represented among the persecuted.
China: From 700,000 to Tens of Millions
When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, the total Protestant Christian population was estimated at approximately 700,000. By the time the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 — a decade during which churches were closed, Bibles burned, and pastors imprisoned, sent to labour camps, or killed — those numbers had been driven deep underground. No one knows how many believers survived the Cultural Revolution in secret. What is known is what emerged when Deng Xiaoping’s liberalisation policies of the late 1970s and 1980s allowed a measure of public religious expression to resume: Christianity had not been destroyed. It had multiplied.
Government figures reported 6 million Christians worshipping in registered churches in 1982. By 1997, that figure had reached 14 million — more than double in fifteen years, against a general population growth of only 22 percent. These were the registered numbers alone. The underground, unregistered house church movement was growing simultaneously and invisibly. Pew Research Center calculated approximately 68 million Christians in China in 2010. Fenggang Yang of Purdue University’s Center on Religion and Chinese Society estimates between 93 million and 115 million Protestants in China today, with fewer than 30 million attending officially registered Three-Self Patriotic Movement churches — meaning the large majority of Chinese Protestants worship outside state sanction. Other estimates run higher still, with some reaching 130 million total Christians including Catholics. The most recent government figure for registered Protestants stands at approximately 44 million. The gap between that figure and independent scholarly estimates is not a rounding error. It represents tens of millions of people who meet in homes, in back rooms, in the open countryside, and in digital spaces — deliberately invisible to the state.
The World Religion Database, using data from the Gordon-Conwell Center for the Study of Global Christianity, estimated Protestant Christianity in China at around 70 million in 2000, rising to approximately 96 million by 2020. A 2025 academic paper in the journal Socius raised the question of whether growth has plateaued since 2010, drawing on nineteen nationally representative surveys. That debate among scholars is ongoing and honest. What it does not dispute is the scale of what has already occurred: a country that attempted to eliminate Christianity has produced one of the largest Protestant populations on earth, most of it outside state control.
The Three-Self Patriotic Movement and Why Baptists Refuse It
The Chinese government recognises only two official Protestant structures: the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) for Protestants, and the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association for Catholics. The Three-Self formula — self-governance, self-support, self-propagation — was designed to sever Chinese Christianity from foreign missionary influence and to bring it under Communist Party supervision. To register with the TSPM is to accept, in principle, that the Party has authority over the church’s doctrine, leadership, membership, and preaching content.
For theologically serious Baptists, this is simply not acceptable. Baptist ecclesiology has always held that the local church is directly under the headship of Christ and answers to no earthly authority in matters of doctrine and worship. The lordship of Christ over His church is not a secondary or negotiable point. It is the centre of everything. To place the church under state supervision — to require that sermons be approved, that minors be excluded from religious instruction, that foreign theological training be reported, that church membership rolls be submitted to the Ministry of Information — is, in Baptist understanding, to give Caesar what belongs to Christ. For this reason, the house church movement in China has always had a strongly Baptist and evangelical character, even when not formally affiliated with any denomination. The principles are the same: congregational independence, direct accountability to Scripture, rejection of external ecclesiastical or political authority over the gathered church.
The TSPM has also been used as an instrument of doctrinal control. Registered churches have been pressured to display the national flag, to sing patriotic songs during worship, and, in some documented cases, to replace images of Christ with portraits of Xi Jinping. Reports collected by the US Congress in its Combatting the Persecution of Religious Groups in China Act (2023–2024) note credible accounts of authorities rewriting Bible content to produce a version with the “correct understanding” according to Communist Party ideology, and of banning children and students from attending religious services. A church that submits to these conditions is not, in any meaningful Baptist sense, a church at all. It is a department of the state dressed in religious clothing.
Sinicization: The Systematic Assault Since 2017
For several decades after the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government’s policy toward unregistered house churches was one of selective toleration — harassment and occasional raids, but not systematic elimination. That changed in 2017 when Xi Jinping launched Zhongguo hua — the Sinicization of religion — as an explicit state policy. Its aim is to make all religious expression in China conform to Communist Party ideology and foster personal loyalty to the Party and to Xi himself. Christianity is characterised in this framework as a foreign religion — a form of Western cultural infiltration — and any expression of it not subordinated to the Party is treated as a political threat.
The first major blow fell in December 2018, when authorities raided and shut down Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu — one of China’s largest and most theologically articulate house churches, with a membership of several hundred. Its pastor, Wang Yi, was arrested along with over 100 members of his congregation. In 2019 he was sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegal business activity.” His crime, in substance, was preaching the gospel without state permission and refusing to register. Wang Yi had written publicly that his church would never register with the TSPM because to do so would be to acknowledge the state’s authority over the church of Christ. He paid for that conviction with his freedom.
Since 2018, the crackdown has become systematic. Thousands of house churches have been demolished or forcibly closed. Surveillance cameras have been installed on religious properties. Tithing to an unregistered church, participating in an online Bible study, or receiving theological training abroad can each constitute a criminal act under current regulations. In 2024, China recorded the highest number of individuals detained for religious reasons of any country on earth — 810 confirmed cases according to ChinaAid — with house church leaders making up a substantial proportion. Criminal prosecution has largely replaced the old labour camp system, with charges of “fraud” used as a flexible instrument for financially destroying house church networks. In October 2025, police detained dozens of pastors associated with Zion Church — a congregation of approximately 5,000 regular worshippers across nearly 50 cities — in what observers described as the largest crackdown on Christians since the Early Rain raids of 2018. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly condemned the arrests.
The response of those who have lived through this is instructive. Allan Yuan, considered one of the patriarchs of the Chinese house church movement, was asked about the deterioration of religious freedom. He replied: “All throughout history, Christianity has grown by persecution. It’s like a spring. You try to push it down, and it recoils.”
Baptist Distinctives in the Chinese House Church
The Chinese house church movement is theologically diverse. It includes Pentecostals, charismatics, Reformed evangelicals, and those with no clear denominational identity. But the Baptist and Reformed Baptist strain has been persistently significant, partly because it is precisely those traditions with the highest ecclesiological convictions — the clearest theology of the church as an independent, Christ-ruled body — that have the strongest reasons to refuse state registration and the greatest theological resources for understanding why suffering for that refusal is not a tragedy but a calling.
Early Rain Covenant Church under Wang Yi was explicitly Reformed in theology and Baptist in polity. Wang Yi had studied Reformed doctrine carefully, and his church was known for its rigorous preaching, catechesis, and theological seriousness. His public statement before his arrest, titled My Declaration of Faithful Disobedience, is a remarkable document of Baptist conviction — an articulation of the Lordship of Christ over His church, the limits of civil obedience, and the duty of the church to remain the church regardless of the cost. It stands in a long line of Baptist confessions written under the shadow of persecution.
A number of house church networks in China have also made contact with Reformed Baptist and sovereign grace ministries in the West, seeking theological resources — particularly in Calvinist soteriology and Baptist ecclesiology — that help them understand their situation through a biblical rather than a merely pragmatic lens. The hunger for sound doctrine in the Chinese house church is noted repeatedly by those who have had access to it. These are not congregations looking for entertainment or emotional experience. They are people who have paid a price for gathering and want to know what they are gathering for.
Iran: From 3,000 to Over a Million
Iran’s story is in some respects even more dramatic than China’s, because the starting point was so much smaller and the legal jeopardy so much greater. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, there were approximately 3,000 Protestant Christians in the entire country — mostly members of small ethnic congregations among Armenians, Assyrians, and a handful of converts from Islam reached by missionary activity during the Pahlavi era. The revolution, when it came, moved immediately to close this already tiny window. Missionaries were expelled. Evangelism was outlawed. Persian-language Bibles were banned. Persian-language worship services were prohibited or shut down. And the apostasy law — under which a Muslim who converts to another religion can face imprisonment, torture, and in principle execution — was applied with increasing severity.
The regime’s expectation was presumably that these measures would extinguish what little Christianity existed. The opposite happened. By every available measure, the church in Iran has grown faster under persecution than it had in any prior period. A 2020 survey of 50,000 Iranians aged 20 and over by GAMAAN — a Netherlands-based research group conducting the first secular survey of its kind — found 1.5 percent of respondents identifying as Christian. Applied to Iran’s population of approximately 90 million, that yields over 1.3 million Christians. Conservative academic estimates place Muslim-background converts to Christianity at 300,000 to 500,000 over the last two decades. Higher scholarly estimates, cited by researchers including Shay Khatiri and Ladan Boroumand, place the total Christian population at 1 to 3 million, with an estimated annual growth rate of 5.2 percent. Hormoz Shariat, founder of Iran Alive Ministries — sometimes called the Billy Graham of Iran — estimates at least 2 million converts from Islam, a figure supported by his ministry’s documented satellite broadcast reach of over 100,000 conversions alone. Persecution.org and multiple other watchdog organisations identify the underground church in Iran as the fastest-growing evangelical Christian community in the world.
The byFaith report published in 2026 puts it plainly: “In 1979 there were about 3,000 Protestant Christians in Iran. And the church was quite asleep. Today it is estimated that over a million people profess Christ, and we have no idea how many people are secret Christians. God uses difficulty, struggle, and trial to advance the gospel.”
The Baptist and Evangelical Strand in Iran
The dominant evangelical tradition in pre-revolutionary Iran was Pentecostal, centred on the Iranian Assemblies of God. The Central Assemblies of God Church in Tehran held Persian-language services and drew heavily from Muslim-background converts — approximately 80 percent of its membership were from Islamic families. When the revolution came, the Assemblies of God was one of the most visible targets, because it was the denomination most actively reaching Iranians from Muslim backgrounds in their own language.
The persecution produced martyrs whose names deserve to be remembered. Hossein Soodmand, an Assemblies of God pastor and convert from Islam, was executed in 1990 for refusing to renounce his faith — one of the first confirmed martyrdoms of a Christian leader under the Islamic Republic. Bishop Haik Hovsepian Mehr, Superintendent of the Central Assemblies of God and an outspoken defender of imprisoned converts, was abducted and murdered in January 1994. His successor as Superintendent, Mehdi Dibaj, who had himself spent nine years in prison for apostasy, was abducted and killed six months later. In the early years after the revolution, eight Christian leaders were martyred in total. The regime had a doctrine: remove the shepherds, and the flock will scatter. The flock did not scatter.
The Baptist tradition proper in Iran is smaller than the Pentecostal and charismatic streams, but it is present. Several house church networks operating today follow broadly Baptist convictions in their ecclesiology — congregational polity, believer’s baptism, the sufficiency of Scripture, and direct accountability to Christ as head of the church rather than to any bishop, synod, or state authority. These convictions are functionally unavoidable in a context where no external ecclesiastical authority can operate openly, and where submission to the state is not an option. A house church in Tehran is Baptist in practice whether or not it has ever heard the word, because the circumstances force it to be: a gathered body of believers, answerable to Christ and to His Word, meeting in secret, baptising their own, discipling their own, and sending out their own without external permission or sanction.
The growth has been substantially powered by satellite television, radio, and online evangelism. Iran Alive Ministries broadcasts into Iran continuously. Transform Iran and other diaspora-based ministries report tens of thousands of active online participants monthly. Persian-language Christian content circulates on social media and encrypted messaging apps despite government efforts to block it. The government has banned the Persian Bible, but Bibles circulate anyway — sometimes, as the Baptist Press account of house church leader Amir illustrates, carried by the very police officers who confiscated them.
The Cost in Iran Today
The Iranian government’s response to the church’s growth has not been to tolerate it but to intensify the persecution. In 2024, Iranian courts sentenced 96 Christians to a combined total of 263 years in prison — a sixfold increase over the previous year, according to Morningstar News. More than 300 Christians were prosecuted in Tehran alone, with close to 100 convicted for attending house churches or sharing their faith. A February 2026 report found that 254 Christians had been detained for their faith in the preceding year, nearly double the 2024 figure. A 37-year-old pregnant woman was sentenced to more than 14 years. In 2025, a 65-year-old believer received a 10-year sentence. Iran ranks tenth on Open Doors’ World Watch List of countries where Christians face the greatest persecution, and receives a score of zero out of four on Freedom House’s religious freedom index.
The Denison Forum summarised the situation accurately: “Persecution doesn’t get the last word.” The more the regime prosecutes, the more the church grows. This is not a paradox to those who read their Bibles. It is the consistent pattern of the Acts of the Apostles and of every subsequent century of church history. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Tertullian said it in the second century. The underground congregations of Tehran and Chengdu are proving it again in the twenty-first.
What These Churches Teach the West
There is a danger in writing about persecuted churches from a position of comfort, and it is the danger of reducing them to an inspiring story — a piece of spiritual encouragement to be consumed and moved on from. The churches of China and Iran are not illustrations. They are brothers and sisters in Christ, paying a price for the same gospel that Western Baptist congregations hold and often take entirely for granted.
What they teach us is not primarily about suffering, though they know a great deal about that. What they teach us is about the church itself. A church that cannot rely on legal protection must rely on Christ. A church that cannot build a building must meet in homes, which is where the church in the New Testament began. A church that cannot advertise must evangelise by personal testimony, which is the method the apostles used. A church whose leaders are imprisoned must have an eldership that is distributed, resilient, and theologically grounded, because there is no institutional structure to fall back on when the leader is taken. A church whose members can be arrested for tithing must understand what they are giving to and why it is worth the cost.
These are not disadvantages that have been somehow overcome. They are the conditions under which the New Testament church operated, and they produce a quality of faith and a seriousness of discipleship that institutional comfort rarely does. The Baptist tradition has always held that the church exists by the will of Christ and not by the permission of the state. The house churches of China and Iran are living that conviction at its sharpest possible edge.
Xi Jinping has not prevailed. The Ayatollahs have not prevailed. The promise of Christ holds. The church He builds cannot be unbuilt.