Introduction: This Is the Finger of God
When you look at the underground Chinese church, all you can do is stand back in amazement and say: This is the finger of God. Jesus Christ has built this church in China. No man can boast about it. No denomination can lay claim to it. It is the work of God. It is the finger of God.
Before we proceed, we must understand something of God's activity in China through Protestant missions, because it is vitally important to our subject today.
A Brief History of Protestant Missions in China
The first Protestant missionary to China was Robert Morrison. He arrived in 1807 and spent twelve years producing a Chinese translation of the Bible — greatly remembered by the Chinese to this day. That was the beginning of the planting of spiritual seed in Chinese soil.
China was a closed land. The Chinese word for China is the middle country — they were the centre of the world, and outsiders were foreign devils and barbarians. In 1793 the Emperor of China wrote to King George III: “We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious and have no use for your country's manufactures.” But Britain saw trade potential, and what followed was a black mark on British history — the opium trade — which was the beginning of the rape of China by the West.
British missionaries arrived with the gospel, but were only allowed entry through the offices of the British East India Company, which was responsible for the opium smuggling. Hudson Taylor lamented in a letter in 1856: “Not less than 32,000 pounds of opium enter China every month at this port alone. The people have no love for foreigners.”
But China was blessed with many remarkable missionaries during the great missionary movement of the 19th century. William Burns left Scotland at the height of revival to plant himself in obscurity for twenty years for the sake of the Chinese and the gospel. C.T. Studd — a household name in all Britain, number one cricketer, young, handsome, wealthy, famous — was converted and walked away from everything, gave away every penny of his inheritance to missions, and gave his life for souls. He went to Africa at fifty-three, was separated from his wife for eighteen years, and died there. Jonathan Goforth saw genuine revival in China. His book By My Spirit is highly recommended.
In the early 1900s there were 63 Western missionary societies in China with around 3,400 missionaries. Then came the terrible bloody Boxer Rebellion of 1900, in which 186 Protestant missionaries were martyred. One account is almost unbearable: a fifteen-year-old missionary girl, pleading with a government official not to ban her family from China, was beheaded mid-sentence by the man standing behind her.
By 1920, Chinese Christianity had become almost Western in character — Western ecclesiastical models planted on Chinese soil, with Chinese leaders wholly dependent on Western administrators. This was deeply hurtful to the proud Chinese people. An anti-Christian movement swept China from 1920 to 1930, and many Chinese Christians broke away from Western denominations and formed their own independent groups — the beginning of the Chinese indigenisation movement.
Out of this grew significant indigenous movements: the True Jesus Church, the Jesus Family, and most notably the Little Flock, founded by Watchman Nee in Shanghai in 1928. Nee had a vision to evangelize China in fifteen years and dispatched entire families throughout the provinces to begin local assemblies. He was arrested in the 1950s, imprisoned, and died there in 1972. Today the Little Flock is one of the largest underground church groups in China — estimated at over fourteen million members, having grown from 70,000 at the time of his arrest. He was literally the mustard seed that grew to a great tree.
Another man God used powerfully was John Sung, a genius who came to America in the 1920s, earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics in about three years, enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and was born again there. His conversion was so radical and startling to the liberal professors that they had him institutionalized in a mental asylum for 193 days. That was his true seminary training — during those 193 days he read through the Bible forty-four times and God gave him a key word from every chapter for the rest of his preaching life. Out of his ministry grew hundreds of preaching bands — Chinese laypeople who carried flags with a red cross and spread the gospel across the provinces, many of them women greatly used of God.
When the Communists came to power in 1949 to 1952, all Western missionaries were expelled, properties confiscated, and Western influence purged. It seemed as though Christianity had become extinct in China. But God was building his church behind the scenes. In 1949 there were between 100,000 and 150,000 Chinese Christians. Today it is estimated that there are over 100 million believers in China.
The Three-Self Church and the Underground Church
The Communist Chinese government sanctions a registered church called the Three Self Church — self-governance, self-support, self-propagation. But these churches are severely compromised. Government spies monitor every service. There can be no preaching on the resurrection of Christ, no preaching on his return, no mention of the Holy Spirit, no evangelising, no printing of Bibles, no handing out tracts. It is a social gospel — much like some churches in our own country.
The underground house church, on the other hand, is unregistered and labelled illegal by the government. Christians who belong to it are considered enemies of the state. Secret police constantly search for them to arrest, persecute, and imprison them.
There have been three phases of the house church movement. The first in the 1950s as a result of communism. The second during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) — perhaps the worst time of persecution for Chinese believers in history. All churches were closed, Bibles were burnt, believers were forced to renounce their faith or be sent to brutal labour camps. Many died. Yet many Chinese leaders say this was the very time the indigenous church was truly birthed — and it has spread like a prairie fire ever since. The third phase came with the easing of restrictions after Chairman Mao, when the unprecedented explosion of the house church became known to the outside world.
The Character of the Underground Church
Much of what follows was shared with me by a close friend who has spent nearly twenty years visiting rural underground churches in China — churches no Western outsider has ever entered.
The underground church service typically lasts eight to ten hours. The Chinese love to sit and hear the Word of God. They take copious notes, they weep over it, they soak it in like a sponge. They hunger for the Word of God more than real food — hard for us in the West to appreciate, where we have a dozen Bibles in our homes and hardly ever read them.
It is not uncommon for a Chinese believer to have memorised the four gospels in their entirety, the book of Proverbs, and all the epistles. They not only know their Bible — they take it literally. They believe the whale swallowed Jonah. They believe in the virgin birth, in the miracles. They believe God can do great things and does great things.
There are no titles among them. No one is called Doctor or Pastor — they call each other brother and sister. Function and gift determine role, not title. Every member is essential. The church is a family — a true body of Christ. There are no denominations. They prefer simply to be called followers of Christ.
The church services have no set time and no set location — constantly moved to avoid detection by secret police. Usually they meet at an odd hour, perhaps ten o'clock at night in a barn, arriving in shifts so as not to attract attention. A prepared safe room is always ready in case the authorities come.
The believers are extraordinarily close-knit. Nothing is hidden between them. Transparency is a necessity — in fact, there is no word or term for privacy in the Chinese language. When you eat, you all sit at the same round table and eat from the same bowl. There are no hidden sins in the assembly because everyone knows you better than your own family members do.
Many Chinese believers are on their faces at five in the morning, weeping tears of repentance before the Lord until the concrete floor is soaked with their tears. They will pray all night — groaning, interceding, wrestling with God until they get a victory. They believe in a God who hears and answers prayer, and they live that way all the time.
When they pray for healing and deliverance, they fast for days beforehand. They are very sensitive to demonic oppression and walk so closely with God that they can discern demonic activity in a person simply by looking them in the face.
The structure of the church is determined by function and reliance upon the Holy Spirit — not by bankers and lawyers as in the West. There is no division between clergy and laity. All are workers. All are members of the priesthood of believers. The Holy Spirit teaches them, and they are channels, not reservoirs — they do not keep it to themselves but let it flow out to others.
They have lost everything — their homes, their families, their freedom. They have been beaten, starved, imprisoned. And all they want is the presence of Christ. That is the key to understanding the indigenous house church in China. They just want Jesus.
That is the dynamic of the Chinese church that separates them from us today. They are truly doers of the word.
What We Can Learn
The Chinese church is a composite of the church in the book of Acts. They have returned to the apostolic model. We in the West are more concerned with form than function, ritual more than spiritual — trapped in our traditions of men. They are free to serve Christ because they have no such entanglements.
It has been said that the church slumbers in times of prosperity and thrives in times of persecution. When you lose your world as you know it, all you have is Jesus Christ — and he is enough.
Persecution is coming to America. To deny it is to have your head buried in the sand. Here are some things to do now to prepare:
Begin memorising as much scripture as you can. If you go to jail, you will have no Bible. All you will have is your memory. If your memory is not full of scripture, you will be in bad shape. I highly recommend The Heavenly Man by Brother Yun, who would not have survived without hiding God's Word in his heart.
Prepare a safe meeting place. Choose somewhere in your community or on your property where believers can meet undetected. Be prepared to change locations at a moment's notice. Arrive at staggered times and in small numbers.
Get passports for every member of your family. God is a global God. He may move you elsewhere.
Prepare your heart now. Live in the centre of the will of God now, so you will be able to survive in his will then. When persecution comes, faith will be tested. The only ones who will get through are those with a close walk with God, a vital daily faith, a strong prayer life, and a reliance upon the Holy Spirit. If you do not have that kind of life now, do not expect to get it magically when persecution comes.
Be prepared mentally to lose everything. Your home, your savings, your vehicles — all may be confiscated. Be prepared to see your loved ones suffer pain, estrangement, and want. Think of Corrie ten Boom in the German concentration camp, who watched her father and sister die, who had nothing at all but Christ — and one day when she said she could not go on, she felt a nail-pierced hand holding hers. That will get you through times we cannot imagine.
Are you willing to experience the fellowship of his sufferings? Will you bear his name boldly and proclaim him, or will you deny him in that day?
The church in America is soundly asleep, and only two things will awaken her: a Holy Ghost revival, or a hell-born persecution. America needs revival. The church in America needs revival. There is still hope if we seek God in desperate prayer.
O God, have mercy upon us. Have mercy upon America. Forgive us for our laziness in prayer, for our spiritual bankruptcy and impoverishment. In your wrath, remember mercy. Awaken your bride, O God, and bring a mighty revival and an outpouring of your grace upon her now. For your glory and for your dear Son's sake. Amen.