The Five Great Global Dilemmas of the Suffering Church!
China - doing church when there is no place to hide!
It is always important to provide global templates for understanding, even if the exercise inevitably runs the gauntlet of oversimplification. Here comes a monster – a characterization of the essential and defining dilemmas facing the global persecuted church. If anyone wants to help, they had better make it their priority to deal with these!
There are five and they take us around the planet.
1. How do you do church when there is no place to hide? That’s China, and North Korea.
2. How do you do church when almost everyone wants to leave? That’s the Middle East.
3. How do you do church when your neighbour wants to kill you? That’s sub-Saharan Africa.
4. How do you do church when your government has changed the culture you no longer feel welcome in the place of your birth? That’s India.
5. How do you do church when you have to pay a cartel to keep worshipping? That’s Latin America.
Let’s take these in turn over the next few blogs and see how church gets done differently in response to these dilemmas.
First, how do you do church when there is no place to hide?
The world’s second largest church in the world is a persecuted one. It is in China, where there is a staggering 100 million plus Christians. Here, a resurgent State ideology pushed by the current leader Xi Jinping has joined up with vast new AI methods of all-pervasive surveillance to make it virtually impossible to conduct Christian gatherings beyond the prying eyes of the state. The degree of state surveillance over what happens and is said in churches is unprecedented due to new technology as well as old fashioned snooping. Says a house church leader in Shanghai, “Maybe we are now showing the Christian world how to do church when any kind of underground church is impossible.”
It is not merely passive surveillance. Said another house church leader, this time in Wuhan, “We meet in small groups for what we call ‘microwave church’, that is, we gather in an apartment and put all our phones in a microwave oven to avoid eavesdropping.” But to their surprise, the leader is still asked to “take tea” with a local party official from the United Front Work Department. “He made it clear that they knew we were gathering because all the phone signals were blocked at once, and they used another listening device – which he did not specify – to listen in… They did not try to close us down, but they did enjoin us to “boost Xi-thought” – we were not free to teach from the scriptures as we had previously.”
A major change was the passage of new measures in 2018 on “Internet Religious Information Services” which linked religion with the dreaded catch-all of ‘national security’. These require churches to apply for licenses before sharing any content, from blogs to streams. In addition, there is the harsher evidence from Li Ying, known more widely by his online handle “Teacher Li’, and who runs a hugely influential site sharing the experiences of ordinary Chinese. He was speaking recently about receiving a government document from Chengdu that showed officials selecting targets for intrusive surveillance when the individuals were recently divorced or unemployed, or even just demotivated. Said Li Ying, “… AI will just help the authorities make the target list longer and longer. It’s genuinely shocking.”
In the face of all this, it does make the practice of church rather unique. When every word is being assessed, and every action studied, how does one do church in this hostile setting? Said a Beijing house church leader, “Since the older solutions no longer work, such as splitting into smaller groups or gathering in more private settings – situations were we could get beyond surveillance and interference, now we are evolving new methods of being church in the teeth of hostile surveillance and ideological interference.” He added, “Maybe the world church should sit up and notice too, after all, the technology that allows the surveillance has originated in the West, and Western Christians may in time experience a state sponsored ideology that is also suspicious of biblical faith.”
These “new” methods are listed in no order of importance.
“One step ahead”
Where the church gathers in places knowing the state will catch up to them in time, and then moving to another, exploiting the time lag to keep worshipping. One church now meets in a McDonald’s. But after five weeks they were rounded up by police, and happily signed pledges not to do so again.” Winked one of the members, “We signed that we would not gather in that restaurant again, but there are plenty others in the city.”
“Confusion worship”
A tactic that confuses those eavesdropping as to whether it is genuinely subversive or not. One house group simply chanted for a whole hour the bible verse found in Acts 4:12. They shouted “Jesus” and then repeated the verse each time; There is salvation in no one else, God has given no other name under heaven by which we must we saved. This causes some debate among the authorities. Yes, the verse appears exclusive and has no role for the CCP or Xi – which contradicts the ‘Sinicization’ injunction, yet it was only the repetition of a bible verse and not an anti-government statement. It was weeks before the ruling was conveyed… that the verse was subversive ‘without appropriate qualifiers.’.
“Play the game… your way”.
This is where the new requirements are followed but with secretive signals given to the audience to distinguish truth telling from mere compliance. One leader of an official protestant Three Self church knows he is recorded but is not on camera, so will preach parts of his sermon normally, and for the obligatory political stuff will stick his fingers in his ears, saying to the congregation “don’t listen to this part.”
“Keep a go-to-jail book”.
No less than three house church leaders and four official church pastors were given the same advice – keep a small notebook and put into it what you must say and will go to jail for saying it. One of them said, “It is small but powerful – it’s just a great exercise in knowing what we can never compromise on.” Some even share their notebooks. The emphasis is on what they will claim about Jesus and not allow to be placed alongside Jesus. Said one, “The best reason to go to jail is to say that Jesus is Lord, and there is no other.”
“Never stop helping”.
Christians are no longer able to form charities and run NGO’s in the country, so their visibility in helping in care, education and food scarcity is much diminished, but the churches put a big stress on living out one’s witness to acts of helpfulness to neighbours, even though they may not be co-ordinated. Said one pastor in Kunming, “We cannot allow the state to break the link between Christians and good works.”
“Extreme togetherness”.
It is possible to gather beyond surveillance, but it takes some organizing and risk. One church gathers in a park at three in the morning with some members carefully disabling night cameras. Another group uses sport activities as cover. One church full of youngsters has created a climb and cave club and makes expeditions to high caves in the mountains.
“Elite pulpits”.
In the Three Self pulpits particularly, the sermons are often relayed to the local government office by CCTV. Some preachers see this as a new gospel opportunity to preach to an elite set of officials that would never be seen in church. One preacher who was bidden to place portraits of Mao and Xi at the front of his church placed them either side of the cross and promptly preached an exegetically faultless sermon on the “two thieves crucified either side of Jesus.” Weeks later an official casually suggested the portraits be removed to the back of the church.
There seems to be evidence that the growth of the church in China is slowing. Hard facts are not possible to uncover, but countryside churches are full of the elderly, reflecting the rush to the cities. And even the urban churches report a mixed bag. Some are growing. Some are slowing.
Nevertheless, optimism is widespread. Said an elderly evangelist, “I rejoice in the new restrictions, because the more it costs to witness, the more the Gospel gallops.” Others are convinced the heavy handedness of the State will backfire. Said a sociologist who identified as a ‘culture Christian’, “The state cannot hope to fill the problem of spiritual emptiness that besets the Chinese people with a materialistic ideology coercively applied – recent history has shown that a better washing machine is no substitute for a God that answers prayers.”