AT an underground  Bible College that protects its covert identity with great care, I got the right to take a picture only after making promises it would never reach the internet. The place of this school is in one of the many umpteen cities in China with over 1m population (it’s projected that 12yrs there will be 200 Chinese cities exceeding 1m). A factory owner became mysteriously convinced that the building he was operating in was haunted and bringing him bad luck. He promptly sold it at a ridiculously low price and the school bought it. It’s in the middle of this giant city up against a little hillside and scarcely anyone knows it exists. Students must not leave the building and even I could not walk around outside the school (which looks like a closed factory from the outside.) Over 100 students live for months on end inside this transformed factory where they eat, sleep, study and worship. In late September I was in the bowels of this place, that reminded me of the catacombs in Rome.  Luther’s refurbished Pauline ideas of how to live were given an airing …”the just shall live by faith”. Has any one graduated from this school? Is this faith a piece of cake as we say? Luther would argue we’re all in kindergarten and anyone that says he has mastered this way has likely either forgotten it or never known it. The natural and broken elements lodged in the human heart cause us to recoil from trusting this unseen foundation of grace the Father has put under our lives, in Christ. Mere Apostolic words preached and heard, and the subtlety of the Spirit urge us beyond our comfort zone to rest our lives on the Invisible. These subjects and others replaced the buzz, grinding and fitting of metal gears and parts.  Surely the neighbors must be saying to each other “something’s happening over there but I don’t know what it is”