I have just returned from my 5^th trip to China in the last five years. Here follows a few of my reflections one week after completing another teaching marathon providing a course in Christian Ethics in four seminaries in different provinces. In this visit I saw everything I saw before, only more!   China’s reconstruction of its society continues unabated. The countryside continues to be emptied at a stunning pace. While reputedly independent business has slowed marginally the State’s own investment in China’s economic boom has not slowed. The marvel of China’s transformation is the marvel of top down power and authority.

The State is very wealthy and powerful and it continues to build China at a pace that boggles the mind. High Speed rail continues to expand in leaps and bounds every year connecting more of its cities. For every one significant public works project currently in progress in America China probably has a few thousand projects under way. Over the last year I had read that China’s economy was slowing but one thing is everywhere evident, that part of the economy sustained by the Central Government’s industry and investment is not slowing. The breadth of the State’s construction activities is likely unrivaled in the history of governments. Literally everywhere one turns major public works projects, often gigantic in size, are occurring. Immense national greatness is about to be intentionally hall marked and the consequences dimly grasped.

Top down authority is showing its economic muscle in a grandiose remake of China. It’s a stunning display. Centralized power is over seeing an economic – cultural shift in its vision for China. It’s awesome, pervasive, and tremendously ‘successful’- effecting a sea change – the urbanization, capitalization and ‘factorization’ of a mere billion or so people!

The question that everyone in the West is debating is whether this top down power is really moderating and liberalizing. Hong Kong is an exception and the verdict on whether they will gain even the freedom they were promised is still out. In the main land the people seem most interested in making money and tasting the good life. It is true people are expressing their grievances more but little evidence exists that the Beijing governing elite are really having a rethink about their principle of top down power and the rights of the people and whether the people really want such an arrangement.

My impression is that many of the people in Mainland China seem to have formed a kind of cynical paternalism in their attitude toward the government although their love for and pride of China is strong. The governing elite on the other hand seem driven to over function and publically prove a kind of Aristotelian ethic of moral superiority to rule by their anti corruption, anti prostitution campaign within and against high ranking members in the party. The attitude of top down power seems characterized by over functioning while the attitude of the people seem to me one of under functioning – a kind of laissez –faire attitude toward their government except for a few ethnic separatists groups on the parimeter, a few intellectuals and poet types –and one other small group.

This group is the ‘Underground’ or ‘House Church’ movement. This movement was born sixty-six years ago because enough Christians did not take well to the then new Communist government’s attempts to control the church, a policy and practice that remain in place to this day. The birth of the underground church occurred because some Christians refused to submit to the top down impress and control on the church. The new communist government wanted to domesticate and socially quarantine the Christian church’s cultural impact and potential political threat by virtue of its independence and feared interaction with the ‘imperialist’ West. And this going underground was not merely about freedom from a Western viewpoint. The underground church went underground because of obedience not modern freedom sensibilities. It is true this movement is just a tempest in a teacup but one must beware of despising the day of small things. The Kingdom of God in this world almost always lives in the shadows of small insignificant things.

During my working visit this year I learned a little more about this movement. The underground or house church movement remains vital and growing. Country/rural congregations have lost members over the last ten years because of the shift to a factory industrial economy based in the cities but city congregations are growing. There are five streams or developments in the movement numbering several million. But these exist, for the most part, in strings of house congregations with pastors who are under pastors. In most settings one cannot go to any publically recognizable place and see this church and find out where it is at and who is in charge. Indeed it is underground and disparate, loosely but in fact really connected in one of these five streams.

In many locations women provide the leadership needed and their number far exceed men. One pastor’s class I taught for a week in the mountains was composed of approximately 25 women and 3 men. The ladies were a force to be reckoned with. They were wives, mothers as well as the main leaders of the church. One pastor may in fact shepherd 10 or 20 house church congregations. In one seminary/college I served in a major city the principle in his forties introduced me to their founder – a woman around eighty years of age. She gave me a lusty smile her countenance bearing the impress of an undefeated warrior.

In a very few locales congregations have emerged above ground and come to tacit working arrangements with the government and with the official government registered ‘Three Self Churches’ without becoming registered. But my experience now 5 years in the making, confirmed by new conversations, argues that the popular narrative of growing tolerance by the government is not consistent and nor reliable. Because of economic development assumptions are made about the liberalization of Chinese society. But just about the time a person makes this conclusion some one in the top down power chain becomes anxious or randy and a new series of intrusions occur. Even so in many locales especially in the far north persecution of underground church leaders has moderated little over the years. The Communist Party still possesses a vision, albeit a changing vision, of what does and does not contribute to Chinese culture and an inbred fear of groups assembling and indoctrinating independent of government control. In the West we make a distinction between the civil and the sacred, the religious and the secular. But my sense is that the Communist party does not get this distinction and for one reason – they had too much ‘religion’ in their political platform from the get go.

To state the matter directly, along with the explicit paternalism, there is still some ‘religion’ in the State’s communism – Marxism was always a secular variant of the Kingdom of God. Beyond order and justice, the rightful vocation of all governments, the communist government remains committed designers and mangers in their socio –culture project even though this task has become more complex as China modernizes, as socio-economic mobility occurs among its people and as it is more exposed and responsible to international values and critique.

This year in a province once thought to have gained considerable religious tolerance and which enjoyed in many instances ‘above ground’ normality churches were forced back to a more subtle covert posture because local authorities returned to their policy of repression. One church costing millions of RMB thought to have established itself above ground was bull dozed to the ground. Top down power is by nature unpredictable, fickle and unsafe. Seasoned leaders in this Underground/House Church movement know this. Even so their caution is not to be interpreted as fear. While few openly defy the government I have not talked to anyone who obey demands to cease and desist. They just go down and come up somewhere else most often within the space of 24 hours. One group upon being instructed to disband and join a near by government registered church simple reset their meeting times at hours apparently too early for the authorities.

In some locales authorities have been at times tolerant and the believers have built churches or rented facilities then intolerance revives and these are closed or destroyed.

In Beijing a different sort of group of non – government church has emerged and become bold. They bought their own building and commenced to meet publically. But within a short time their pastor was arrested and jailed then released and the building chained and it remains chained. Now for three years they meet year around in the park in the open air. On any given Sunday up to 2000 members gather but their pastor is often arrested on Friday and released on Monday.

This year in all but one of the house church seminaries I taught in I was required to go into the school facility under cover and remain inside for the entire week – no leaving the premises. These schools exist with as little a social footprint in their environs as possible and their facilities are almost always not recognizable from the outside and the students living inside leave the premises very seldom, which means for most students once every four months. Most schools offers a diploma, a bachelors and masters as well as a program for practicing pastors needing formal education. All degrees ultimately come from an established accredited Asian theological school outside China and most of the teachers come in as missionaries with their own support.

When the View From Below Comes From Above

In a future posting I will develop one of my ethics lectures that I taught this year. The lecture I will post provides the theological and ethical rationale for a segment of the church in China breaking away and going underground and staying underground (more or less for nearly seven decades). My lecture (given at three of the four seminaries, to be posted in the near future) returns to Karl Barth, Martin Niemoller, and the Barman Declaration by the Confessing Church in the 1930’s. In crafting this Declaration Barth whetted his sword razor sharp in order to expose the Nazi’s ‘trespass’. Hitler and his Nazis required official control of the Church in Germany and wanted to domesticate it and organize it around their top down cultural National Socialism project. In a word (here paraphrased) Barth and the Confessing Church said in effect “the church does not belong to you or to us that you may require it and we may give it over to you. Obedience to a higher claim on us the church obligates us to decline your demand and name it for what it is. You have trespassed the propriety of your rightful reach over society – the church belongs to Christ. It exists for his mission and purpose alone and no others and he alone is its head and sole authority and as Lord over the church he is alive through the Spirit, the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.” (The Barman Declaration was a declaration not written in the first person nor composed as a letter to Hitler but indeed sent to and read by him.)

Not unlike the Confessing Church in 1930’S Germany the underground church in China is indeed a free church movement in its radical obedience to Christ’s sole Lordship over the Church. It was born over against the centralized government’s attempt to control Christ’s church and it continues vigilant in this posture.

While the historical situation is entirely different between Germany and China the issue of propriety and domain as regards the church remains the same. There is clarity, timeless clarity, in the Barman Declaration especially regarding the church’s relation to any egregious behavior of the state whenever and wherever that occurs.

Christmas /Advent Mission Appeal

By the time this academic year concludes, the Lord willing and if the creek doesn’t rise, I will have completed my goal of serving between 8 and 10 schools. My vice has been that while I have succeeded in getting into these schools and teaching for credit college and masters level courses I have not succeeded in raising sufficient support to balance even my expenses. If you are looking for a micro mission project to support please consider this one.

May you claim the Peace that Christ came to give; the peace that gives favor with God and serenity in the soul.

* Some of you who read the title of this article will recognize the phrase “ the view from below”. It comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer description of his experience as a prisoner. Here it is obviously infused with a different meaning