Dr Dan’s Teaching Mission Update: China Fall 2013

There are over 100 underground seminaries currently flourishing in China. A few operate out in the open in the south but most carry on in the shadows. To date over the last three years I have a served a little less than ten. There are Government approved and co-opted churches in which the government has ultimate restrictive control and say and then there are the underground churches. The former derive their permission to exist from the state and the latter from God. The former I call churches organized around top down power and the latter underground church is organized around bottom up power. The mere fact of the relocation of power in the underground movement accounts for a good deal of the new energy that is released.

I am writing this having just returned from China to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand where I will attempt some R&R and do the final editing for the long over do book “Existence and Faith: The Doing and Undoing of Religion in America”. Circumstances beyond my control have delayed the final editing until now. Here follows a brief report of the five legs of my mission teach in China then out to Malaysia and back in again. Of the five stops three were especially skittish about pictures and any precise blogging that would draw attention to their location and identity. In many places the situation appears to be loosening and it is but then just about when one thinks that calm has at long last arrived here to stay the corpse of old zealots suddenly starts kicking and flagellating.

I will avoid a chronological order and share bits and pieces freely of this six-week run. The visa process is sometimes daunting and from my standpoint inflicts unnecessary burdens. In order to fulfill my assignments I had to go in and come out and then return  – always as a tourist.

At least one school I worked in has achieved a working sharing relationship with an approved government church and enjoys greater freedom. I have included with their permission a number of pictures from my time with them. There are cities in the south of China from Shanghai to Hangzhou where little government resistance occurs. My impression is that schools from the North and West have migrated to these cities and set up shop but remain very careful perhaps far beyond any caution due. Within 10 years the situation will be radically different, the Chinese are can do people extremely aggressive and undaunted at this time in history. Traveling to many Asian countries I feel this distinction sharply. The day when Mainland Chinese underground churches will educate their own teachers cannot be far away. Several of my students are going abroad for M Div’s. One leader told me within ten years itinerant teachers from the west and other Asian countries will not be needed.

In Beijing I asked one leader what the key to his success in planting and building churches was from a human standpoint and he simply said the government loosened the chokehold on us just a little and we immediately exploited this slight easement. He has been working for thirty years building underground churches and his story is amazing. It is being written up for me and will be posted soon.

I taught again in Beijing, stayed in a modest hotel and walked to the ‘school’ located in business high-rise office building. Here I met up fifteen older students working on their master degree. The course was Christian Ethics. The challenge during this week was translation. The translator that was originally planned fell through the last minute so two young guys were immediately drafted. English to Mandarin takes an experienced translator to pull off, these guys were not trained and still in the early stages of learning English. Many things could not be translated so I invented stories and suborned them into my service like mules enlisted to carry one’s luggage. I would spin a story and then show where the idea was in the story. Straight concept was way out of reach. But it was the heart these two guys nicknamed King David and Joseph the favored son. While one translated the other manned the computer word search back up post. The second day Joseph said he was whipped his brain had never worked so hard – and he looked haggard. I was like Pharaoh’s taskmaster lashing them to deliver the goods. But they had heart – and prayed, really embracing the challenge with spirit and this proved the tipping point I am sure. Spirit and grace salvaged the week and in fact this is true. And on the last day the students demanded that I share something from my own story in life and ministry so I told a few personal stories with no agenda whatsoever. So grateful were they to see my ‘in the trenches real person identity trying to work out my calling juggling the fatherhood duties of not so distant bygone days that they secretly pulled their RMB’s and gifted me a small send-off – a brisk and sweet embrace of their kindness and gratitude to me for my sojourn to their school.

This time, as always, it was a steady culinary struggle. Chinese eat many things at one meal. One meal where I went out with the surrounding pastors to a restaurant I counted 37 dishes on the table that turned in the middle. I am gastrointestinally challenged and did not look forward to school mealtime. Often I thought how to come up with a good excuse to legitimize my absence at the table, perhaps resort to the tried and true method – cut my toe off or run into a building face first. In spite of gastrointestinal disturbances by the grace of God I kept one foot out of the net and kept laying up new bounty on my ‘new’ ethics insights and also on my ride through Galatians. In Paul’s faith – sight polarity [2 Corithians5:7]  there is an ethical well of pure water so deep and fresh as to be inexhaustible.  In my course through Galatians I paid attention, to D G Dunn, Wright and Sanders gathering many insights [‘The New Perspective] but then went on to show that their Covenantal Nomism paradigm disintegrates under post exilic Hasidim separatism which infected 1st Century Judaism with legalism coming through  the back door. After working through this book time and again I have never understood Paul so well. Even now Paul, who is the radical thinker and theologian Apostle, is domesticated by the church. In order to unhook Christianity from the train called Judaism and set it free to go into the Gentile world unencumbered by food laws, Sabbath days and holy rituals like circumcision and the other 600 plus laws he reshaped the people of God identity and the ethics that would carry it. Thanks to Paul the Christian way is ‘extra nomos’ – outside law. These insights and ‘new’ ideas I will put in my theological discussion column in this blog in 2 weeks.

After my first August run in China I went to Penang, Malaysia to meet the president of MBTS and speak to the student body and take a three-hour lecture with the D Ministry students on the foundation of Christian Ethics. The president Dr John Ong is a prince of a man and able leader of this school. I am honored to have bumped into him and liaise with MBTS to help out in their China seminary education mission. Beyond their service to Malaysia, China is their main mission field and they are coordinating teachers for underground seminaries all over China ranging from 40 students to a hundred or more.

The last school I served in southern China, ‘Union’ (September 18 to 27) had 46 students terrible as an army with banners. Before class started they sang and then prayed and when the appointed student prays he or she pauses between complete phrases at which moment the entire class provides a resounding a refrain – “amen”. It stirs the blood to say the least.  I found the students spirited, full of questions and so full of youth’s verve trying their best to calibrate their devotion with what is true in the Christian faith.  I am sure I fielded over 150 questions during this one week, eight hour a day course on Galatians.

Many students come to Union from far away some from the Mongolian border. In the middle of the week the president took me out to dinner in the mountains with my translators to a restaurant that dates back to the old way of raising one’s own food, cooking in a kitchen that dates back to the 1800’s with a little ditch outside the kitchen where live fish await their destiny so that from swimming to eating is a matter of a few minutes.

At dinner I learned about the president’s history. During the Cultural Revolution they confiscated all Bible’s all around China also in the city I was teaching in threatening imprisonment and hard labor for those who did not surrender them. He told me how his mother salvaged the only Bible in the area wrapping it in plastic and hiding it between a rock crevice under the stone bridge in her neighborhood much later when the heat resided she recovered it and it survives to this day. And true to her devotion her son now the president and founder of Union became an evangelist and traveled China for years building little clandestine house churches eventually ending up in prison. Such is the salt behind this school’s beginning by this family.

At Union one girl sat on the front row 20 years old with the maturity far exceeding her years.  She had a natural way of keeping everything real and the questions she asked revealed her mind. With dead seriousness wrapping her question in a beguiling smile, as if it was a bit humorous and serious at the same time, she asked me why unlike her classmates the Christian message didn’t wind her up with zeal and feeling, surely there was something fundamentally wrong with her she implored. I told her to sit easy with feelings and flux of zeal and devotion and close to the teaching that made sense and spoke to her. She said “I think what you teach makes sense to me”. She was one of three out of the entire class who spoke English. She traveled 40 hrs by train from a city in the northwest close to Russia.

I went again to the motorcycle prison seminary. This is the name that I penned on it because when one goes into this school (once a motorcycle factory) there is no coming out until you served your time. This year about 70 students attend and live there male and female. The school is as obvious as a bird’s nest in a thicket. You can be looking right at it and never see a school. Once inside walks outside are prohibited. Inside an intense routine of worship, study, classes, and (in keeping with their habit) fast eating occurs like clockwork. Romances are not allowed. But who is surprised when 10 minutes after graduation ‘friends’ transmute into bride and groom and start ringing the wedding bells.

In my upcoming blog posting I will share a few thoughts and stories from the other seminaries that I taught at in China during this August – September 2013 run. Attached are a few Union pictures and a few others from 2 other schools plus a couple shots from my street walks. With these there are a couple shots from my visit to MBTS.

I must confess I am spent totally. Lecturing all day every day including morning and evening refocusing the lectures ends up a 12 hr day. I emptied the bucket again and again until there was not a drop.  Chiang Mai is my appointed R&R town in northern Thailand. Here I will spend a couple weeks making the final, long over do, changes on my book before submitting it to MBTS then return to teach at a new Karen seminary along the Thai Burma border [Masters students only

God Bless you

Daniel

Don’t miss more photos from the road posted in the following China Photo Essay Post.