Christianity - in both the official and unofficial churches - is again
gaining momentum in China, and is a source of some consternation for
the party leadership. "Being Christian" is fashionable, with young
people sporting crosses as a mild form of dissent, and others feeling
the faith has a certain international cachet. But something more is at
work. In many interviews, congregants say the deity they worship
communicates, and has power in their lives, especially now when China
is going through immense, jarring economic changes that upset older
social contracts.

"People in China have a spiritual hunger, very much so," says an
official church pastor in Xiamen, "and there is a need for that to be
filled. I think this is the main reason why we continue to have larger
services."

Congregations in China comprise all ages, with younger people popping
up during the service to take cellphone calls outside - this being
Asia. Last Sunday, several Xiamen churches held a Christmas party,
notable because preaching took place. The gathering at an ocean-side
exhibition center was so large that 300 people were turned away. In
Quanzhou, north of Xiamen, church members tore down an 800-seat
edifice, and have nearly finished a 2,500-seat $1.6 million new church
which is 90 percentfinanced by the 3,000 congregants there.

Along the easy-going southeast coast, Protestant worshipers pay little
attention to China's Shanghai-based official church hierarchy. They
hold Bible study groups, have choir rehearsals, and gather in volunteer
groups. "We have to join the [official] church, but then we do and say
what we want," says a local pastor. "We preach the living God."

Still, what's happening around Xiamen is a far cry from the way Ji Lu
worships in Beijing, the center of political power. Mr. Ji helps lead
prayers in an unofficial church - where 20 people gather in a room so
small that when they share tea and cakes afterward, all must stand.

Ji is one of an estimated 30 to 60 million "unregistered" Christian
believers. His sect is made up of nearly a hundred other small groups
around Beijing - part of a range of illegal evangelical sects in China,
some extremely devout, who say the church fills a "spiritual void" in
their lives.

The rising evangelical movement in China is creating a complex and
dynamic set of tensions, as individual longings challenge a state
operating for a half century on principles of collective social order.
Not only are there renewed government efforts to curb Christian
churches, policies to stop Sunday schools, restrictions on the movement
of pastors from one city to another, attempts to dilute theological
content, and efforts to stymie new church applications with red tape,
but tensions and suspicions have also been growing between official and
unofficial "home church" Christians as well.

One expert says the home church-official church split is more serious
in the long term than Beijing's scattered, stop-and-start efforts to
rein in religion. "A lot of Chinese are becoming Christians," argues
the US-trained theologian. "But the biggest problem is between
unregistered and registered churches. There is a lot of antipathy
between the two, a lot of water under the bridge."

Christianity in China began to flourish after the Opium Wars, as
European and American missionaries set out for the Orient. "In 1842,
the Gospel of God was disseminated in Xiamen," according to the Xinjie
Church council here. Xiamen is one of the original five treaty ports
negotiated with China's imperial court. Churches grew rapidly
throughout China, and have been regarded by officialdom and locals as a
mixed blessing ever since.

When the communists consolidated power in 1949 under Chairman Mao
Zedong, religion was reorganized. Missionaries were largely driven out.
Catholics, Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants, and Taoists were brought
under government control, and they remain the five officially
sanctioned religions in China today. Protestants found themselves
gathered under one roof called the "Three Self Patriotic Movement" -
whose purpose was to bring the Gospels into the service of the state.

According to the official Xinjie church records, "In 1966, owing to the
Great Cultural Revolution, church services came to a halt. This
situation lasted 13 years."

Since the 1980s, as China liberalized, churches were again allowed to
open. But a burst of religious expression brought a series of tighter
controls whose actual enforcement has varies from province to province
- with urban areas such as Beijing and Shanghai drawing more oversight
and intervention than rural China and the south.

Churches in the city of Wenzhou last year conducted a campaign of civil
disobedience in response to official efforts to stop the teaching of
Sunday School. Evangelicals in Henan Province have been targeted, as
have home-church prayer leaders in Shanghai, who have been sent to
labor camps in recent months. Church building is constricted. A
government official in Fujian says one reason for so many home churches
is that official services are overflowing. "It is very difficult to
register any new churches right now," says the official. There has
always been a policy not to allow more churches, but now it is being
enforced. The government wants to stop the evangelical growth."

Estimates of Chinese Christians vary widely. The official figure is 15-
20 million unregistered, 1.8 million registered. Some Christians with
access to unpublished figures in Beijing say the number is 85 million
unregistered, 5 million registered. A recent graduate of Nanjing
Theological Academy, considered the center of official Protestantism,
gives a figure of 60 million. Jason Kindopp, a visiting scholar at
George Washington University says the figure is "at least" 30 million,
and possibly 60 million.

In some ways, the efforts of the government in recent years has been to
offer greater support to official churches - while making efforts to
undermine the evangelical fervor found in home churches.

For the majority of Christians in home churches, the basic question is
how or whether to worship in an official church, which they see as
woefully compromised by state rules. Ji, the home-church believer in
Beijing, for example, jokes about one leading theological institute as
a place where first-year students believe in God. By the second year,
they are merely "good men." By the third year "you become a ghost who
no longer believes in grace or being saved. But you are a ghost with a
car, a salary, and a job."

Typical of what Ji objects to is a 1998 policy (recently given new
prominence) known as the "Theological Construction Campaign." It is
promulgated in leading Chinese seminaries - and can be summed up by
what are known as the "Four Againsts": the Bible is not the revealed
Word, Jesus was not born of a virgin, the resurrection is a myth, and
there is no "second coming." Along with this view is a strong push
among official Protestant church leaders to eradicate the concept of
individual "salvation." To the essentially conservative Chinese
Protestant mind, such ideas are an effort to "de-Christianize
Christianity," says one Guangdong pastor.

Such liberal views do not yet predominate in official churches,
especially in rural areas. But what separates Christians in China runs
far deeper, and is reflected by fears on both sides. In numerous
interviews, official church pastors said they couldn't currently engage
home-church brothers and sisters (as they are known to each other) due
to legal constraints.

Official clergy say that home-church Christians simply cannot forget
the Cultural Revolution period and its attendant horrors. Yet from the
home-church view, to blame the Cultural Revolution for all problems,
and to assume that all is forgiven, is too easy and too risky. In their
memory, Protestants underwent more than a 10-year persecution - but
they have been targeted since 1951. Land was taken, purges and "self-
correction campaigns" were conducted, patriotic loyalty tests were
prescribed, overseas support was cut, churches were closed, and pastors
were demonized as imperialists or parasites. Moreover, they point out
that evangelical Protestants are still arrested, and that campaigns
(like the new liberal theology) are still powerful in official circles.

A Chinese band brings glad tidings

At Christmastime in the remote mountain valleys of Fujian, it is
possible to pick up the live sounds of a brassy approximation of
"Silent Night" or "Onward Christian Soldiers" or even "Jingle Bells."

Each year at this time, the 15-member brass band of the Hutou Christian
Church are on the march. Farmers, construction workers, and small
business owners temporarily leave their jobs to assemble the only brass
band, amateur or professional, anyone in this region has heard about.
They even have a new CD.

China is not known for participatory Christmas celebrations. But in
these terraced Fujian mountain villages, where the lines between
official and unofficial churches are blurred beyond recognition, well,
Christians will be Christians when December rolls by.

The Hutou church was officially founded in 1983, though it started with
more than a thousand Chinese unofficial believers. As pastor Li Qing
Ling tells it, the band is a gift. The church considered what it could
give to their city of 100,000 and decided it should be "something
different" that everyone would enjoy.

"We decided to have a brass band because in the countryside, you need a
sound that people can hear. This is a very open area," he says.

Music plays a large role in Hutou services; members proudly point to a
drum set and electronic keyboard in their 800-seat sanctuary. But to
drum up, so to speak, a brass band - took nights of planning, months of
fundraising, lining up the proper talent, and sewing uniforms.

After three years of work, the church sent a delegation in 1996 to a
music shop in Quanzhou, on the coast. They purchased 12 instruments.
Each year for the next five years, they bought another. Progress was
slow since band members first needed to learn how to play the
instruments they signed up for.

Yet now the Hutou Christian Church Brass Band "tours" with three
trombones, two snare drums, a bass drum, two clarinets, three trumpets,
a cymbal, and three alto horns. A saxophone was purchased this year,
but you can't hear it yet. The sax player is still learning how to blow
his jazzy riffs.

END