God's Grace Is Enough For Us

CHRISTIANITY HAS for so many centuries been identified with Western civilization that we who are Christians from the West tend to forget that this long association is a historical phenomenon and is therefore subject to change. In fact, our age is a period in which Christianity is beginning to lose its Western character and is taking on new forms and identities in other parts of the world--identities that have been forged through bitter struggles for survival and have come to reflect the social and cultural experiences of the peoples in whom the faith has taken root. Of all the churches in the non-Western world, the one whose story presents what is perhaps the most moving and dramatic challenge to Western Christendom is the church in the People's Republic of China.

My own exposure to the experience of the Chinese church and its implications for the Western conception of Christianity came during the years of 1981 to 1983 when I was in China doing research at Nanjing University. Before I had left the United States, I had met an elderly retired missionary who had lived in Nanjing in the '20s and '30s. She was intrigued by my impending journey and gave me an old photograph of her former church, bearing the inscription "Han Djung Church, 1937," and casually suggested that I try to discover whether it was still standing. The first Sunday I was in Nanjing, I managed to locate the only Protestant church then open in the city. I was taken aback when I recognized the Mo Chou Road Church as the building pictured in the faded snapshot and read the original name chiseled in stone over the front doors.

Today the old mission relationship is greatly downplayed by the Chinese Protestant church. Although the Three Self Patriotic Movement, the church's administrative body, recently resumed contact with the former mission-sending churches of the United States, it strongly emphasizes its independence, refusing to renew the old missionary relationship.

Since its inception in 1951, the Three Self Movement has also remained firm in its commitment to the social and economic goals of the communist government. For this the Three Self Movement has been criticized as a mouthpiece of the Communist Party by certain conservative church organizations outside of China. However, rather than basing judgments on Cold War perceptions of China, U.S. Christians might profit more from an attempt to understand the concerns and convictions that have motivated the church and its leaders since 1949, especially in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.

CHRISTIANITY WAS first brought to China in the seventh century but established a permanent presence there only in the 16th century through the efforts of Jesuit missionaries. However, the present church is primarily the result of the intensive missionary activity, both Protestant and Catholic, that followed the forcible opening of China in 1842 after the British victory in the Opium War.

Given the circumstances of the Western encounter with China--a decaying dynasty pitted against nations bursting with wealth and power on the upward swing of the Industrial Revolution--it is scarcely surprising that many Westerners, including the missionaries, believed in the inherent superiority of their own political, social, and economic institutions. The gospel thus entered China as an integral part of Western civilization and was spread through a variety of Western ecclesiastical, medical, social welfare, and educational institutions. As a result, the Christian message was often associated with Westernization in the Chinese consciousness.

When it came, the reaction to Western domination that began in the 1920s was intense, protracted, and violent. The Communist Party, itself a product of the anti-imperialist movement of this period, emerged in time to represent the only authentic nationalist alternative in China and, as such, has retained a strong anti-foreign strain throughout its history. But it was during the 1930s and '40s that the party's moral legitimacy was established.

Establishing a base in Shaanxi province, one of the most impoverished areas of the country, focusing their attention and efforts upon alleviating the misery of the Chinese peasants, and doggedly fighting the Japanese invaders during World War II, the Communists won the admiration of many educated Chinese who were disillusioned with the existing government. In 1949, after nearly 30 years of bitter struggle, the Communists came to power. On them were fixed the hopes of the rural poor as well as the hopes of many who were weary of war and corruption and longed for a brighter future.

During the turbulent years before 1949, Christianity continued to grow as a concentrated effort was being made to turn more and more of the church work over to Chinese hands. Yet Christianity remained a minority religion with its Western-educated leadership concentrated in the more cosmopolitan treaty ports.

The Protestant church was splintered into numerous denominations, another heritage of Western missionary activity. Moreover, despite a growing interest in social involvement, in certain groups the tendency toward individual piety and non-involvement in "worldly affairs" remained strong. Another problem was that for some Christians the distinction was not always clear between the gospel and the attractions of Western fashions and mores. For others the temptation was great to use the world of the church and the mission schools as an escape from the harsh realities of life that the majority of Chinese people faced.

Despite these all too human limitations within the Chinese church, there were also Christians who were deeply concerned about China's desperate situation and eventually became sympathetic to the Communist Party and its goals for the country. "National Salvation" was seen as an issue in which the church should be involved.

AFTER THE ESTABLISHMENT of the People's Republic, it was no longer possible for anyone to remain apolitical. To the new governors, non-cooperation or opposition to the new regime meant disloyalty to the Chinese people. Together with other influential social groups, the church was brought to the test in 1950 with the outbreak of the Korean War.

The United States government had opposed the Communists during the civil war with the Nationalists during the years 1946 to 1949 and continued to support the corrupt Nationalist regime even after its defeat and flight to Taiwan. U.S. involvement in the Korean War was a matter of grave concern for the communist government. Termed the "War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea," the conflict was perceived as a direct threat to the newly established People's Republic.

Due to the international crisis, demonstrations of loyalty to the new government were considered imperative for all Chinese citizens. For Christians, whose ties with Western churches made them suspect, the situation was particularly precarious. Responding to the rapidly changing political situation, a group of national Protestant church leaders drafted the "Christian Manifesto," which was eventually signed by 400,000 church members. The language used in the manifesto was purposefully uncompromising, stating a commitment to "heighten our vigilance against imperialism" and to "hasten the building of a Chinese church whose affairs are managed by the Chinese themselves."

The need to dissociate the Chinese church from its foreign connections and reorient its political loyalties was pressing enough to call forth fairly drastic actions. Financial assistance from foreign sources was rejected, and missionaries were encouraged to leave. Such a fundamental reorientation of the church required an organized leadership to negotiate its relationship with the new government.

The Three Self Reform Movement was thus established in 1951 as the first step in uniting the various Protestant groups into a new, independent Chinese Protestant church. The movement took its name from the slogan "self-government, self-support, self-propagation."

An insistence on ideological purity and a low tolerance for dissenting thought had been evident in the Communist Party even before 1949. As class struggle was considered the impetus for historical change, so ideological struggle was also held to be essential for the elimination of reactionary ideas and the development of a positive socialist consciousness.

THE KOREAN CONFLICT provided the catalyst for one of the early ideological campaigns that involved the church. In an extreme gesture of dissociation from the West, certain representative church leaders, both Chinese and foreign missionaries, were harshly denounced in public by close friends and associates. The severity of the attacks raised concern in Christian circles in the West that the participants in the campaign, all respected church leaders, had abandoned their Christian faith.

Similar concern was expressed over the publication of autobiographical self-criticisms written by church leaders who had been through the party's re-education programs. The focus of the attack was on the missionaries' emphasis on individualistic ethics and the "reformist" types of solutions to China's social problems that had rejected the Marxist principle of class struggle.

In China not only the intense pressure to conform but also the unwillingness to oppose a regime that seemed to be the country's only hope provided sufficient motivation for some Christians to participate in these campaigns. For the most idealistic, the temptation may have been overwhelming to equate the gospel of Christ with the success of the Chinese revolution and to sacrifice the emotional well-being of individuals for the perceived good of the society.

The '50s was a decade of hard work and enthusiasm for the new order. The officially recognized social groups within the country--political parties, cultural organizations, and religious bodies--concentrated their efforts on the campaigns to reorient the collective consciousness toward a socialist society.

During this period of support for the Communist Party and the socialist regime, sermons and religious instruction were often politicized, while interest in religion among the young and educated waned and church attendance dropped. In 1958, as a result of both declining membership and new government policies, the majority of churches were closed by the Three Self Movement, and churchgoing members of the different denominations joined together for common worship in the few churches that remained open.

IN THE LATE '50s and early '60s, violent policy shifts testified to a growing split within the Communist Party. One of the two principal factions favored a pragmatic approach to economic development, concentrating on heavy industry in urban areas. The other faction, headed by Chairman Mao Zedong (Tse-tung), feared the loss of revolutionary ideals in the period of economic reconstruction. A visionary and a daring revolutionary strategist, Mao continued to stress the transformation of human values and attitudes as the primary goal for the nation and looked to the peasants in the countryside for his inspiration.

This factional struggle intensified as the years progressed, reaching its peak in the Cultural Revolution. The purposes of the movement, which was launched by the party's Maoist faction, were variously expressed as purging the country of reactionary bourgeois and feudal tendencies which had begun to appear throughout the society, overturning the government and party bureaucracy, and returning political power to the worker and peasant classes.

In the struggle to rid the country of the corrupting influence of bourgeois ideas, the principal target became the intelligentsia, which in China was considered to include all teachers, persons in cultural fields, technicians, and those who had Western educations. Others in nominal positions of authority were sent off to reeducation schools or to the countryside to "learn from the peasants and workers."

The Maoist groups sought to eliminate all evidences of "feudal" superstitions and customs as well, including religion of any kind. Mosques, temples, and churches were shut down and defaced; religious and philosophical books were destroyed; and most religious leaders were sent away for re-education or manual labor among the laboring classes.

Christians came under attack not only for religious reasons but also because they were considered to be representatives of a foreign ideology. Although some small groups were able to continue to meet privately for prayer, other Christians found themselves cut off from Christian community for years. The church had, in effect, ceased to exist as an organized public institution.

In 1969 the Cultural Revolution was declared to have officially ended, but it was not until Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978 that substantive policy changes were made. Deng, a member of the rival faction during Mao's lifetime, abruptly changed the focus from ideology to economic development. Social, political, and cultural institutions were restored to their pre-Maoist forms. Sweeping economic changes have recently been made in both the urban and rural sectors, incorporating elements of a market economy. And more individual freedom has been permitted, including freedom of worship.

The Three Self Movement was revived in 1980, and the government has made an effort to reassure the Christian leadership that, within certain parameters, religious life would be tolerated and respected. The Three Self Movement received permission to reopen the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary in 1981. In subsequent years seminaries have also been reopened in Fuzhou, Shenyang, Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, and Hengzhou.

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION was for many Christian leaders and laypeople a time of hardship scarcely imaginable in the Western church. Strangely enough, however, although the violence of the time inflicted deep wounds upon the Christian community, a profound transformation appears to have taken place within the church. As institutional and hierarchical structures were stripped away and material worship aids confiscated, the Christian community found itself more directly dependent upon the grace of God to survive. Individual Christians, confronted with pain, isolation, and despair, testify to having found within themselves a deeper faith and a sense of God's presence in the midst of their own weakness.

I found myself greatly moved by the many stories I heard of quiet courage during those painful years. A pastor, imprisoned for two years, spoke of the emotional torment that drove him to consider suicide. Yet on the night that he planned to take his life, he somehow found enough faith to pray, and the words of the apostle Paul came to his mind: "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own." The words gave him the courage to live through the night and turned him from self-destruction to hope.

During the remainder of his time in prison, the pastor nurtured the will to live by watching the sunset every evening through the small window of his prison cell as he hummed an evening hymn. That tiny flicker of hope now burns steadily within him despite his own physical frailty and the uncertainty of life in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. When I asked him about the future of the church after the heavy blows it has received, he smiled. "God's grace is enough for us," he said.

Some of the most faithful and enduring are elderly laypeople. One woman greeted me in impeccable English at one of the churches I visited. A retired English instructor, she had been denounced as an American sympathizer during the Cultural Revolution and later sent to a re-education camp, where she was separated from other Christians and compelled to do manual labor.

Although she was over 60 at the time, she was meticulous about her work, particularly the task of cleaning the latrines, which had been given to her because no one else was willing to do the job.

She was determined to demonstrate to the other inmates that she would do her job willingly and to the best of her ability because her faith required of her a commitment to duty, no matter how degrading. She demonstrates the same strict adherence to Christian duty. In the struggling church, her strong-willed persistence has been instrumental in laying the foundations of Christian renewal.

Nearly 80 now, she plays the piano every Sunday morning, despite her rapidly deteriorating eyesight and several internal ailments. On Sunday afternoons she unfailingly visits other elderly Christians who are weaker and sicker than she, bringing them tapes of the morning service. Her children are not Christians and, fearing the outbreak of another anti-foreign movement, have repeatedly urged her to stop attending church. But she remains adamant. "I am not afraid of anything anymore," she says.

National church leaders were also victimized during the Cultural Revolution. Now quite elderly, they go about their work of rebuilding the church with a firmer resolve and a deeper sense of commitment to the gospel than they had before.

One man who had worked for years to build cooperation between the church and the state described the destruction of the seminary library by the Red Guards and his own successful attempt to save one-tenth of the books from the fire. He recalled his growing bewilderment as one after another of his colleagues--people known to have been supportive of the socialist regime--were denounced. Finally his' own wife was accused and held for six months. From that point he resolved that he would no longer acquiesce to the "beautiful words" of the ultra-leftists who wanted to wage incessant class struggle and attack those who opposed them in the name of socialist purity. "I am an old man now," he said. "But if such a movement ever arises again, I will not stand aside. I will resist to the end."

Seen against the background of the Cultural Revolution, the actions with which these Christians resisted the destructive forces around them seem insignificant. Yet these small acts of faith became channels for a power greater than the powers of this world. Through their humble gestures, the Spirit has shown itself in a new way. After having shared the suffering of the Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution, the church has emerged more firmly rooted in Chinese soil and more conscious of its identity than ever before.

In 1957 Bishop K.H. Ting, now chair of the Three Self Movement and president of the China Christian Council, eloquently summarized the church's position as a channel of God's grace in a socialist society:

At least we know, just because our Chinese church is weak and without antecedent prestige, that we can demonstrate how the church of the Lord in weakness shows forth strength; we can show the workings of God's might and thus give glory to God. God has indeed chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame them that are wise, and the weak things to put to shame them that are strong. This shows that the strength is from God and not from ourselves.

COMPARED WITH THE period Before 1949, the present-day church is a poor church, having long ago turned over its educational, medical, and social welfare institutions to the state. Since 1979 when Moen Church again opened its doors for worship in Shanghai, about 2,000 Protestant churches have been reopened. However, because the number of these urban churches is insufficient to meet the needs of the Christian population, particularly in the rural areas, private, lay-led worship groups--called "assembly points" by the Three Self Movement--have been crucial for the maintenance and development of Christian community.

Most of these, particularly those in urban areas, are related to the Three Self Movement and depend on it for the supply of Bibles and Christian literature as well as for assistance in the administration of the sacraments. Both churches and worship groups have abandoned old denominational divisions and consider themselves to be a united church, although flexibility in accommodating different worship traditions has been crucial in developing a true unity of spirit.

The worship groups have attracted a great deal of attention in churches outside of China because of their spontaneous organization and their reliance on lay leadership. Their astonishing proliferation is all the more remarkable considering the prohibition against public evangelism outside of church buildings.

There are no reliable statistics on the number of Protestant Christians in China today. The official count by the Three Self Movement is three million, triple the number of Protestant believers in 1949 and about the same number as the official count of Catholics by the Catholic Patriotic Association. However, unofficial Chinese sources, as well as the Chinese Church Research Center in Hong Kong, place the number much higher, estimating variously between 20 and 30 million out of a total population of more than one billion.

Some who attend church are merely curious; others are seriously seeking answers to questions that have become all the more urgent since the Cultural Revolution. A surprising number of visitors are young people.

One young factory worker, who had only recently demonstrated any interest in Christianity, groped for words to explain what he sought in the church. "The other fellows in my factory care only about making money and getting ahead," he said. "I work hard and almost all my time is taken up at the factory. But that doesn't satisfy me. I want to have something meaningful in my life."

Another recently baptized factory worker I met in the young people's group of the Mo Chou Road Church takes the message of Christ to heart. I had just tried to brush away a woman beggar who had approached us, when he startled me by carefully extracting several dog-eared ration coupons from his wallet and handing them to her. I tried to dissuade him from giving away his precious coupons, but he turned to me and asked awkwardly, "Isn't it true that Christians must share what they have with the poor?"

The unquenchable longing of the heart, the impulse to compassion, the courage to live through the night and the painful days ahead, the commitment to a hard task, and the determination to stand alone--these are varied glimpses of the Spirit's movement, elevating individuals beyond themselves and through them illuminating their society.

When I hesitatingly asked one pastor whether his church had not been split into conflicting factions during the Cultural Revolution, he bowed his head. "Yes," he said quietly, "but we don't talk of that anymore. Each person had made his own silent prayer of confession. Now we are together again." His words suggest a new meaning for the church that may be emerging from its baptism of fire. For in a country that has been battered by fanaticism, manifesting the love of God through reconciliation and the healing of wounds is certainly the greatest witness that the church can offer.

Brenda Sansom was a doctoral candidate in Chinese history at the University of Wisconsin at the time this article appeared. She was at Nanjing University from 1981 to 1983.