Pros and cons of registration: churches in China - Column

Christian Century, Dec 7, 1994 by Mary-Margaret Patterson

AS RECOGNIZED churches and other Christian groups in China register their places of worship with the government under the new religious regulations, observers are wondering how the growing number of unofficial "house" churches will respond. These independent, often clandestine churches must decide how far they can trust government promises and the rule of law, as well as how much religious persecution the unregistered will continue to suffer.

History hardly inspires confidence. Since the 1949 revolution, the government has required churches to shed their ties with the West and become all Chinese--self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating--if they expect to survive. Membership in this so-called three-self movement, which was imposed on churches during the 1950s, also has required embracing the government's "patriotic" socialist political front--a stand deeply repugnant to some Chinese Christians. As resisting pastors were detained or otherwise repressed, organized Christianity declined and virtually disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, except for small groups of Christians who met secretly in each other's homes without trained clergy.

Mainline organized churches and their leaders resurfaced in the aftermath of this upheaval and were allowed to resume open worship in some of the old church buildings. But they still were required to follow the three-self line. Some house-church Christians regard this accommodation as a sell-out to the Communist Party and decline to participate in government-recognized churches. House-church Christians frequently fear repercussions for practicing Christianity outside the recognized church.

Today more than 8,000 Protestant churches, as many as 4,000 Catholic churches, and 20,000 other meeting points are recognized by the government. They are all crowded. I will never forget the sight of a packed church parking lot where people received communion through the windows because the church was so crowded they couldn't get in.

Millions of other Chinese Christians meet in houses and apartments, sometimes connected to each other by public address systems. Typically, they have no ordained clergy. Many are located in poor and rural areas. "Small-group fellowship [in such house churches] and personal evangelism have led to an explosive growth of Christians, up to 10 percent of the population in some districts," according to Donald MacInnis, author of Religion in China Today. The largest of these groups is the Little Flock or Assembly Christians, founded in 1922. Another is the True Jesus Church. Estimates of the total number of Christians in China range from an official low of about 8 million to a maximum of perhaps 60 million in a country with a population of 1.2 billion.

Lately people have become concerned that the government's new regulations may dampen religious participation and drive more of it underground. The first regulation, adopted last January, calls for all church groups to register with the Religious Affairs Bureau, an arm of the government closely tied to the police. Previous registration was with the church-run three-self movement. The second regulation reiterates the long-accepted principle that foreigners may not proselytize in China.

Malevolent as these rules may sound to some Westerners, they are basically nonthreatening, argues Jean Woo of the National Council of Churches' China office. Woo believes the regulations are directed not against open worship, but against groups evangelizing secretly. This is a particular problem if any of the leaders are non-Chinese--anathema to a government that fears foreign involvement and regards it as spiritual imperialism and a political threat.

Veteran Chinese Protestant church leader Bishop K. H. Ting, who is encouraging all Christian groups to register, calls the registration "protective" because it could give public legitimacy to house churches that have been easy targets for persecution. "I believe that the government's objective is to ensure social tranquillity, to give protection to normal religious activities and ... to ensure that undesirable domestic and foreign elements have no room for maneuver," Ting said in a recent interview distributed by the Amity Foundation's news service. Amity is a Chinese Christian-inspired social service agency that cooperates with the three-self movement and receives wide support from American mainline churches. Ting acknowledges recent religious persecutions and predicts that under the new regulations "there will still be venues [of religious activity] which are disbanded, but ... these will be a very small minority."

Recently hassled in Beijing was a housechurch group called the Beijing Sacred Love Fellowship, which includes some well-known dissidents. Seven of its members were detained or arrested during the summer, according to the Associated Press. Typically it is evangelical fellowships that get into the most trouble with the government. One well-publicized case involved a missionary of a Pentecostal sect, Dennis Balcombe, who, with six colleagues, was arrested and detained for four days in a Henan village while visiting local Christians. He said he and members of his group were "beaten, manhandled and robbed" by the Public Security Bureau before being expelled, according to Hong Kong's English-language South China Morning Post.