President's Corner

Dear friends,

    Bang, bang, bang!

    House churches will be banned! Participants in “unauthorized” overseas religious conferences will receive severe punishment! Landlords who rent to religious organizations will face criminal prosecution!

    Those are just some of the consequences of the changes to the Regulations on Religious Affairs, adopted on Oct. 7, exactly one month after China’s State Council distributed a draft to collect proposed alterations.

    These modifications expand bureaucratic control over religious affairs, prohibiting house churches, Bible studies, or prayer meetings outside Communist-controlled institutions. The financial penalty for holding an unauthorized service could be as much as $31,000.

    While anticipating potentially the worst persecution since the Cultural Revolution, Chinese Christians wonder if this  crackdown will resemble the Party’s arrest of Christian dissidents in the 1950s. Will theirs be the same fate as the hundreds of pastors who were sent to concentration camps in Hitler’s Germany? 

    Chinese house churches are very apolitical. They simply want to prove that the Church is not owned by the State and that the concept of government control over the Church is doctrinally false.

    As this major storm comes to the Chinese Church, I remember Pastor Allen Yuan, who married me and my wife. Because he refused to join the official church, he was sentenced to life in prison in 1958 for “counter-revolutionary crimes.” 

    He was released in 1979 after serving 22 years in prison but banned from traveling outside of Beijing for 10 years. Every time we met at his house church, he always said, “The greater the persecution, the more believers there will be.”

    Thank you for supporting families of prisoners and our upcoming biblical worldview training in Hong Kong. I ask that you continue to pray for a revival in China during this troubling time.

    Your fellow coworker for the persecuted faithful, 

        Bob Fu