The Global Church Era · 1920s-present · China
The Chinese Church - Indigenous & Suffering
Not yet available
There's no built conversation for this tradition here yet.
About This Movement
In the 1920s Chinese Christians began founding churches that owed nothing to the foreign missions. Wei Enbo founded the True Jesus Church in Beijing in 1917; Watchman Nee's Little Flock assemblies date from 1922; the Jesus Family from 1927. Their leaders wrote copiously — Nee's The Spiritual Man appeared in 1928, and Wang Mingdao published his own account of fifty years in 1950 — and the itinerant preacher John Sung kept diaries his family later compiled. After 1950 the Christian Manifesto and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement reorganized Protestant church life under the state; Wang Mingdao published 'We, Because of Faith' in 1955 and was imprisoned from 1955 until 1980, and Watchman Nee was imprisoned from 1952 until 1972. Much church life has gone on since outside registered structures, and in November 1998 house-church leaders published a joint Confession of Faith. No living person and no present-day community is named here: what is known is thinnest and least safe to make public exactly where the growth has been greatest, and that is a fact about the church itself, not only about the available sources.
Sources
- Watchman Nee, The Spiritual Man (1928) and Little Flock literature, including the Nee-to-Lee succession corpus published through Living Stream Ministry; Wang Mingdao, Wushi nian lai (1950; ET A Stone Made Smooth, 1981) and 'We, Because of Faith' (1955); John Sung's diaries, posthumously compiled by his family (primary)
- True Jesus Church records (1917-present); Jesus Family records (1920s-40s) (primary) — The True Jesus Church holds a Oneness-family confession of faith, distinct from mainstream trinitarian doctrine.
- The state-church contest: the Christian Manifesto (1950) and TSPM records; denunciation-campaign records; imprisonment records (Nee 1952-72; Wang 1955-80) (primary) — These records include both official, state-aligned documents and material produced under coercion, offering a fuller picture from both sides.
- Note on sourcing: current house-church directories, network data, and information that could identify living, non-public believers are deliberately not used here (primary) — Real people could be put at risk by identifying them, so anything about the church's present-day state here rests only on published, publicly available figures and standard scholarship — never on unpublished or identifying material.
- Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (Yale, 2010); Daniel Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) (secondary)
- Chinese Christian numbers: Pew 2011 (approximately 67 million) versus TSPM/CCC official figures versus movement claims (reference) — Pew's figure is independently cross-checked; the official (TSPM/CCC) and movement figures are self-reported. The real spread between these different counts is the honest picture, not collapsed into a single number.