Independent Protestant Movements (1930–Present)

This chapter examines independent Protestant movements in China from the 1930 to the present. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Protestant foreign missionaries encountered occasional and sometimes violent resistance in China. At the same time, independent Chinese movements and leaders increasingly displaced foreign-controlled Protestant denominations and mission agencies. Then, with the Communist takeover, the Chinese expelled all foreign missionaries and sought to stamp out the imperialist Western religion. Under these hostile circumstances, previously formed independent churches such as the True Jesus Church, the Jesus Family, and the Little Flock, along with independent evangelical pastors such as Wang Mingdao, provided the necessary resources for survival and even growth during the repressive Cultural Revolution (1966–76). With the easing of religious restrictions in 1979, China witnessed an unprecedented explosion of Christian conversions, particularly of the evangelical/Pentecostal variety. An estimated 1 million evangelical Christians now live in the coastal city of Wenzhou, and an increasing number of Chinese urban elites are turning to Christianity.

The True Jesus Church and the Bible in Republican China

During China’s Republican Era (1912–1949), the True Jesus Church, comprising one of the largest indigenous Pentecostal/charismatic churches in China, created a whole set of exclusive salvation doctrines based on its unique biblical interpretation. This paper attempts to illustrate the role that the Bible played in the development of the True Jesus Church (TJC for short) and how its biblical interpretations functioned in the shaping of its exclusive identity based on certain aspects of its charismatic experiences and unique doctrinal system. The founding of the TJC relied upon charismatic experiences, which were regarded as the work of the Holy Spirit to prove the authority of the Church. Doctrinally, the approaches to biblical interpretation employed by TJC leaders were another source of the church’s unique identity: The exclusive status the church assigned to itself was evident in its distinct interpretive approaches, as well as in its innovative rituals, especially facedown immersion baptism. Along with various influences of the Pentecostal tradition and the Chinese social context, these hermeneutics were an important reason for the TJC’s development as an independent denomination in the Republican era.

The First and Last Day (1917–1922)

Why do some big ideas catch on, spread, and endure while others fizzle? Analyzing Wei Enbo’s vision of Jesus and the religious revival it sparked gives us insight into the attraction of the True Jesus Church in 1917. Wei’s theophany was recounted in multiple stories revealing overlap but also significant variation. Over the course of retelling, these stories became more abstract and theologically focused, suggesting ways in which religious narratives emerge. This process generated a culturally fluent and linguistically discriminating message of biblical adherence. Chinese Christians seeking increased ecclesiastical purity and personal morality converted to the new movement. Wei’s prediction that the world would end by 1922 reflected realities of social turmoil and Chinese millenarian traditions, but also was in keeping with the charismatic (extraordinary) tenor of the early True Jesus Church movement, which relied heavily on tropes, language, and expectations from the Bible.

Conclusion

Rooted in decades and even centuries of Chinese history, the history of the True Jesus Church highlights the significance of charismatic experience in creating community. Observations from a contemporary baptismal rite and Lord’s Supper rite provide points of reflection for the admixture of miraculous and mundane within the True Jesus Church’s Christian culture.

Four Governments in China (1932–1949)

During the tumultuous period between the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Communist victory in 1949, parts of China were controlled by three different governments: the Nationalist government based in Nanjing and then Chongqing, the Communist-controlled area around Yan’an in the northwest, and the Japanese. Against this backdrop of regional division and contested legitimacy, the ecclesiastical government of the True Jesus Church stands out. The church’s extensive and relatively functional systems of church governance point to the significance of autonomous ideological organizations, whose stable models of functional governance and legitimate authority contrasted unflatteringly with the dysfunctional or corrupt authority of the Chinese party–state. Legitimate moral authority held the True Jesus Church together in a national and even international community during a chaotic time in which other attempts to create shared identity and common purpose across China failed.

A Smaller, Bigger World (1905–1917)

The introduction of new printing, steamship, rail, and telegraph technologies to China increased global awareness and supported universalistic thinking. These new technologies facilitated both the spread of charismatic ideas and organizational processes to protect and propagate these ideas. The international Pentecostal movement in the early twentieth century arose not only from the inherent popularity of charismatic practices and theologies but also from new logistical capabilities in popularizing these practices worldwide, such as mass mechanized printing, telegraph and rail lines, and transpacific steamship travel. This global openness that began with the great transnational missionary organizations of the nineteenth century became more accessible to ordinary people by the first decades of the twentieth century, allowing the Norwegian American Pentecostal missionary Bernt Berntsen to influence the religious worldview of Wei Enbo, who later founded the True Jesus Church.

China and the True Jesus

This book examines the dynamic between charisma and organization in the history of the True Jesus Church, China’s first major native church, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The True Jesus Church is one of the earliest Chinese expressions of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, now the dominant mode of twenty-first-century Chinese Christianity. The book argues that the charismatic mode of Christianity is not merely a reflection of native religious traditions or conditions of socioeconomic deprivation, but a powerful tool for organizing and sustaining community. The book’s chapters explore the relationship between charismatic experience and collective action from a variety of different angles, including transnational communications and transportation technology, the context for charismatic religious experience, women’s agency in patriarchal religious traditions, Christian churches during the Maoist era, clandestine culture, civil society groups, and the relationship between religion and the state from imperial times to the present. Although existing scholarship on global influences within modern Chinese history has tended to focus on elites such as political leaders or well-known intellectuals, this history illuminates global networks of interaction and exchange at the grassroots. Throughout the turbulent modern era, women and men of the True Jesus Church faced situations and made choices that highlight shifts and tensions within Chinese society on a human scale. Their various collective responses to the concerns of their day highlight the significance of charismatic religious community as a resource for empowerment and agency.

The Parable of the Cursed Chicken (1974–Present)

In the charismatic culture of the True Jesus Church in contemporary China, extraordinary occurrences are expected within the mundane circumstances of modern life. The church community’s claimed access to miraculous power strengthens the legitimacy of church ideology and church government. These charismatic experiences, often framed in reference to the Bible, inject vitality into church members’ shared life and the organizational structures holding them together. At the same time, church leaders attempt to carefully define and regulate charismatic experience in order to preserve community norms and maintain optimal levels of tension with surrounding society. At the level of individual practice, the church’s emphasis on Christian separation from the world results not in withdrawal, but in engagement with nearly every aspect of everyday life.

Introduction

The context for the rise of the True Jesus Church in China includes not only continuities with native sectarian religion and conditions of deprivation that have been noted in existing scholarship, but also crucially global Christian restoration traditions, transnational cultural exchange, and the relationship between charismatic experience and moral discipline. Religious individuals’ experience of the extraordinary is significant not merely for what it may reflect (such as the native religious milieu or participants’ marginality) but also for what such charismatic experience produces, namely, distinctive worldviews and the energy and focus necessary to build and maintain community over time. The history of the True Jesus Church in China provides a framework for understanding the mutually dependent yet mutually corrosive relationship between charisma and organization in institutions with a strong ideological ethos.