Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  The pastor in charge of Cangxia Christ Church, renamed after the neighborhood, grew up in a Christian family. I had met Pastor Sun four years earlier on my first visit to the church. He told me then that during the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, his family did not keep a Bible in their home. Instead, his father wrote down passages of scripture, which everyone read and shared. The pastor had worked at the cathedral since it reopened as a registered church in 1985. Over tea in his office, he explained to me the congregation’s recent good fortune. The demolition was stopped on a technicality: the building had historic status as part of the city’s cultural heritage and was protected by law. Fuzhou, like many other cities in China, had belatedly recognized the value of its architectural legacy and was preserving some historic structures, even building ersatz “old” neighborhoods.

  The author, left, standing atop Cangxia Christ Church in Fuzhou in 2015 with her daughter, Cory. Courtesy of Kaikai Lin.

  My daughter and I climbed three flights of stairs and stepped outside to the rooftop between the towers. In the middle of this platform stood a three-foot-tall red cross, outlined with neon. In the distance, I could make out another church with a big cross, a Catholic congregation, I was told. As I surveyed the neighborhood, what struck me was the utter absence of any effort by this old church’s Anglican founders to have it blend in with its Chinese surroundings. When the cornerstone was laid with much fanfare in 1924, a powerful nationalistic current was lifting the Chinese people. Rather than respond to that emerging spirit, missionaries designed a church in their own image. It looked British, not the least bit Chinese.

  Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, Pastor Sun and two others conducted services for about one thousand members. Inside the cathedral, I could make out the bones of its Anglican past. The chancel in the front of the church, where the choir sat, had four rows of high-back, dark wooden benches that faced each other. Under a sign listing the hymns for service was a grand piano. I had hoped to see the eagle lectern donated by the Lin family in 1927, but it had been removed or destroyed long ago. The only furnishing from the original building was a hexagonal stone baptismal font. Everything else—slatted pews, pulpit, lectern, and altar—were replacements.

  During the Cultural Revolution, the church was converted into a factory to make medicine. I will never forget what the pastor said to me the first time we met in 2011. I had asked whether the bad old days could ever return, when churches closed and Christians went underground.

  “Impossible,” he said at the time with a wave of his hand. “There are too many believers.”

  Another cousin, this one from the Ni side of the family, flew up from Hong Kong to join me for the next leg of my journey. His father and my grandmother had been siblings. I had asked him about the legacy of Watchman Nee: What had become of his Little Flock? For the answer, we were off to see a ninety-eight-year-old man.

  In Fujian, some followers of Watchman Nee decided to join churches with the Three-Self Movement. But many more preferred to worship at house churches. My cousin and I drove an hour south to Fuqing County. Along the highway, I saw one twenty-story apartment block after another, a dreary landscape of runaway development that had metastasized all over China. We pulled off the main road and headed down a narrow road. Immediately, something caught my eye: a bright red sign with two vertical lines of characters, pasted on the side of a gray cement wall. It was a reference to Ephesians 1:15: Faith in the Lord Jesus, Love unto all the saints.

  This was a village of Christians. We entered a five-story building and took the elevator up. The entire year-old building was a house church, including a meeting hall on one floor, a canteen on another, and apartments. As we entered a conference room, a young man was finishing a study session and left to turn the space over to us. Photographs covered all the walls—group shots showing a very old man known as Brother Lin (no relation) posing with visitors from all over the world.

  Like me, they wanted to meet this man who had spent twenty-four of the past sixty years in prison for his religious beliefs. Brother Lin was convicted four times for everything from being part of Watchman Nee’s “counterrevolutionary” inner circle (1956) to writing reactionary hymns (1963); criticizing the Three-Self Movement (1983); and disturbing social order (1999).

  Brother Lin toddled into the room but seemed spry and sharp. His plain white cotton shirt hung loosely on his small frame. Sitting in an old-style wooden Chinese chair, his feet just brushed the ground. He wore a hearing aid but had no trouble following the conversation or understanding why I was there. The mention of my grandmother’s name reminded him of the only time he had met her. Brother Lin had just been released in 1957 from a year in prison after his first conviction. Watchman Nee was behind bars, but his coworkers from the Little Flock gathered in Shanghai for a meeting to plan for the future. Brother Lin, undeterred by his recent prison stay, came up from Fuqing for the two-week meeting. One Sunday, he gave a sermon at the Nanyang Road assembly hall and afterward shared lunch with my grandmother, Ni Guizhen, and her friend Charity, Watchman Nee’s wife.

  “We chatted a lot,” he told me. “She inquired about my family, how many children I had, were they boys or girls.” Brother Lin, then forty, was a teacher who struggled to support his family. The day after their lunch, Ni Guizhen sent him four sets of clothing for each of his young children. More than fifty years later, he remembered this act of kindness. “This left a deep impression on me,” he told me through my cousin.

  Brother Lin had something he wanted to show me. It was a pair of old frayed baggy pants and a shapeless padded cotton jacket. Both looked like a crazy quilt of threadbare patches in indigo blue, black, gray, and white, all held together with crude, thick stitches. I had read in his memoir about these tattered clothes. This was what he wore when he was released from a labor reeducation camp in 1973; he wrote that he could not bear to throw the clothes away. He proudly showed me the pants and coat that he had worn for ten years and seventy-five days.

  In the past, just meeting a foreigner like me could have gotten him in trouble—and did. In 1983, after he received an overseas Chinese Christian, Brother Lin was arrested. One of the charges against him was that he had played a role in reprinting a banned book by the late Witness Lee, a close coworker of Watchman Nee, who left China in 1949 for Taiwan and later California. Authorities accused Witness Lee of being behind the “Shouters Sect,” a Christian group with a call-and-response style of worship that the Public Security Ministry labeled a cult.

  Students in China’s official seminaries are banned from reading Watchman Nee’s books to this day. He still bears the “counterrevolutionary” label. But online, anyone can get access to all of his works—from his opus The Spiritual Man to compilations of sermons, essays, and testimonies. Interest in Watchman Nee, who died in 1972, remains strong both in and out of China. A Chinese professor and expert in religious history, Wang Aiming, described Watchman Nee to me as “a spiritual giant” among Chinese Christians. Part of what made him different from his contemporaries—other famous independent preachers like John Sung and Wang Mingdao—was his global appeal. Nee had traveled extensively in Asia, Europe, and the United States during the 1930s and published books and periodicals in Chinese and English, extending his reach far beyond Shanghai.

  Brother Lin told me that every Sunday about one hundred people gathered at this building. Sometimes they invited Christians from other places—only the previous Saturday more than five hundred visitors from another town had joined them in fellowship. Overseas Christians came and went frequently. Brother Lin recounted a German visitor telling him, “Watchman Nee not only belongs to China, but he belongs to Germany as well.” Members of the Fuqing local church had traveled abroad, attending Christian gatherings in the United States, Japan, and Europe. “Even I had a chance to visit Taiwan,” the old man enthused. “Imagine a guy like me who had once been sentenced to twenty years, and now I have that fr
eedom. Things have really changed for the better.”

  How was this happening? How could a group that, in the government’s eyes, bore the stigma of a cult operate so openly?

  After my years of living in China, I knew that nothing in China was black and white, only shades of gray. Indeed, it was possible for the situation in Fujian to be the antithesis of neighboring Zhejiang. It all came down to local leaders, and Brother Lin explained to me that the situation began to change in Fujian in 2003. He and others in the local church in Fuqing realized that unless they were able to remove the label of being a cult with an aberrant theology, they would always face problems. “If we wanted to fix the issue of cults once and for good, we must let people know the truth, in the right way,” he explained. “I appealed to the government a first time, a second time, telling them about our faith, our activities, our political stance, our contribution to society. The walls between us gradually fell down.” Communication was in writing at first but was followed with face-to-face meetings between church members and provincial authorities.

  The last big crackdown was in 1996, when more than sixty Christians in Fujian were arrested and sent to labor camps or forced to undergo reeducation. Brother Lin told me that before his group established “mutual trust” with the government, eighteen Christians were jailed, including two of the men sitting beside him. But in the past eight years, no one had been arrested.

  We had been talking for more than an hour. Brother Lin was tired. In parting, I asked him and the others whether they feared that the situation could abruptly change and they could be arrested. Their answer for me: “China is a vast country. We can’t say for sure about the whole China, but in Fujian Province, the communication has been going well.”

  Reputations

  After Mao died in 1976, Chinese society began the slow process of recovering from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. One aspect of healing was allowing people who were wrongly accused of crimes against the country to restore their reputations. A formal process—called pingfan, or political rehabilitation—was put into place, through which victims or their families could request an official clearing of the record.

  My family has a document dated August 23, 1986, and titled in big red characters “Shanghai Public Security Bureau Decision.” It stated that Ni Guizhen in 1969 was labeled a counterrevolutionary by the Shanghai Public Security office, the court, and a military committee. Her alleged crimes were using “religion to conduct counterrevolutionary activities.” Specifically, she had been accused of participating in “secret networks and gatherings” to spread reactionary opinions, accepting funds from Hong Kong churches to support counterrevolutionaries, and “maliciously defaming Chairman Mao.” The PSB had reexamined her case on August 21, 1979, and ruled that the earlier crimes were true. But since she was dead by then, the counterrevolutionary label could be removed. It was only a half victory. Seven years later, the family petitioned the government to take another look at her case. This time, the PSB ruled that the earlier criminal allegations were “not proper.” In writing, they decided to “give Ni Guizhen redress.” My grandmother was no longer an enemy of the people.

  In another document, dated August 27, 1984, the Shanghai Religious Affairs Bureau reexamined the case against Lin Pu-chi, who died in 1973. In August 1971, my grandfather was accused of being part of an American spy ring. “The decision is now negated upon the approval by higher-level leaders,” the decision read. From 1969 to 1972, a Shanghai “study group” targeted Christians. This was a form of political persecution, the statement said. “For that reason, any untrue statement made by the study group should be overturned.”

  Portrait of Lin Pu-chi and Ni Guizhen from 1948. Their records were purged of charges made during the Cultural Revolution. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  And what of the reputation of Watchman Nee? I asked that question in 1999 for a magazine piece about Christianity in China that I wrote for the Inquirer. It came up in an interview with three Protestant leaders in Shanghai who spoke on behalf of the official Three-Self Movement. I prefaced my question with the observation that China took great pride in the fact that churches were free of foreign or denominational influences and had been reshaped, like the economy, with Chinese characteristics. Didn’t Watchman Nee advance precisely that form of self-supporting religious movement? Wasn’t he an independent, uniquely Chinese Christian voice?

  My query prompted a sharp response from one of the elderly pastors. She repeated for me in flawless English the crimes of Watchman Nee, as if it were 1956 and we were sitting in the Tian Chan Theater, witnessing his denunciation session. She said that he had committed adultery, was a capitalist, and sent damaging intelligence to spies for Taiwan and the exiled Nationalist Party. Added another pastor: “We don’t talk a lot about Mr. Nee himself.”

  But by 2015, I found that opinions were beginning to soften. Privately, Chinese theologians and scholars suggested to me that the time had come to reconsider the reputation of Watchman Nee. Many universities in China had centers of Christian study with scholars and graduate students who were inquiring into Watchman Nee’s ministry, teachings, and historic impact. At the grassroots, meanwhile, the influence of Watchman Nee on the current generation of Christians remained strong. A mainland scholar estimated for me that about fifteen million Chinese Christians would identify Watchman Nee as the strongest influence in their faith life.

  Even with the restrictions that still exist under the atheistic rule of the Communist Party, the Christian revival in China is expected to continue unabated. Fenggang Yang, the Purdue sociologist, projected that if current trends progressed at even a modest growth rate, China could have as many as 225 million Christians by 2025. Compare that to the United States: the Pew Research Center estimated that in 2010, about 247 million Americans identified as Christian, but the trend was on a downward slope.

  On a summer Sunday in 2015, two dozen people filled a sparsely furnished ground-floor apartment in the Nantai neighborhood of Fuzhou. It was close to 9:00 a.m., and almost all the little plastic stools in the living room were taken. In the center of the room was a small folding table with a glass of grape juice and a plate of wafers set on a white tablecloth. Everyone held black hymnals on their laps and sang with vigor. I was told I could follow along in English on my smartphone by going to www.hymnal.net and searching for number 214, “According to Thy Gracious Word.” Alas, I had no Wi-Fi connection.

  In between the third and fourth hymns of the morning, stragglers walked into the room. A young father held his toddler in his arms and gripped her tiny green backpack in his hand. They took seats on a stool in the back. The girl chattered while holding the ear of a fluffy stuffed toy rabbit.

  In my Catholic church back home in Philadelphia, congregants were seen but only heard when reciting the liturgy. But in this living room, everyone who wanted to participate did participate. People took turns in a kind of call and response, making short, spontaneous comments in Chinese that were answered in English with “Amen.”

  We are all family. Amen!

  It doesn’t matter what our surnames are, we have the same Father. Amen!

  We are all priests. Amen!

  We must spread the gospel, spread the truth. Amen!

  Whoever we meet, we should speak to them. Amen!

  Thank God I can get together with all of you this morning. Amen!

  I looked around. Men sat on one side of the room, women on the other, many of whom wore small black lace caps. The head coverings reminded me of the round white veils we wore at Mass in my childhood. Some women pressed their eyes shut. It was an older crowd, but there was a smattering of couples with children. Everyone seemed engaged and connected, and it was at that moment that I thought of my grandmother.

  In chronicling my family’s history, I had plotted what had happened to them starting at the very beginning, all the way back to the fisherman from Fujian who
was the first member of my father’s branch of the family to convert to Christianity. But I had a harder time understanding every “why” in their journey. One of the questions that I continued to wrestle with was why my grandmother upset the harmony in her marriage by walking away from her husband’s church to join the Little Flock of her brother. I had my theories, but it wasn’t until just then, in the informal setting of this house church, that I understood. I felt it. It was the intimacy of shared fellowship, the yearning for connection in a turbulent world. I pictured her sitting on a wooden stool in the terrace house on Hardoon Road in Shanghai, listening to her younger brother put into language she could understand the mystery of man’s spirit and soul.

  The assembled turned their attention to a middle-aged member who delivered the main message of the day from Acts 20, verses 17 through 38. The apostle Paul was saying good-bye to the elders in Ephesus after three years with them. He was headed to Jerusalem and almost certain imprisonment. Paul warned them of the dangers they faced and expressed his sadness in parting. “Have we done that?” the speaker asked the group. “Labored for the Lord like Paul?”

  After he finished, people passed around the plate with the wafer pieces and dipped spoons into the cup of juice, the symbolic body and blood of Christ. There was another round of spontaneous call and response and more singing. The clock on the wall read 10:05 a.m. when the service ended and everyone got up to leave. Women stacked the blue plastic stools. The father lifted his toddler and picked up her green backpack. One man told me that he would attend another service that evening, a much larger and younger gathering of about a hundred people.

  Next Sunday, they would return.

  Epilogue

  On a late August afternoon, I stood at my desk in my Pennsylvania farmhouse talking via a video link to my Aunt Martha, who sat at her computer in an old brick house in Sydney, Australia. We were continuing a conversation that began three decades earlier. I spoke to Martha every few months, picking up threads of the family story. On this day, I asked her about returning to church after the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution.