XU YONGHAI’S flock gathers weekly to worship in his small studio apartment in west-central Beijing. On a chilly winter morning a dozen people climb the concrete stairs to his door, dump their coats on his Snoopy bedsheets and gather around a table laid with tea and Bibles.
XU YONGHAI’S flock gathers weekly to worship in his small studio apartment in west-central Beijing. On a chilly winter morning a dozen people climb the concrete stairs to his door, dump their coats on his Snoopy bedsheets and gather around a table laid with tea and Bibles. The service begins with some devotional songs, accompanied by music from a battery-powered speaker. The pocket-sized gadget packs up halfway through the medley, forcing the pastor to dig out a spare.
Many tight-knit services such as this one take place across China each week. The small congregation meets without the permission of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, a government umbrella under which all China’s Protestant congregations are supposed to huddle. It meets on Fridays rather than Sundays, an arrangement considered less likely to provoke officials. Authorities know what goes on and occasionally post a watchman to a security box outside the building. But they tend not to interfere, says Mr Xu, because they know that all his congregation does is “read the Bible”.
Chinese Christians were thought to number about 70m in 2010 and are probably more numerous now. Perhaps only a minority of them worships in government-sanctioned churches, in which the party vets both clergy and services. Most attend unregistered ones, which vary from cramped house groups such as Mr Xu’s to thriving congregations of hundreds—and in a few cases thousands—of believers. Some of these churches are aggressively persecuted, their ministers imprisoned. But most persist, watched warily by officials but not exactly clandestine. Gatherings in this “grey zone” are where China’s Christians may worship most freely, says Fenggang Yang, a scholar of religion at Purdue University in Indiana.
God- and state-fearing
Although Christians are growing more numerous, the wriggle room allowed to them is shrinking. Of most recent concern is a revised set of religious regulations that came into force in February. The old rules had stopped short of explicitly outlawing informal religious gatherings, but the new ones state more clearly that unregistered churches are beyond the pale. Fearing a clampdown, some bigger churches have split their congregations into small house groups that they think officials will find less bothersome, says Fan Yafeng, a pastor and legal scholar. Others are appointing chains of substitute ministers and managers to keep things running should the main ones be arrested.
