THE NEXT CHINA:

‘Six new Protestant churches are opening every day’: There are between 50 million and 100 million Christians in China — and their number is increasing rapidly (John R. Pritchard, 6/11/10, Times of London)

In Mao’s China, however, these independent churches were as unwelcome as the mission-founded churches. All were in effect disbanded. The remnants of the old western denominations were funnelled into a Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), using the slogan which the NCC had made its aspiration back in 1922. Those who wanted no truck with the TSPM were harshly penalised. For example Elder Li, a gracious and still hard-working old pastor whom I met in Wuhan a while ago, spent 25 years in solitary confinement. By the end of the 1950s, 20,000 Protestant churches had been closed and fewer than 100 remained open in the whole of China. The Cultural Revolution was merely the final straw.

The final curtain was in fact no more than a long intermission. Since the early 1980s Protestant churches, with or without buildings, have been opening or re-opening at the rate of at least six a day. From about a million baptised half a century ago, numbers have risen to a total estimated at anywhere between 50 and 100 million. The China Christian Council, with a restored TSPM, claims 20 million of these, but now the indigenous, independent groups represent the majority. One or two of the older bodies have been co-opted by the TSPM, but new networks a-plenty, preferring to remain unregistered, have arrived on the scene.