The War For China's Soul

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Because of fears that officers from the Public Security Bureau might disrupt the proceedings, which are illegal, services in house churches are often low-key. Not at the Home of Love. The congregation starts by belting out a series of hymns to an accompanying sound track booming out of several large loudspeakers. After the singing, the preacher launches into a sermon extolling the growth of Christianity in China. Then he steps among the tightly packed worshippers, holding their heads and praying over them, chanting what would sound to most Chinese like gibberish. Soon most of the room has joined him in fervent, noisy prayer, many swaying back and forth, eyes squeezed shut, moaning, shouting, wailing. One woman repeats over and over, "Oh mashalah, oh Yesu, oh mashalah, oh Yesu, oh Yesu, oh Yesu." (Yesu is Jesus; mashalah seems to mean nothing.) The woman's face is clenched in ecstasy; tears run down her cheeks.

So far, the government hasn't done much to halt the spread of such hothouses of faith. But that may be changing, as evidenced by the assault on the Hangzhou church. The mandarins in Beijing have always reserved special venom for groups they label xie jiao, or evil cults. The most famous is the brutally suppressed Falun Gong movement, but the authorities may be tempted to extend that label to the Christian sects that are growing the fastest--those practicing fervid forms of worship that stress miracles and personal inspiration through prayer. A number of cultlike, pseudo-Christian offshoots have sprung up in the Chinese countryside in recent years, apparently inspired by this ecstatic form of worship. Often spawned by the personal ambition of their leaders, these highly secretive groups usually espouse millenarian views that make the authorities profoundly nervous. Members of a sect called the Three Grades of Servants were convicted earlier this year in Heilongjiang province on 20 murder charges, involving attacks on its main rival, Eastern Lightning, a sect that relies on kidnapping and beating to make converts. One of its central aims is the overthrow of the "Great Red Dragon," a thinly disguised reference to Beijing.

Although Christians tend not to see themselves as revolutionaries, house churches have become one of China's few bulwarks against government power. In Wenzhou, a city in coastal Zhejiang province known among Chinese Christians as "China's Jerusalem," 15% to 20% of the population is Christian, a fact that gives the church leaders much greater authority in confronting local party officials. In 2002, for example, a campaign of protests and appeals to Beijing led to the reversal of a city government decision to ban Sunday-school teaching. In Hangzhou, local officials say the clash--about which TIME was the first to hear eyewitness accounts--stemmed from the church builders' long-running defiance of government regulations. The county government's statement contends that three alternative sites had been offered to the Christian community's representatives but were refused by church leaders.