When the Smugglers Are Working for Jesus

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Night had fallen over the dusty city of Luoyang, and the agents who call themselves the Secret Service Christians were ready to commence their most dangerous mission yet, to disperse 60 Americans into the Chinese hinterlands to spread the word of God covertly. Wendy Lawson, a member of the South Hills Assembly of God Church in Bethel Park, Pa., was trained for the Tract Bombers, the Service's most elite force. After a bruising half-day journey to get to the central Chinese city, the 51-year-old paramedic tucked her fair hair under a hat and crammed 300 religious pamphlets into the secret pockets of a custom-made vest. Then, from near midnight to the first glimmering of dawn, she and a posse of evangelists wandered down alleys in small-town China, stuffing mailboxes, bicycle baskets and window sills with their religious contraband. "When the people woke up the next morning," she says, "there was Jesus everywhere."

While U.S. businesses are busy trying to capture the country's 1.3 billion wallets, America's evangelists are out to snare Chinese souls. Their spiritual quest couldn't come at a more opportune time. The decay of communism, combined with rising unemployment and rampant consumerism, has kindled a religious revival in China. Some Chinese, many elderly and disenfranchised, have taken to Falun Gong, the outlawed meditation group that spooked the nation's leadership by quietly mobilizing more than 10,000 people for a mass protest in Beijing last year. Other seekers of spirituality, mostly younger and more attuned to Western influences, have converted to Christianity. Two decades ago, shortly after the antireligion fervor of the Cultural Revolution, only 2 million Chinese identified themselves as Christian. Today the number is nearly 60 million, according to overseas Christian groups--about the same number as the official membership of China's Communist Party.

Beijing has paid lip service to the burgeoning spiritual movement by encouraging believers to join its state-supported Christian church. (The government sanctions five carefully monitored religious organizations.) In a prelude to the Millennium World Peace Summit in New York City last week, Fu Tieshan, Beijing's state-appointed bishop, maintained that "there is no religious persecution in China." Yet his statement came just days after the arrests of nearly 200 Christians. The raids also snared three American evangelists, who were deported to the U.S.