25

One Extra Paid of Underwear

From southern China, I flew to a major city in another province where two of David’s friends met me at the airport. As I slipped into the back seat of their car and out of public sight, one of the men pulled out his cell phone to make a short call: “Our visitor has arrived. We will bring him to location number four at time number seven.”

After he hung up, he explained that for security reasons their house-church movement had developed a system of frequently changed numerical codes that they used when they needed to discuss logistical arrangements over the phone. They never used names of people or places unless it was absolutely necessary. Even if the authorities happened to be listening to his phone conversations that day, they couldn’t discern our plans. Because the friend on the other end of the line was working with the same list of codes, he knew exactly where and when we were to arrive at our destination.

Once we merged into heavy, late afternoon traffic on a major thoroughfare, my driver slowed down and lost all sense of urgency. I had plenty of time to get acquainted with my hosts as we drove what seemed to be a series of aimless, meandering, irregular circles around and through the city until the dead of night. We finally stopped on the perimeter of a sprawling inner-city government housing complex—acres and acres of fifteen-story concrete-gray rectangles looming up into the starlit sky.

I stayed right on the heels of my guides as they hurried through the night shadows and darted around to the backside of an apartment building. They hurried me through a rear exit door and then rushed me up the back stairs and into a hallway where they proceeded to knock softly on one of the apartment doors.

When the door opened, I was welcomed into the presence of seven house-church pastors and evangelists, four of whom I quickly learned had been recently imprisoned for their faith. They had just been released from prison and had stayed in the city an extra few days to talk with me. After our meeting, they would finally go home to be reunited with their families. One of the men spoke passable English, so he would do the translating as I interviewed the others over the next few days.

Because this part of the city was restricted to Chinese only, I was confined to the apartment for the next four days. My Chinese companions, on the other hand, were free to come and go as they wished. They took strolls in the fresh air. They walked to the nearby grocery to purchase ingredients for the simple meals that they prepared on a single-burner butane stove.

The four men who had just been released from prison clearly relished their freedom. Their stories were remarkable.

I was especially intrigued by Pastor Chang. He was eighty-three years old and had been out of prison for three days. Pastor Chang had spent his entire adult life preaching and teaching the gospel—and paying a high price for the privilege. He was old enough to remember the early days of communism when Chairman Mao’s new government attempted to purge the country of Christian (and western) influence.

Missionaries from other countries had been banished from China overnight. Church buildings were boarded up or turned into brothels and drinking establishments. Thousands of believers and church planters like Pastor Chang were arrested and subjected to brutal labor camps and re-education programs.

In fact, Pastor Chang had been sent to prison three different times. He first went to prison when he became a believer. A second time he went to prison for leading others to faith in Jesus and for planting a church. He was arrested and sentenced to prison a third time for leading a house-church movement.

That kind of mistreatment was common in China. In fact, imprisonment was so common for believers that they would typically find themselves in prison with other believers. Small groups of believers, in prison, would band together for fellowship and study. They encouraged each other to share their faith, to win converts among their fellow prisoners, and to plant other small churches in various parts of the prison. Amazingly, there was a huge church-planting movement within China’s prisons!

In prison, countless new converts were discipled. Eventually they were released to return to home communities scattered throughout every region and province of the country. Returning home, they would either join the local house church or help start a new one. These house churches spread like wildfire across China.

David Chen had already given me an excellent overview of Christianity’s history and impact in China. And I had done additional research on my own. I felt that I had a good grasp of the major historical trends and milestones. Hearing the story fleshed out in the first-person narrative of an active participant in the fastest expansion of Christianity in the history of the world, however, was a remarkable privilege for me.

Pastor Chang had not only survived his government’s relentless campaign to wipe out the gospel’s gains, he had also watched the number of Chinese believers multiply dramatically during his ministry. At a certain point, when there were too many pastors to imprison, the communist party changed its strategy and created the officially recognized and approved “Three-Self Church” as a means of regulating and limiting the spread of what they called this “foreign religion.”

That strategy proved to be too little and too late. By the early 1960’s, illegal house-church movements had spread so far and so fast that there was no containing the Holy Spirit. Even the re-arrest and re-imprisonment of the most influential leaders, like Pastor Chang, failed to quench the quickening flames of faith.

When Christianity was first outlawed following World War II, the number of Chinese believers was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. (This was the fruit of nearly a century of labor by western workers who had not been allowed into China until the last half of the nineteenth century.) By the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, after more than twenty-five years of communist persecution, there were millions of Chinese believers worshipping secretly in house churches throughout the land. (By 1983, estimates suggested that there were ten million believers in China.)

By the time of my visit in 1998, after fifty years of governmental opposition to Christianity, no one knew for sure how many Chinese believers there really were. Many experts estimated that the number might be higher than one hundred million—and increasing daily.

Before I would leave China, I was scheduled to meet personally with leaders of four different house-church groups. Each group claimed more than ten million members. The seven men that I met in that apartment were all evangelists/church planters in one of those movements.

It seemed that Pastor Chang had lived through it all. Like the apostle Paul, he had learned to be content regardless of his circumstances. Inside prison or outside of prison, he preached the same gospel message and he discipled anyone interested in becoming a follower of Jesus Christ. Pastor Chang was like the Apostle Paul in another way too. He devoted his life to mentoring and training younger believers—just as the apostle Paul had done with young Timothy.

Indeed, the six other men in the apartment with us, ranging in age from their twenties to their forties, were Pastor Chang’s “Timothys”—men he had led to Christ and mentored over the years. Pastor Chang’s joy was obvious as he talked about his own faith journey and celebrated the way that his life had intersected with the lives of these other men. For two days, I listened as Pastor Chang quietly recounted story after story of God’s faithfulness, protection and provision over the many years of his spiritual pilgrimage.

What struck me most about Pastor Chang, even more than the details of his remarkable life, was his demeanor over the following days as he listened to me interview his spiritual protégés. As the younger men shared their testimonies, the old man squatted in a corner of the room. He closed his eyes and listened. From time to time I noticed that he was humming what sounded like praise songs. Even then, I could tell that he was still listening intently to what the others were sharing. Over and over again, he smiled in satisfaction and nodded with pride and approval at appropriate points in his young friends’ stories.

I felt as if I were watching something akin to the passing of the mantle from the Old Testament prophet Elijah to his young replacement Elisha. This old man—only days out of prison, without a penny to his name—owned nothing but the clothes on his back and one extra pair of underwear. He had no home to return to and no surviving family to take him in. He planned to live out the remainder of his days much like a New Testament apostle, traveling the land and visiting one house church after another. He would encourage believers in their faith, while trusting the Lord and local bodies of Christ for His provision. He would do that unless, or until, he was arrested and thrown in prison again.

By any standard, Pastor Chang had lived a hard life. He had nothing tangible to show for all of his labor. Even so, he seemed more content, more filled with a spirit of peace, and more aware of the joy of living than anyone I had ever met.

The two men who had met me at the airport and made arrangements for these interviews stopped by the flat every day to check on us. Each time they showed up, I thanked them profusely for setting up this opportunity for me. I tried to convey the excitement that I felt about what I was hearing and learning.

For four days, I was able to talk at length with Pastor Chang and three of his spiritual protégés. It had been a mountaintop experience. I think that my Chinese friends, however, sensed that our cramped quarters and my own confinement were wearing me down. I couldn’t deny that; four nights of little or no sleep had left me feeling that I had nearly reached the end of my rope.

David Chen’s two friends assured me: “We still want you to interview these other three men who just got out of prison. Instead of doing that here, however, we are going to check you into one of the tourist hotels downtown. We will let you do the next interviews there.” I was grateful for the change in scenery and for the prospect of getting a good night’s sleep.

Checking in to the tourist hotel, I noticed a vigilant employee behind the tourist registration desk. It seemed that his sole responsibility was to take notice of everyone who came through the front door. He seemed especially interested in Chinese individuals who spoke with any of the hotel’s foreign guests.

I asked my local hosts if it would be safe for these recent parolees to come to my room the next day for interviews. They assured me that no one else in that entire city knew or could identify any of these men. They would be leaving for their homes throughout the province shortly and they wouldn’t be around long enough to raise any serious concern with the local authorities. Their response to my concern was strong and unequivocal: we would be “safe enough” for the next couple of days. I was glad that they thought so, because my new accommodations suited me much better than the previous ones.

I had expected that there would be three more individual interviews. Instead, the interview lasted for two days and included all three of the believers at once.

This trio of thirty-something evangelists decided to do the interview together because they had shared many of the same experiences. In fact, one of the things that they were most grateful for was that they had all been arrested at the same time. They had also received the same sentence, and they had even been sent to the same prison. They claimed that being imprisoned together had turned out to be a marvelous blessing from God. They also had been released at the same time, less than a week before I met them.

When I asked one of them a question, the other two would follow up his answer with thoughts of their own. Sometimes, they completed each other’s sentences. And they felt free to tease one another, correct mistaken recollections, and laugh at each other’s memories.

Their stories reminded me of something that I had seen in Somalia and had confirmed again in some of the interviews that I had already done in Russia and other former Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe: the psychological aspects of persecution often cause deeper wounds and leave greater scars than physical mistreatment.

These men acknowledged that they had suffered both psychological pain and physical mistreatment. Somehow, they had survived unbroken, in large part due to the shared strength of their bond of friendship. Before being arrested, they had served together as house-church planters. Then, after their arrest, they had together endured years of imprisonment and cruel treatment because of their faith. In prison, they had together led hundreds of fellow prisoners to Christ. And now, less than a week out of prison, they sat in my hotel room and together actually re-enacted for me some of the torture that they had received in prison. At the time, their antics were light-hearted and even humorous. In fact, they explained that a good sense of humor was an effective tool for dealing with physical mistreatment. All the same, it was clear that there was deep pain behind their now-smiling faces.

For their most memorable skit, they asked me to imagine an Asian toilet in the middle of my hotel room floor. (Given my recent experience, that wasn’t hard for me to do.) Then two of the men roughly grabbed the other one by his wrists and elbows, twisted his arms back and hiked them up. They forced their victim to bend over with his face down closer and closer to the imaginary “toilet.” They turned and twisted the man’s arms as if they were adjusting rabbit-ears antennae on the top of an old television set.

“Let’s see what kind of reception you can get today,” they taunted. They mimicked their former guards as they again twisted the arms of their “prisoner” and forced his face lower and lower toward the “toilet” recessed in the floor. If there was waste in the toilet bowl, the guards would sarcastically exclaim, “This is your lucky day, reception is good—we have color television today!”

If the toilet had nothing in it but urine, the guards would laugh and say, “Too bad, only black and white television for you!” Then they would make more wisecracks as they further adjusted the “antennae” until their “prisoner” finally collapsed to his knees where they could force his head down into the toilet.

What they were describing and acting out to me was horrifying. I could barely imagine the treatment that they had experienced. The fact that they were laughing about it now—especially since they had only been out of prison a short time—was actually reassuring. It may seem odd to be talking about humor in the midst of this kind of horror. But humor is a powerful indicator of psychological health.

One of the clearest warning signs of undue psychological stress that we watched for among our relief staff in Somalia was the loss of an appropriate sense of humor. When our workers found it impossible to see and respond to humor, it was clear that they were in serious need of emotional relief and healing. When that happened, it was time to retreat and recover.

It dawned on me that, despite the horrible suffering that these men had endured for years, there was never an opportunity for them to step away to retreat and recover. Their abuse was constant. They endured three long years of persecution and horrible mistreatment with no relief. Still, somehow, when given the opportunity to share their ordeal, they were able to do that with healthy and healing humor. Clearly, the persecution that had been designed to break their spirits had failed to do that. The persecution that had been designed to intimidate these men of faith into silence had failed to do that. Having now been released from prison, their spirits were strong and their faith was vibrant.

After years of cruel emotional and physical mistreatment, these three friends had walked out into freedom with an obvious and contagious sense of joy. Their testimony was one of humor and hope. Their lives were evidence to the strength that can be found in community and fellowship and faith.