In China, pews are packed
Beijing is wary as Christianity counts up to 90 million adherents.
China's first Protestant church is still located on a winding back alley of fish markets and fruit stalls in this old port city. A crest atop the brick colonial structure reads "1848."
Yet the Xinjie Church here is hardly a museum piece. Every Sunday it literally overflows with more than 2,000 attendees during its two regular services, with more people coming during the Christmas season. This church - with an altar flanked by blinking conifers - and the four other government-sanctioned churches nearby, are home to rising numbers of worshipers.
Christianity - in both the official and unofficial churches - is again gaining momentum in China, and is a source of some consternation for the party leadership. "Being Christian" is fashionable, with young people sporting crosses as a mild form of dissent, and others feeling the faith has a certain international cachet. But something more is at work. In many interviews, congregants say the deity they worship communicates, and has power in their lives, especially now when China is going through immense, jarring economic changes that upset older social contracts.
"People in China have a spiritual hunger, very much so," says an official church pastor in Xiamen, "and there is a need for that to be filled. I think this is the main reason why we continue to have larger services."
Congregations in China comprise all ages, with younger people popping up during the service to take cellphone calls outside - this being Asia.
Last Sunday, several Xiamen churches held a Christmas party, notable because preaching took place. The gathering at an ocean-side exhibition center was so large that 300 people were turned away. In Quanzhou, north of Xiamen, church members tore down an 800-seat edifice, and have nearly finished a 2,500-seat $1.6 million new church which is 90 percentfinanced by the 3,000 congregants there.
Along the easy-going southeast coast, Protestant worshipers pay little attention to China's Shanghai-based official church hierarchy. They hold Bible study groups, have choir rehearsals, and gather in volunteer groups. "We have to join the [official] church, but then we do and say what we want," says a local pastor. "We preach the living God."
Still, what's happening around Xiamen is a far cry from the way Ji Lu worships in Beijing, the center of political power. Mr. Ji helps lead prayers in an unofficial church - where 20 people gather in a room so small that when they share tea and cakes afterward, all must stand.
Ji is one of an estimated 30 to 60 million "unregistered" Christian believers. His sect is made up of nearly a hundred other small groups around Beijing - part of a range of illegal evangelical sects in China, some extremely devout, who say the church fills a "spiritual void" in their lives.
The rising evangelical movement in China is creating a complex and dynamic set of tensions, as individual longings challenge a state operating for a half century on principles of collective social order. Not only are there renewed government efforts to curb Christian churches, policies to stop Sunday schools, restrictions on the movement of pastors from one city to another, attempts to dilute theological content, and efforts to stymie new church applications with red tape, but tensions and suspicions have also been growing between official and unofficial "home church" Christians as well.
One expert says the home church-official church split is more serious in the long term than Beijing's scattered, stop-and-start efforts to rein in religion. "A lot of Chinese are becoming Christians," argues the US-trained theologian. "But the biggest problem is between unregistered and registered churches. There is a lot of antipathy between the two, a lot of water under the bridge."
