Hattaway, Paul. Henan: The Galilee of China. Fire & Blood. The Church in China: Volume 2. Carlisle, CA: Piquant Editions Ltd., 2009.
“This was one of the most agonizing experiences of my life,” recalled Peter Xu, of being tortured by hanging from his wrists on a gate that was made to slide back and forth.
“The pain was absolutely unbearable… I was certain my time had come to die. Death was what I longed for… I was grateful for this opportunity to know the Lord more intimately. It was my honeymoon with Jesus.
“Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the chief interrogating officer came and unlocked my handcuffs. I fell to the floor in a heap…” He was made to walk, then collapsed again. “The officer continued his interrogation. ‘Xu, this is your last chance. Confess all your crimes! How do you feel about the treatment we have given you today?’
“I looked at him with compassion in my eyes. I didn’t hate him at all. He had been a young boy in Henan Province once, just like me, only he had never once heard the gospel. I looked into his eyes and said just one brief sentence: ‘thank you.’”
I don’t know how I’ll be able to convey the essence of this gripping narrative, which is 320 double-column pages long, in a brief review.
Perhaps I should start with my conclusion: Paul Hattaway has given us a major contribution to the history of the church in China, based on extensive reading and personal interviews with key characters in the story. Hattaway had already written several well-known books, including The Heavenly Man, Back to Jerusalem, and China’s Book of Martyrs (which was reviewed in these pages).
Henan was the first volume in a planned multi-volume series covering the history of Christianity in all the provinces of China. The series “died” when the publisher went out of business. A new series, The China Chronicles: Inside the Greatest Christian Revival in History, now published by SPCK and Asia Harvest, the organization that the author leads, already has three volumes in print: Shandong: The Revival Province, Guizhou: The Precious Province, and Zhejiang: The Jerusalem of China, were all published in 2018.
“Fire and Blood” in the initial series title referred to the “fire” of revival that God has sent, and “blood” referred to the fierce and often deadly persecution endured by missionaries and Chinese Christians over the past four hundred years.
For this series, Hattaway says that he read more than 1,500 books and thousands of articles, and he conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. He was given access to the archives of OMF International (formerly the China Inland Mission, the largest Western missionary society in China). The book is richly illustrated with photographs.
When dealing with recent Chinese church history, security is always a major concern. The author has tried not to reveal the names of people who could be hurt by exposing their names or pictures of their faces. Some prominent house church leaders have said that they have already suffered so much and are so well known by the government that there isn’t much to be gained from hiding information about them.
Henan
Hattaway chose Henan for this opening volume in the study of China’s provinces because “it is now China’s most populous province, with almost 10 million people,” and “also has the largest number of Christians and is the centre of the greatest and most sustained revival of Christianity, which has lasted more than 30 years” (1). The coastal city of China has been called the “Jerusalem of China” because it has so many Christians, so the believers in Henan call it the “Galilee of China,” because so many millions of believers come from there and also because it has “become an engine room for the spreading of the gospel of Jesus Christ throughout every part of China, and even in recent years beyond the country’s borders” (1).
The Story
After two chapters on Henan’s geography and history and the Jews in China, Part I traces the story of Roman Catholic missions and Chinese Roman Catholics from the beginnings to the present.
Part II follows the course of Protestant missions in China from 1875 to the end of the 1940s. Part III, “The Refiner’s Fire,” tells how the church went underground during the first years of Communist rule in China and during “the Silent Years, the 1960s and ‘70s,” when the Bamboo Curtain kept those outside of China from any news of the fate of China’s Christians.
Part IV, “The Three-Self Church in Henan,” gives an overview of the government-sponsored Three-Self Patriotic Movement as well as the myriad of cults that have sprung up in the province.
Part V: “Henan’s House Churches,” is by far the longest section of the book at more than 150 pages, and it is clearly the heart of Hattaway’s narrative. He tells us that suffering is the “Secret to China’s Mighty Revival,” a theme that he will illustrate many times over, often in graphic, sometimes almost overwhelming, detail. Three chapters take us decade-by-decade through the “valley of the shadow of death” through which Henan’s house church Christians have been taken by God. The last one hundred pages examine both major house church “networks” – all of them with millions of adherents – and outstanding leaders, whose stories read like the Book of Acts.
A very helpful section describes the “eight types of house churches” to show the variety of unregistered groups and to caution against simplistic generalizations about them.
The narrative ends with the “struggle with unity” that church leaders have pursued but not quite attained and a sobering warning of “the threat of Mammon” faced by Christians in today’s more prosperous China.
An appendix gives detailed answers, with supporting figures, to the oft-asked question, “How Many Christians Are There in China?” followed by maps, tables, and a bibliography containing almost 500 titles. Paul Hattaway is a first-class historian; he weaves a fast-paced narrative that draws upon first-hand testimonies and accounts, as well as hundreds of books and articles from a variety of sources from the nineteenth century to the present. Though he is by no means completely impartial – he writes from the viewpoint of Evangelical Protestant Christianity – he maintains a high degree of balance and objectivity.
Throughout the text, pictures and footnotes illustrate and document this comprehensive account of Christianity in Henan.
Major Themes
No review can do justice to the wealth of information contained in this fast-paced history. I can only highlight a few prominent themes.
The Foundational Work of Missionaries
For Protestants, the Henan story begins with Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission (CIM) and a Chinese evangelist from Hubei named Yang. Together, they brought the gospel to that province in 1875. Taylor eventually left because of the fierce opposition he met from the mandarins and literati, but others followed him: A. W. Sambrook in 1884 and J.A. Slimmon in 1886. Joe Coulthard, also of the CIM, established the first Protestant church in Henan in 1887; Maria, Hudson Taylor’s daughter, married him the following year.
The Canadian Presbyterian Church, urged by Hudson Taylor to send missionaries to Henan, had established three stations by the end of the nineteenth century. In 1895, Howard Taylor, the son of Hudson Taylor, who had married Taylor’s daughter Geraldine, opened a medical mission in Zhengzhou (the present capital). He combined preaching the gospel with his healing skills, and Geraldine impacted thousands of students through her Bible teaching and a “shining face that comes to those who speak with God” (40).
Other mission societies established bases later, but many had to quit because of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. One of the most effective groups was the American Norwegian Lutheran Mission in Nanyang.
Toward the end of the century, “many missionaries began to realize that the key to winning the country for Christ lay not in their own efforts but in the hands of the Chinese they had won to the faith. Hudson Taylor was one who promoted this development… Instead of taking prominent leadership roles, many of the wiser missionaries stepped back and were content with helping and advising the Chinese preachers. As a result, the light of the gospel began to shine more brightly” (42).
Hattaway devotes two chapters to Jonathan Goforth, “China’s Greatest Evangelist.” You can read a brief biography of Goforth in the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity.
After he had been personally revived, Goforth became “the flaming preacher” in the eyes of the Chinese, for he blazed with love for God, zeal for the lost, and a passion for the gospel. He sought and received the constant filling of the Holy Spirit, who used him to bring revival not only to Henan, but to other places in China as well. He rebuked sin but also spoke of the matchless love of God offered to those who trust in Christ. Wherever he preached, the Spirit fell upon professing Christians and seekers alike, causing them to bewail their sins, cry out for mercy, and then shout for joy when they received new life.
One who knew him said, “Jonathan Goforth was an electric, radiant personality, flooding his immediate environment with sunlight that was deep in his heart and shone on his face. And God used him in mighty revivals” (54). Another spoke of “his utter dependence on the Holy Spirit” when speaking at meetings. Hattaway writes of dramatic conversions from sin and to Christ as a result of Goforth’s ministry.
Along with other conservative missionaries, Goforth also spoke out against the modernism (otherwise known as liberalism) that had infected the church at home and many missionaries in China.
The Indispensable Role of Chinese Evangelists, Pastors, and Believers
“When the last Western missionaries left China, they left behind them a faithful, if small, group of believers… They became a tiny remnant battered about in the ugly, swirling red sea of Communist Revolution. But wherever they were, these Christian believers became beacon lights pointing to Christ. Without this tiny remnant there would have been no one to introduce the people of China to Jesus Christ” (154).
Accordingly, throughout his book, Hattaway introduces us to dozens of zealous Chinese who could proclaim the message more clearly and in a “Chinese” fashion. We hear of early witnesses like Li Zizeng, the first Chinese Christian in Taikang, in the 1880s; the “Christian General” Feng in the first part of the twentieth century; James Liu and Stephen Wang; Liu Daosheng; John Sung, Andrew Gih and the Bethel Band; Li Tian’en; Peter Xu Yungze, and his sister Xu Yngling; Elder Fu; Brother Yun (Liu Zhenying); Zhang Rongliang (whose book I Stand With Christ was reviewed in these pages); Sister Hei; Sister Lu Xiaomin, the prolific songwriter, and thousands of nameless evangelists, many of them young women.
Most of these names are unfamiliar to readers on the outside, but they deserve to be just as well-known as famous evangelists and pastors in the West.
The Sufferings Endured by Missionaries and Henan’s Christians
Both missionaries and Chinese believers encountered fierce resistance from the earliest days, but the Boxer Rebellion in the summer of 1900 claimed the lives of hundreds of missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians, though Henan suffered far less than some other provinces. Hattaway tells the stories of thrilling escapes, horrific suffering, and indomitable courage, especially on the part of Chinese believers who risked – and often lost – their lives to protect their foreign friends.
Page after page of graphic narrative of barbaric torture inflicted upon innocent believers, especially since the Communists gained power, invests the word “persecution” with new meaning for most Westerners. From these stories, we see the bestial cruelty of Communist police, the God-given persecution of the believers, supernatural love for their tormentors, and the power of the Holy Spirit to use unspeakable pain to lead unbelievers to Jesus, who suffered for us.
In addition to hanging prisoners from their wrists as recorded at the beginning of this review, Christians in China have been beaten repeatedly until they are black and blue and almost dead; shocked with cattle prods, often in very sensitive places; forced to kneel for hours, even days, on end; deprived of food and even water for days; pinched with pliers; placed in solitary confinement for weeks and months; left naked to freeze; subjected to water torture; and burned with cigarettes and cigarette lighters. Some were chained to vehicles or horses and dragged through the streets to their death. Others were crucified on the walls of their churches. Women were repeatedly raped and horribly abused.
Some guards were so sadistic that they took pictures of their victims being tortured and even of the guilty agents in action. Hattaway includes many of these photographs.
The Relentless Attempts of the Chinese Government to Eradicate Unregistered Churches
The Communist Chinese government has engaged in repeated systematic campaigns to wipe out unregistered Christians and their churches. Hattaway records the ebb and flow of persecution, demonstrating that a time of relative peace and quiet may quickly be followed by a period of intense attack. As these lines are being written, Christians in China, after almost two decades of relative freedom, are once again subject to the wrath of an atheistic regime that cannot tolerate any rivals to its ideological supremacy.
Sometimes, persecution has been limited to a particular county or church network. At other times, as at the present, the central government has mobilized all its resources to bring all religions under its control, with particular attention to believers in unregistered churches.
Often, even during the fiercest assaults on unregistered groups, government spokesmen will blandly assert to foreign visitors that there is freedom of religion in China and that claims of persecution are false. All too often, gullible church leaders, including people like a former Archbishop of Canterbury and leaders of American Christian denominations, will naively believe what they are told.
These visitors are routinely taken to worship services of congregations belonging to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), which was created in the early 1950s to bring all Protestants under control. The visitors are not told that the TSPM has often, even recently, been one of the prime means used by the authorities to root out and destroy house churches.
When we read that leaders of house churches continue to refuse to join the TSPM and harbor great mistrust towards its leaders, we must keep this tragic history in mind and not blithely scold them for refusing to register with the TSPM.
The Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM)
Nowhere does the author’s commitment to truth and balance appear more clearly than in his discussion of this very controversial topic.
He first explains why the leaders of unregistered churches continue to refuse to join the TSPM. Though they freely acknowledge that multitudes of sincere believers crowd the Sunday worship services of TSPM congregations, they also remember the relentless opposition of TSPM leaders to any Christian activity outside the bounds of that organization.
They point also to the restrictions on normal Christian activity that the TSPM has received from the government, which are stamped with the approval of TSPM leaders. All these regulations – which are now being enforced to a new degree – prohibit religious activity outside the walls and formal organizational structure of the TSPM. That includes teaching Christianity to anyone under eighteen, meeting anywhere but in TSPM buildings, conducting itinerant evangelism, or serving as church leaders without TSPM approval and training. The house church leaders note that all top officials of the TSPM have been theological liberals or even atheists, and that the TSPM is committed to putting official Communist Party dogma above Scripture. The recent “Sinification” of Christianity is just the latest expression of this long-standing practice.
On the other hand, Hattaway not only acknowledges that TSPM churches have millions of true believers but that most of the lower-level clergy are faithful servants of Christ. He describes in detail the heartrending shortage of ordained, or even trained, clergy and Bible teachers in the face of the overwhelming spiritual hunger of Henan’s Christians. The TSPM opened a seminary to help meet this need, but it can only send out a few graduates each year, many of whom leave their ministries after a short time because of the abject poverty they have to endure.
Though sanctioned by the government, the TSPM has had to overcome the opposition of corrupt officials to obtain land, build church structures, and conduct services. In some places, officials demand payment for each person who is baptized!
To win the hearts of the people, the TSPM has sought to provide a variety of services to meet urgent needs. These have included medical clinics, outreach to AIDS sufferers, assistance in times of disaster like floods, contributions to economic development by opening sustainable businesses, care for the elderly, the printing and distributing of Bibles, and even the provision of tea without charge during the Luoyang Peony Festival.
Slowly, some of the fierce animosity between the TSPM and house churches is abating, but there does not seem to be much possibility that house church leaders will ever agree to joining the TSPM. The bottom line, they say, is that the TSPM (and the China Christian Council – CCC) are controlled by the government (more recently, they have come under the aegis of the Party). How, they say, can Christians submit their religious activity to an atheist government?
The Strengths and Weaknesses of Christianity in China
Paul Hattaway presents both the strengths and the weaknesses of Protestant Christianity in China. He does not romanticize the house churches or repeat unfounded criticisms.
From the foregoing, we can already see that Protestant Christians in China have come through fire and water, and they have emerged with a toughness and tenacity that matches Christians of any place or era. Not only their most famous leaders, but ordinary believers, have endured unspeakable torture and suffering without denying their Lord or losing their zeal to propagate the saving message of Christ.
It is true that some have failed in the hour of testing, and the author records these sad stories, but they are relatively few. Besides, what would we have done under similar trials?
The huge house church networks have exhibited unrivalled ardor in obeying the Great Commission, sharing their faith as pastors, evangelists, and individual believers despite overwhelming odds and seemingly impassible obstacles. Hundreds of accounts in this book testify to a fire to tell others about Jesus that rebukes our lukewarm attitude and lethargy. In recent decades, these churches have organized and trained bands of evangelists, sending them not only throughout China, but to other parts of the world.
They maintain systematic training programs for believers and leaders at all levels, seeking to overcome the stigma of being “a mile wide and an inch deep” or even heterodox in their faith.
At the center of this unprecedented explosion of Christianity stands their reliance on the Holy Spirit and their devotion to, and love for, the Word of God. Both Word and Spirit fuel this ongoing movement that possesses both depth and staying power. Hattaway fills his narrative with tales of people who hunger and thirst for the Scriptures and who cry out to God for the supply of the Holy Spirit to work miracles and empower them for holy living and selfless service. They are following the example of early missionaries, especially some like Jonathan Goforth and Marie Monsen, and they have benefitted from the ministry of the Pentecostal missionary Dennis Balcombe.
We could go on, but we must not neglect the faults and failings that Hattaway also faithfully records. Since the 1950s, some leaders have gained and held onto almost dictatorial power within the churches and networks they have founded. In this, they are only following the age-old tradition of China’s imperial leadership style, one that shows its evidence in all domains and at all levels of Chinese society and church today.
Hattaway lays bare the kingdom-building and self-preserving drives that have led to lack of unity and even competition. Happily, since the 1980s, the major house church networks have valiantly sought to forge some sort of unity, but they have been thwarted at many points. He also confronts head on criticisms that have been levelled at leaders like Peter Xu and Brother Yung, “the heavenly man.” In each case, he tries to acknowledge the force of their detractors’ charges and to respond with a sympathetic, balanced, and candid statement of why he believes these men are still to be honored and respected.
In an uneducated rural society lacking an adequate supply of Bibles, we should not be surprised that a multitude of sects, heresies, and cults have misled many. The worst, perhaps, is the Eastern Lightning cult, but there are too many others. Indeed, both the TSPM and house churches leaders name this as the greatest threat to the church.
Well, maybe it does not constitute the greatest danger. The last chapter in the book bears the title, “The Threat of Mammon,” and shows how modernization, urbanization, and globalization have been used by Satan to lure large numbers of leaders and followers away from a pure devotion to Christ. Love of money and of the world has challenged China’s Christians to the core, and will remain a constant foe.
Conclusion
Henan: The Galilee of China ranks among the very finest studies of Christianity in China. In my opinion, despite its limited treatment of only one province, and though we need the perspective of broader surveys like Daniel Bays’ A New History of Christianity in China and the specialized studies of other books reviewed in these pages, this volume is now the most valuable description of the past and present of the largest Christian movement in history. I look forward to reading Hattaway’s book on Christianity in Shandong and eagerly await the forthcoming volumes in this ambitious series.
Read a collection of reviews of more than fifty books on Chinese Christianity here at Reaching Chinese Worldwide.