Towering eight stories over wheat fields, the Golden Lamp Church was built to serve nearly 50,000 worshippers in the gritty heart of China’s coal country.
But that was before hundreds of police and hired thugs descended on the mega-church, smashing doors and windows, seizing Bibles and sending dozens of worshippers to hospitals with serious injuries, members and activists say
Today, the church’s co-pastors are in jail. The gates to the church complex in the northern province of Shanxi are locked and a police armored personnel vehicle sits outside.
Can you wrap your mind around a “house church” which has 50,000 members? One church. One 8-story building.
Yet this is an outgrowth of the “house church” movement in China, the one most singly powerful voice for Christ, growing daily by leaps and bounds.
Do what they may, the Chinese government is ulitmately going to be unable to contain this movement.
The article is moving and inspirational, even as it brings a judgment on the “ease in zion” of so much of our own church experience. The only thing that could defeat the growth of the movement described would be the adoption of the agenda that has worked so well in the Episcopal Church for the last forty years.