The rural church in China

On that first mission trip of mine into China some eight or nine years ago, I discovered a whole new world of Christianity that I had never known before. I had been on many mission trips to many different countries (Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, India, Kenya, US, UK, etc) and I thought that I had a pretty good idea of how churches are run.

In this Bible training session that I was attending in Northern China, I met with about 100 church leaders and not one of them was a pastor. I discovered that all of these leaders were working in secular jobs (the vast majority were farmers). They had to hold a secular job because in the eyes of the local government authorities they needed to be have a job. They obviously couldn’t be a pastor because  their churches were illegal. They refused to be a part of the government registered church (called “The Three-Self Church”) so they were part of the “underground” church (nowadays it is better called “the unregistered church” because many of these churches are no more underground or invisible).

None of these church leaders had ever attended a Bible seminary (ie, pastors’ university). In fact, the majority had never even finished high school. Some were illiterate. But all of them loved the Lord and wanted to do their best for Him. They practised “doing their best and leaving the rest” to God. And I believe God was well pleased with what they were doing because it was obvious that He was blessing their ministries.

This unimpressive bunch of farmers certainly did not look like a group of pastors but I found that they were each leading groups of between 100 to 10,000 people. At that time I was pastoring a church of a few hundred people. I had just quit working as a doctor to be in full-time ministry because the demands of pastoring was taking up all my time.

These leaders did not call themselves as “pastors” but addressed themselves as “tong kong” which means “co-workers.” They could lead so many people because they were co-workers with the rest of their congregation. They were not paid by their congregations and therefore their congregations did not sit back while expecting them to do all the work in the church.

They were organized into congregations of about 20 to 30 in little house-churches. Several of these little house-churches were loosely organized into a local district house-church group. Several of these local district groups were then loosely organized into regional house-church groups. And then on to provincial groups, etc. In this way, a “co-worker” could lead up to 10,000 people without all the complicated administrative and expensive organizations that are found in other countries.