Christians visiting China for the first time expecting to see persecution against Chinese believers can be a bit confused when they see open churches in Chinese metropolitan centers. It is easy to be confused when trying to understand the purpose of the underground house church when there are seemingly so many legal churches to choose from.
The truth is simple.
The Chinese Communist Party maintains strict control over the official church, also called the Three-self Church, and enforces theology that many Christians do not agree with. Christians who have a faith that differs from the Three-self Church, or the official church in China, do not have any other official church they can go to, so they instead choose to attend churches that are not legal. These illegal churches are what we call the underground house church.
The Chinese Communist Party often uses the Three-Self Church to push propaganda and restrict ministry, but what many people do not know is that the Three-Self Church was never the Communist Party’s idea. It was an idea from an American missionary who arrived 100 years before the Communist Revolution.
John Livingston Nevius, born on a farm in New York in 1829, traveled to China as a missionary in 1853. He and his new wife, Helen Coan, quickly learned the language and preached the Gospel, but John understood something that few missionaries understood at that time – if the people in China were to be reached, they would have to break their unhealthy dependence on foreign missions.
Nevius believed the only way for the church in China to grow was to do so independently. As a missionary, he believed that it was unhealthy that the Chinese should rely on foreign missionaries as pastors, directors, and financiers. From his initial teachings, the “Nevius Method” was developed and it was based on the “Three Selfs” – that the church in China should be self-propagating, self-supporting, and self-governing.
Fellow Presbyterians in China rejected the concept. However, in 1890, missionaries in Korea felt convinced that these teachings were necessary for future missions and adopted them. New converts were taught to remain in their jobs, support themselves by their own work, and witness for Christ without taking a salary from a western entity. Churches would appoint their own leaders and be responsible for their support.
The Nevius Method began to grow rapidly and created many healthy churches, until 1949 when the Communists came to power and wanted to completely destroy Christianity. After it became clear to the Communist Party that completely destroying Christianity in one generation would be impossible, they began looking for a way to control the church.
That is when missionary John Nevius’ method was adopted and perverted as the solution.
John Nevius meant for the Three-self method to create a healthy and independent church, but the Communist Party took the Three-self method and changed it to allow the Chinese government to control Christian activity without any outside interference. Shortly after establishing the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the new communist government used the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) to change aspects of Biblical teaching that they did not agree with, including outlawing unregistered meetings, banning unregistered baptisms and Bible distribution, and forbidding all evangelism – especially to those under 18-years-old.
The hopes of the Chinese government was to choke the church and deprive it of growth so that Christianity would die out in one or two generations. However, data shows that when the Communist government came to power in 1949, the Protestant church only numbered about one million people while the Roman Catholic church was about three times that. Today, a couple of generations later, the church is not dead, but instead experiencing the largest revival in the world with an estimated 150 million believers.
Their plan did not work.
