Last week, BTJ hosted a secret meeting in mainland China between some of the top Chinese underground house church pastors. One of the pastors shared an amazing testimony about how his urban church in Shanghai exploded in growth in the last couple of years to well over a thousand members after starting from the humble beginnings of a small pig house.
“Soon after I was married,” Pastor Enoch (not his real name) shared, “my new wife and I felt called to serve the Lord in Shanghai, but we didn’t know anyone and didn’t know where to start. We didn’t have any money to host prayer meetings so we rented a room inside a pig house.”
Pastor Enoch and his wife lived in the small room in the pig house outside Shanghai and invited villagers to come and join them for Bible study.
It was not an easy life, but Pastor Enoch believed that was what the Lord had called him to do. “It was extremely dirty,” he explained, “so we had an infestation of rats. To keep the rats off our new born baby, we put rat poison everywhere.”
As the baby grew old enough to crawl in the small room of the pig house, she eventually got her hands on the rat poison and ingested a large amount. “We rushed her to the hospital, but there was not much the doctor could do other than to tell her to drink water.”
Pastor Enoch and his wife prayed and the baby was miraculously healed! It was not long before the village heard about the baby living in the pig house who had been healed and began joining the Bible study.
The small room in the pig house was soon too small for the fellowship to meet, so the church moved to a factory. Soon, the factory was too small for the growing church, so Pastor Enoch started a second location at another factory and then a third and then a fourth.
Before long, Pastor Enoch had a network of churches all over the city of Shanghai and today it has more than 40 fellowships.
Earlier this year, BTJ held a leadership training together with Pastor Enoch where more than 200 house church pastors who oversee more than 1,000 believers gathered together in a secret location. It was amazing to see how quickly the church has grown from being a small fellowship in a rural pig house.
