Will China change the rules about House Churches?
17/12/2008 1:55 pm
The subject of the symposium was “Christianity and Social Harmony – A Seminar on the Issue of the Chinese House-Church”. The main sponsor was the Minorities Development Research Institute of the State Council, along with the Beijing Pacific Solutions Social Science Research Institute.
Conference attendees were drawn from 1) government officials in government research organs. 2) academics from the universities and government think-tanks.
3) non-governmental scholars. 4) six specially invited house-church leaders from Beijing, Wenzhou and Henan. The inclusion of this last group is unprecedented.
Every aspect of the house-church movement was discussed and papers presented on numbers, growth, history, distribution, trends etc Members agreed there may be 50-100 million house-church members compared to only about 20 million Christians attending churches and meetings managed by the State-supervised Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM). The Christians present stressed that rapid growth was due to walking the pathway of the cross under God’s protection while others stressed the formation of civil society providing the external space for the church to survive and multiply.
Many of the reports were critical of the present system of religious control. Almost all said China’s current religious control mechanisms and regulations were severely lagging behind compared with the development of the rest of society, especially in the economic sphere. They stated that these organs were ‘vestiges of the era of dictatorship – a mere appendix to society’. Use of State power to control religion was a serious confusion of Church and State which violates basic religious belief and will inevitably decline as China heads for a more democratic future. (By 2020 according to academics and some top Party leaders.) The official control structures such as TSPM only control some 20 million believers and have hardly any effective jurisdiction on the vast majority (50-100 million). The implementation of this system only exacerbates opposition between the government and the masses of believers. Participants felt that out of self-interest the Religious Affairs Bureau along with the TSPM colluded in order to hide and distort the actual situation thus leading the government to become more rigid in carrying out a policy that is impossible to execute.
The conference put forward plans which would eventually lead to the abolition of the State organs for managing religion, including the RAB (or State Administration for Religious Affairs and TSPM etc) and repeal restrictive regulations such as Regulations on Management for religious Venues, Regulations for Registration of Religious Venues etc. Entirely new laws should be drafted to reflect reality with a democratic management system according to the rule of law.
However, in early December reports were issued by China Aid of arrests of house-church Christians in Shandong and Henan. This may reflect tensions behind the scenes between those who favor relaxing controls and those who wish to continue the present system.
(The above report is the English translation of information released in Chinese on 26 November 2008 on the website: jesus.bbs.net. See also the ‘Gospel Herald’ (California) of 30 November 2008 for an English report.)
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