Tim Ellsworth

For my last story from my trip to Beijing, I wrote about Yu Jie, a Beijing writer and the leader of a house church in Beijing. My original piece was lengthy, so Baptist Press chose to split the article into two parts — China house church leader weighed Scripture & culture and Finding a house church leader in Beijing.

I understand the reasons for doing so, and signed off on the way they handled the story. But my original preference was one article. And since I have a blog where I can post the entire thing, here’s the original article in its entirety.

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BEIJING –Yu Jie sat in his living room talking about his church in Beijing. It’s called the Ark Church. And he’ll quickly tell you that the church is not underground.

Though not the pastor, Yu was one of the church’s founders and is one of the three elders there. Many churches in China are indeed underground and try to operate without government detection. But the Ark Church operates openly and unashamedly, and defiantly refuses to submit to the government’s unbiblical demands.

Communicating with Yu was difficult. He doesn’t speak English. I don’t speak Chinese. A translator I had hired certainly helped, but even she was hard for me to understand at times. As I sat in Yu’s home listening to him tell me about his church and about the growth of Christianity in China, I pondered the events that had brought me to this place.

Before leaving for China to cover the Olympics for Baptist Press, my editor at BP suggested that I try to interview a house church leader during my stay in Beijing.

To provide some background, house churches are illegal in China. The Chinese government has an organization called the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, whose job it is to “ensure that all the activities of China’s officially approved Protestant churches conformed to Beijing’s political and social objectives,” according to journalist and author David Aikman in his book, “Jesus in Beijing.”

In short, the TSPM is an arm of China’s atheistic, communist government.

Three-Self churches in China operate openly, with the government’s blessing and under the government’s oversight. Pastors are appointed and approved by the government. One of the criticisms many Christians in China have about the organization, Yu Jie said, is that its leaders are often not even believers.

Imagine that – a communist government appointing unregenerate pastors to lead Protestant churches. What’s next? Using an attractive 9-year-old girl to lip-synch during the opening ceremony of the Olympics instead of letting the homely girl sing for herself? Oh, wait.

So rather than submit to what they consider to be an unbiblical structure for the church, some churches in China have chosen to operate independently of Three-Self oversight. This is illegal in China, and the cause of great consternation for a government intoxicated with power and control. To combat the growing number of these family churches, the government has often imprisoned and persecuted pastors and other leaders of this movement.

The result of this persecution? More validation of Tertullian’s claim that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church. Christianity in China is growing massively (some estimates put the number of Christians in China at more than 100 million), and the government can’t stop it.

My first reaction to my editor’s suggestion was a negative one. I had been credentialed by the U.S. Olympic Committee to cover the Olympics. Would making contact with a house church leader jeopardize my credentialed status? If I was found out, I figured I might be asked to leave the country – or worse.

Paranoia on my part? Perhaps a little. But the Chinese government is not a body with which to trifle.

The more I thought about it, however, and the more I read, the more intrigued I became. This would be an incredible opportunity to tell the story of one of my brothers in China, and help inform other people about how God is working in that nation. I decided to give it a shot.

But how does one go about making contact with a house church leader in Beijing without attracting the attention of the government? How would I know whom to interview? Would he even speak English? How could I initiate communication with him without relying upon Christian workers in Beijing to help me arrange a meeting, so that I wouldn’t expose and endanger them?

I began to research. One of the names that I noticed early in the process was Yu Jie, a Christian writer in Beijing whose work had been banned by the government. Yu Jie was also a leader in a family church. Several things attracted me to this man. We shared a common trade as writers. He was my age, and he had a newborn son. My wife and I are expecting our third child. Yu Jie was the guy I wanted to interview.

So I began making some inquiries with some of my contacts in the United States. It didn’t take long for me to come across an American reporter, formerly based in Beijing, who was friends with Yu Jie and his wife. This reporter offered to contact him and set up a meeting.

The connection with this reporter was even more providential than I could have hoped. I found out that she had a suitcase full of baby items – formula, diapers, clothes, etc. — that actually belonged to Yu and his wife. The reporter was supposed to have traveled to China earlier this year to take them the suitcase, but a back ailment had prevented her from making the trip. She asked if I’d be willing to take the suitcase to them.

I decided that delivering the suitcase to Yu would be the perfect cover story if I encountered any overly-inquisitive Chinese officials: “Why am I going to meet Yu Jie? We have a mutual friend who asked me to return this suitcase to him. I was simply being nice. Here, you can take it to him if you’d like.”

In setting up my meeting, my reporter friend discovered from Yu that as of late July, he was under a form of house arrest. Police were watching his home around the clock. Anywhere he went, he had to go in a police car. He was expressly forbidden to go anywhere near the Olympic sites.

But the good news was that other foreign reporters had visited him at his house without incident. I began to feel more at ease. We decided that I’d take the suitcase to Yu and interview him on my last day in Beijing. That way, if the Chinese government wanted to expel me from the country for doing so, I could simply reply, “No problem. My plane leaves in four hours.”

With a suitcase full of baby items in tow, I made it through the Beijing airport without incident. That actually surprised me, as I was fully expecting to get at least a question about the contents of the suitcase. I mean, why would a foreign journalist, accredited to cover the Olympics and traveling by himself, be bringing diapers and baby formula with him to Beijing? But the Chinese said nary a word about it.

(As a side note, shortly before leaving for China I began reading Aikman’s book, “Jesus in Beijing.” I highly recommend it. I picked up a damaged copy of the book really cheap, and that also proved to be providential. I was told by someone familiar with the situation in China that I probably shouldn’t carry that book with me into the country, but I wasn’t quite finished with it by the time I had to leave. So I completed reading it on my flight from Nashville to Toronto, then dumped it in a trash can in the Toronto airport before I departed for Beijing.)

The suitcase sat in my hotel room for 10 days, until my last day in Beijing arrived. My translator drove me and a photographer to Yu’s house on the southern outskirts of the city. He met us on the street and led us up to his apartment, wheeling his suitcase as we walked. We entered his apartment and he introduced us to his pretty wife, Liu Min, and his 5-month-old son Justin (his English name), who was born in the United States in March.

Liu Min served us some tea, and I sat down on the couch. I quickly noticed the children’s book “Goodnight Moon” sitting on the coffee table. I’ve read that book to my children dozens of times.

We then got down to business, with Yu telling me about the situation with his church and the broader circumstances for Christians in China. Started in 2001, the Ark Church began with three couples. Now the church consists of more than 40 people, most of them young professionals.

The growth of that church mirrors the growth of Christianity in China as a whole. Yu Jie himself is a relatively new convert to Christianity

Yu said his conversion came as a result of two factors. The first was the nature of sin, and how people must deal with it.

“In Chinese culture, many people don’t believe there is sin,” Yu said.

Instead, they cling to a belief in the innate goodness of people. But as Yu studied Scripture, he was forced to confront its teaching that man is inherently sinful, and not innately good. That was a difficult truth for him to accept.

“I believe I am a good man,” Yu told himself. “I’m always better than others.”

He carefully considered this matter as he attended many Bible study groups, until he came to the understanding that God’s demand for humanity was perfection – much like an archer shooting an arrow. “Close” doesn’t hit the bull’s eye. Through the Bible – especially the four gospels – Yu concluded that nobody meets that standard, and that Jesus alone lived a perfect life.

A second factor leading to his conversion was the understanding of love.

“Without the love from God, there cannot be any love between people,” he decided.

Firmly convinced of the truth of Christianity, Yu was baptized in 2003.

His new faith has given him a theological grounding for his opposition to the government that began long before his conversion. The dissident Yu has lambasted the Chinese government for its unconstitutional denial of freedom of religion, and for its persecution of Christians.

Though soft-spoken in person, he is not one to pull his punches in his writing. He regularly denounces the murderous reign of Mao Zedong.

“It is inconceivable that the Olympic Games, one of the high points of civilization, be held in Beijing as long as the body of the assassin lies in the heart of the city,” he wrote in a Hong Kong magazine, as reported by the City Journal.

In a column in the Chicago Tribune earlier this month, Yu expressed again his disdain for the politics behind the Olympics in Beijing.

“Beijing shouldn’t be host of the Olympic Games anyway,” he wrote. “At the moment, China should invest the money in the country’s education and public health systems, rather than building gigantic and glamorous stadiums to show off its status and save face.”

He argued in the article that the Olympics have not brought any joy to the Chinese people, only dissatisfaction and fear.

“Everywhere you go, you see soldiers with loaded guns patrolling the street,” he wrote. “Missiles have been installed near the Bird’s Nest (Olympic stadium), where the Opening Ceremony took place. Taking the subway or the bus is like going to the airport; one has to undergo all sorts of strict security checks. Beijing no longer belongs to its residents. The whole city has been plunged into a state of extreme fear.”

Such opinions have not endeared Yu to the Chinese government. Indeed, his writings have been banned in mainland China. He has even spent a night in jail.

But Yu recognizes that his treatment at the hands of government officials has been mild compared to that of some of his Christian brothers and sisters. He said more than 2,000 Chinese Christians are currently imprisoned in China solely because they refuse to worship the way the Chinese government has mandated. Many of them have endured beatings and torture. Those who submit to Three-Self rule do not face such hardships.

Yu was clear that his opposition to Three-Self churches should in no way be extended to everyone in those churches. He recognizes that many strong Christians are involved in Three-Self churches, and even acknowledges that some pastors and other leaders are godly people. For a nation as vast as China, there’s a great deal of variety in the Three-Self churches, and they’re not all bad. It’s the system as a whole that he opposes.

He is hopeful that one day, when the law in China allows for greater freedom of religion, Three-Self churches will disappear entirely. And he is optimistic that such increased freedoms are on the horizon – not because the government will lose its desire to control, but because it will not have adequate power to do so.

Yu’s dream is that Christians will lead the way in transforming China into a land of greater freedoms, and that Christians will become a larger, more influential part of society. Despite his distaste of the politics behind the Olympics, he expressed hope that the work of Western Christians during the Olympics might provide a spark for change. In a statement he prepared when he spoke to a group of legislative staffers in Washington, D.C., last year, Yu encouraged Christians to come to China – not for stealth evangelism campaigns, but overt ones.

“Even though they will be expelled, each expulsion case can become a news event, a crack that opens up the iron curtain,” he wrote in the statement.

To conclude my time with Yu, I asked him how American Christians can pray for him and for Christians and churches in China. He listed three specific requests.

First, he asked that other Christians pray that Christians in China will be allowed full freedom of religion, so that they can worship as they see fit.

Secondly, he asked for prayer for the 2,000 persecuted Christians who are sitting in Chinese prisons and labor camps.

Thirdly, he requested prayer for the increased education of Chinese Christians, and that they would practice pure Christianity from the Bible. Because so many churches are still underground, Yu said they don’t always have access to educational material, like books and other literature. Because of this lack of access, problems often arise in churches as they stray from biblical doctrine. Chinese Christians desperately need more books about the Bible to be translated into their language, so they can be faithful to Scripture and be holy in their living.

My interview with Yu complete, I took my leave so I could catch a plane back home. Chances are I’ll never see him again in this life. But my encounter with him was one I’ll always remember. Here is a man who faces an uncertain future, and who could endure struggles I could never imagine, all because of his devotion to Jesus Christ. To me, he and thousands of other Christians in China are heroes in every sense of the word.

Yu and his family will be a regular part of my prayers for some time. And I look forward to the day when I will see him in heaven, when language barriers will no longer be an issue. We will in one tongue talk about the grace and faithfulness of the Lord Jesus Christ, and sing praises to the One who redeemed us.