Rael Jean Isaac

While the support of most U.S. evangelicals for Israel is well-known, few are aware that evangelicals in China, a small and beleaguered minority but growing in numbers, offer similar support.

This emerges from Jesus in Beijing by David Aikman, former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine. The book, published by Regnery, was first published in 2003 and an updated version reissued in 2006.

First, some background provided by Aikman: in February 2002, leaders of Chinese major house church networks met with Korean and American church leaders including Dr. Luis Bush, chairman of the AD 2000 movement, which seeks to coordinate world missionary efforts. Aikman points out that while it was astonishing that the leaders of the house networks would dare to meet in the heavily policed Chinese capital, what was even more surprising was the presence of clergy from churches connected to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which has in the past either denied that house churches exist or cooperated with government persecution of unregistered Protestant groups.

Some of the goals enunciated by what became known as the Beijing Forum were breathtakingly ambitious (and unrealistic), including implementation of the “Back to Jerusalem” program. This involved sending out 100,000 Christian missionaries from China in 2007 with the focus on evangelizing Islamic countries. The idea behind “Back to Jerusalem” is that the Gospel has spread, for the most part, westward from Jerusalem; it is now time for the circle to be completed and the Gospel to go west from China to Jerusalem.

The idea was born during World War II when Chinese Christian seminaries and missionaries, those who escaped the Japanese invaders, relocated in China’s western provinces. The vice principal of one of these Christian training centers was a recent convert named Mark Ma who had a vision telling him to go to China’s most northwestern region and to go west from there toward Jerusalem to preach the Gospel. Aikman reports Ma’s testimony that he argued with God. “That section of territory is under the power of Islam and the Mohammedans are the hardest of all peoples to reach with the Gospel.” The Almighty replied, “Even you Chinese, yourself included, are hard enough, but you have been conquered by the Gospel.” Ma then asked why Western missionaries had no luck in preaching the Gospel to Muslims and received the reply that success in this task had been preserved as an inheritance for Chinese Christians.

Ma decided to call the group he founded the Back to Jerusalem Evangelistic Band and told the group God was calling Chinese evangelists not only to China’s outlying provinces but to Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Palestine (then still under the British Mandate). Aikman reports that by 1949 Ma’s followers, as well as other Christian groups, had made several daring expeditions to China’s far west. However, the Communist victory halted their efforts, with several members undergoing many years of imprisonment, torture and humiliation. The leader of one group, Zhao Haizhen of the Northwest Spiritual Movement, survived forty-five years of imprisonment and on his release spent the last few years of his life imparting the “Back to Jerusalem” vision to China’s current house church networks. According to Aikman, enthusiasm for the project of using the Silk Road to take the Gospel to Jerusalem is not limited to any one network but is common throughout Christian China.

A small number of house church leaders have actually been to Jerusalem. In sharp contrast to the Chinese government, these Chinese Christians are overwhelmingly pro-Israel. (Indeed many have said they pray for a U.S. victory in Iraq.). They do not seek to evangelize Jews, Jerusalem itself serving as the symbol of the Gospel having traveled round the earth and returned to its starting point (once the obstacle of Islam, standing athwart the road to Jerusalem, can be overcome). Paradoxically Chinese Christians view
their government’s stance, despite their strong opposition to it, as a benefit in their missionary efforts. Aikman quotes Zhang Rongliang: “Chinese people are more suitable than Americans to go to the Muslim world….The Chinese government supports [Middle Eastern] terrorism, so the Muslim nations support China.”

While there is no way 100,000 missionaries will be going out this year, there are several small missionary seminaries in different parts of China preparing Christians to serve as missionaries in the Moslem world. Some Americans who encourage the effort estimate there may already be several hundred in Moslem countries, filling professional positions such as engineers and interpreters. To quote Aikman: “Along with Chinese arms sales and petroleum import agreements will go hundreds and eventually thousands of Chinese technicians and workers. Some of these, without question, will be as eager to spread the Gospel as many Americans have been when given similar opportunities to work in the Islamic world. There will, no doubt, be strong resistance by the government and by the Islamic authorities of the Arab world to the presence of Chinese Christian missionaries presumed to have been merely technical experts or actual workers.”

Will Chinese Christians have any better luck than Western missionaries in supplanting Islam? It’s certainly a long shot, but as Dick Cavett used to say in his pitch for the New York lottery, “Hey, you never know.”