Risk is the air they breathe

Editor Hannah Nation talks about the Chinese pastors behind 'Faith in the Wilderness'

Faith in the Wilderness: Words of Exhortation from the Chinese Church

Edited by Hannah Nation & Simon Liu (Lexham Press, 2022)

Faith in the Wilderness is a just-released collection of edited sermons delivered by Chinese pastors at the height of the pandemic. It’s the first published book from the Center for House Church Theology. CHCT managing director Hannah Nation co-edited the collection with Chinese pastor Simon Liu.

Its very existence is an achievement. Religious regulations enacted in 2018 by the Chinese Communist Party drastically upped the pressure on the house church movement to capitulate to state control. Using the expanded powers, a Chinese court in 2019 sentenced Wang Yi, pastor of Early Rain Covenant Church, to nine years in prison following a secret trial. Some of the pastors writing in this book endure round-the-clock police surveillance outside their homes. “Every one of these guys has spent at least 24 hours in a jail cell,” Nation told me. She spoke to me about the book from her office in Pittsburgh. Full disclosure: I have recently joined the advisory board for CHCT, an organization I hope you’ll be hearing more about.

GLOBE TROT: How did this group of authors come together for this collection?

HANNAH NATION: It was challenging to get these guys published. It’s atypical for the Western publishing world to have a multi-authored volume, but this is very Chinese and very representative of the house churches. They have a more communal identity and there’s a deep sense of comaraderie and fellowship among these pastors. They rely on each other spiritually and intellectually, so it’s an accurate representation to publish them as a group.

GT: How did you decide whether to use their real names?

NATION: We left it up to them entirely to publish under a pseudonym or under their own name. It’s interesting because the pastors under the most pressure and most persecution are the ones who chose to use their own name. They are already known and they’ve already counted the cost.

GT: Does it make you anxious with the book’s release this week?

NATION: I do feel anxious. China is an evolving situation so it’s hard to know how to predict what will happen. I really rely on their decision making. In 2020 when COVID-19 broke out and Wuhan shut down they chose this motto: “Let light shine in the darkness.” Since then they feel there is a need to preach the word, not discounting the risks, but that they are going to do it whatever the cost.

GT: That helps to underscore how important the book is. Who are they writing to?

NATION: All of the content in the book was initially preached on open access online forums for Chinese. They were preaching to both believers needing encouragement and those who may be evangelized.

In the West we do not mix those audiences easily—there’s evangelism and there’s discipleship. During the outbreak of the pandemic in the U.S., the American church responded with discipleship, with a focus on reassuring the saints to persevere. And I was working on this book at the same time, and these pastors were focusing on evangelism. The pandemic is the most important time to preach to those who have never heard the Gospel before, they believed. Most Chinese homes are multi-generational, and it’s very rare that everyone in a family will be a Christian. So in one sense it’s a practical decision for an online preaching event.

GT: Explain how this online preaching event came to be. It was at the start of the pandemic?

NATION: Yes, in 2020. My co-editor, Simon Liu, organized all these sermons. He dreamed up, planned, and executed a whole year of pandemic preaching. It was something along the lines of great-revival 20th-century preaching, with the feel of getting out in the fields with the coal miners. For China in the 21st century, that meant a digital “tent.” I can’t name the platform, but anyone with a link could log on. Pastors would show their face and use their full Chinese name. It’s hard to calculate how many attended, but it’s safe to say there were tens of thousands of device log-ins. And this wasn’t the only group of pastors doing it.

GT: How did the book take shape out of the preaching?

NATION: We were working on translation simultaneously. There were many more sermons that could have gone into the book, so we tried to choose ones that would speak to an American audience. I wanted a movement toward our end destiny, a kind of creation/fall/redemption structure.

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“If we can feel a kinship with Martin Luther, we should feel a kinship with Chinese pastors who are writing on their MacBooks while answering their smartphones. They live in a secular society that cannot find its moral underpinnings, and the experience of secularization can be an emerging bond.”

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GT: In the first section with Simon Liu’s essay “A Deadly World,” we see these pastors aren’t shy about speaking directly against CCP authorities. He writes about living in a “cultural system in which demons are clothed as angels” and says “whoever believes in the Communist Party will walk into a crematorium.” It seems so risky: Is it?

NATION: Yes, risk is the air they breathe. Every one of these guys has spent at least 24 hours in a jail cell. They in a very real way have counted the cost. They call it “drinking tea” with the local officials, just a part of their life and calling as pastors. There was a new recognition after 2018 and [Early Rain pastor] Wang Yi’s arrest, a further sense of counting the cost. And this was amplified even more in 2020 with the pandemic restrictions. They know that churches in China are called to walk the way of the cross.

GT: In the second section, with Brian Li writing “Why We Must Pursue Christ,” there is a raw moment where he describes his anger toward his wife, not something you’d expect from a pastor. Why did you include it?

NATION: In China saving face is everything. So it’s unusual culturally, but it is becoming more and more a marker of the pastors in this particular movement. They are engaging the doctrine of grace in a way that’s almost uncomfortable to watch. So you will see very open and very frank discussions about repentance. They recognize it is a part of the Christian life, and it is very counter-cultural. These churches undergoing active persecution are writing corporate prayers about the way they’ve acted against their neighbors. I find this expression of repentance in the midst of suffering very convicting because of how little that language is part of our language here in the United States. We make repentance a one-time act that brings you into the kingdom, but Martin Luther said “all of life is repentance.” They get that, and Brian Li is a good example of it.

GT: For all the cultural differences, I found these pastors poking at things that Americans can relate to—getting ahead no matter the cost, justifying evil as a means to an end, and living for now more than any hereafter. When we think of China-U.S. relations, is there perhaps more that unites than divides us?

NATION: Of course China and the United States are very, very different. Let’s not minimize it. But we do have a lot more in common than we think. Globalization and technology have brought us more together. And we have more in common as both societies secularize. The world we inhabit is more like theirs than the world Martin Luther inhabited at perhaps the height of European Christendom, yet we study Luther like he’s one of us. If we can feel a kinship with Luther, we should feel a kinship with Chinese pastors who are writing on their MacBooks while answering their smartphones. They live in a secular society that cannot find its moral underpinnings, and the experience of secularization can be an emerging bond.

GT: The last section on hope coming out of the experiences of suffering and secularization contains Paul Peng’s “On the Other Side of the Sea.” It’s an arresting portrait of a sea of glass that also has fire in it. Is this a pandemic vision or is there more to it?

NATION: Eschatology in general is a big topic for all the pastors in this book, and Paul Peng has been preaching through Revelation. It’s so early in their theological formation, but I anticipate that in the next decades, or even centuries, the Chinese house church contribution will be on ecclesiology and eschatology, on the general question of how do we as the church head to our final destination.

Chinese society is looking for that metanarrative. It’s abandoned Confucianism, abandoned Communism on an ideological level, and is in the throes of capitalistic materialism. For most Chinese there is no underpinning to who they are and where they are going. That big picture is so important for the Chinese. The church provides a holistic story, that there is a God who created you, you belong to him, he has ransomed you, and he is coming back.

GT: And doesn’t that heighten the conflict between the church and the state?

NATION: Yes. Communism is an eschatological ideology. It has a message about destiny. The government wants people to respond to the question, who do you love? They don’t want control for control’s sake. They want the love and devotion of the people. In the West when you speak about eschatology, we think of it as boring or brainy, but the Chinese pastors know ultimately it’s a clash over who reigns in the hearts of the community.

GT: What’s something you’d like readers to take away from reading Faith in the Wilderness?

NATION: It’s really important to be praying for these pastors. They are people, not heroes. They are subject to any temptations we face under the pressures they are facing. When I read their words it’s hard not to worship Jesus, and that’s what they would want. The point is not how amazing they are, but that what Jesus is doing among them is amazing.