Chinese Christians braced for a ‘harsh winter’.
According to Release International’s partner ChinaAid, ‘a harsh winter is descending upon Chinese Christianity.’ Following the pattern of recent years, since the beginning of 2024, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities under President Xi Jinping have significantly intensified their crackdown on house churches. Christianity is now firmly viewed as a tool of the state used to bolster the CCP’s authoritarian rule. The church should deliver patriotic education, interpret doctrines in accordance with core socialist values, and promote ‘Xi Jinping thought’. As a result unregistered house churches are aggressively targeted and, increasingly, pastors are arrested and given harsh prison sentences.
For example, ChinaAid reports that since July 2022 members of the Xi’an Church of Abundance have been receiving oral summonses and home visits from the police and some residences have been searched. According to the summoned believers, officers threatened them in relation to their jobs and children’s schooling while demanding that they surrendered church offerings, provided false testimonies, and accused their pastor of fraud and spreading cults.
Subsequently, in August 2022, the police detained the church pastor, Lian Changnian, on the charge of ‘fraud’ and placed him under ‘residential surveillance at a designated location’ along with two other pastors. After further police intimidation and harassment of church members, the case entered court in January 2024 and if found guilty the pastors could face five years in prison. The Xi’an Church of Abundance is affiliated with the China Gospel Fellowship, a national house church movement with 10,000,000 congregants. It is one of the most developed house churches in China. Voice.
