A bitter life brought revival in China — and missions Westward

By Donnie Stultz —

At no moment in Shen XiaoMing‘s life was there ease.

“The entire story of my life can be summed up in one word: bitter,” he says, as translated. “When I was little — bitter starvation. Then as a teenager — the bitterness of my disease. Then when I started to preach the Gospel — the bitterness of prison and persecution. It’s all been bitter.”

Despite unflagging hardship, Shen XiaoMing’s life has also been characterized by unparalleled fruitfulness. Today the man who planted his first church in China when he was a teenager presides over 10M believers who comprise the network China Gospel Fellowship. They are credited with bringing revival raging in the countryside to the cities of China.

“Suffering doesn’t just strengthen faith,” he says. “It helps you experience the presence of God, to experience his power.”

Revival spread unchecked in 1978 to 1998, he says, but mostly in the countryside, in the villages. “Most of the people in China were out in the country,” XiaoMing says. “The church ought to be where the people are.”

His mission pivoted to focusing on cities as the major metropolises surged with population, he says. “For the sake of keeping influence in the cities, China’s church must succeed here,” he says.

The first missionaries enter China came by way of the Silk Road and preached in China’s cradle, in Xi’an amid the Yellow River Valley. They were Nestorian Christians coming from the Persian Empire. They established contact with the emperor and sent up Eastern Orthodox crosses that bear testimony to the first efforts to reach the Chinese. They weren’t known as Christians but The Luminous Religion (the religion of the Light).

They set up monasteries and Bible schools, but they died out towards the end of the Tang Dynasty. But it never completely went away.

If Christianity came from Western nations, it is now going back to those nations from the East, from China. The Chinese Christians have launched the Back to Jerusalem Project, aimed at -re evangelizing the Muslim corridor of the world that was overrun by Islam.

No one better to do that than the Chinese missionaries, who can slip in easier than white North Americans. They also are much more accustomed to hardship than their U.S. counterparts.

Chinese missionaries are now pushing Eastward, into Tibet and Xinjiang, where the Muslim Uyghurs dominate. To eradicate their Islamic tendencies and subject the Uyghurs to the state, China has hit them with mass detentions, intensive surveillance, forced labor, restrictions, sterilization and re-educaton camps, international investigators allege.

“The Middle East is a God-given gift for China,” says Pastor Zhang Rongliang, of the “The house church is now training, preparing. Even now there are already many in Muslim nations already doing mission work. We will see many coming out of China to see China kneeling before the Lord and the Muslims bowing to Jesus.”

Related content: Revival can’t be shut down in China, why do Buddhist monks shave their heads? Sources: Back to Jerusalem podcast.