Qin Cizhe, the 78-year-old retired elder, claims that he enjoys living in Gospel Church located in Huangyuan County, Xining, Qinghai, where he served throughout his life alone. He hopes that his bone ash can be buried in the church's garden after death despite he has one son and four daughters.
Qin was baptized, when he was 11, in June 1949 when Victor Plymire, the founder of the church, held his last baptism service in Huangyuan.
After Victor returned to the United States, Rev. Qin Buying, his father, took over the church. His father was sentenced to nine years in prison in 1958 for the Christian faith and died two years later. The church resumed services in 1988 and Qin became the church leader. He was retired in 1999.
After retirement, he has been watching the church. Blind due to retinal detachment, Qin tells CCD that many Bibles were badly rugged by him and he can only listen to the Scriptures.
He thinks that the whole Bible can summarize with sixteen Chinese characters, "In the beginning was word; Incarnation; Emmanuel; Hallelujah." The aged brother also listens to the news and interprets them through the perspective of the Bible, holding that nowadays is in the last days seen from some events occurred.
The cults like Eastern Lightning and Mentuhui, who are regarded as Qin's enemy, disturb the local believers. Qin says that he ran to the cults and distributed the Bibles to their followers when he was young. He thought that he should show the Bible to the congregations for the cult leaders were hard to change. Once a head of a cult stopped him from the distribution, he immediately slapped the leader in the face. Then the head questioned his crudeness, he replied harshly, "I slapped you, the devil Satan!"
"Now I can't continue to do this because I'm blind." He says. Qin wants to help young believers grow. In the past, he gave a hand to a seminary student who wanted to come back to Yanjing Theological Seminary despite a prestigious pastor opposed the request.
The brother says that he never stops his service though he was not in charge of the church. The old man still keeps watching on the church that has just a few believers.
