On August 20, the Xiaohongpo Church was dedicated in Mile, an ancient Buddhist city in Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan province. It has been the first church opened in Mile since the implementation of the policy on the freedom of religious belief. However, it took eight years' application to have the first church opened.
The city's Chinese name has the same sound from the Maitreya Buddha. Buddhism is popularly practiced here.
A British missionary first brought the Gospel to this city and later, the believers grew, especially after China resumed the validity of its religious policy. The numbers of believers and gathering places increased rapidly.
But the city had had no formal and approved preacher (clergy) or legal gathering place (church) for quite a long time. Since 1992, Elder He Jianjia, the leader of the church, began to submit the application to the local religious authority, requesting to have an open church in the area.
To meet the requirement, the open church should have a clergy. He studied in Nanjing Union Theological Seminary and graduated in 1998. In addition, he sent other preachers to receive training in Kunming.
Until 2000, the local authority approved the registration and opening of the church. Afterwards, considering the inconvenience for the church to develop campuses, he applied for the opening of other campuses, including Dongmen Church and Zhuyuan Church.
He also filed an application for the founding of a city-level CCC&TSPM, but it failed due to different opinions in the church.
During the dedication ceremony, he introduced the church's history and said that it was not the time to have a gathering site while the Xiaohongpo Gathering Site was being founded. The believers gathered in a rented house, experiencing a lot of inconveniences. At that time, there were seven gathering sites in the city and some of them already had churches before Xiaohongpo had its own church building in 1992.
In 2008, the church received a land covering over 780 square meters from the local authority by allegedly claiming to make a home for the aged. It built a tile-roofed house for gatherings. However, it was destroyed by a tornado after a few days. The church then collected donations to construct another house with a tile roof for gatherings. A few years later, it became dangerous for any activity. In 2014, the church built a two-storey church with an area of over 370 square meters with donations worth over 20,000 yuan from believers, subsidies from the government and borrowed money.
The congregation worshipped God in the holy temple on the second floor and two sisters live on the first floor. Half of the members are Han people and the rest are ethnic minorities including Miao, Yi, Zhuang, Hui and Yi. Since they speak different languages, all the congregation members use the Chinese Bible to study and worship. The senior believers who live on subsistence allowances account for 80% of the congregation.
