Since the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, the Chinese Protestant church has evolved into the three-self churches, house churches, and later, urban churches.
Focusing on the connection between the state and the church, the state-sanctioned churches at least undertake the dual missions of the church and state; the distinctive difference of house churches lies in that they hold a different view of treating the government; as for urban churches, they have emerged as the rise of modernization and urbanization and the formation of an industrial and commercial society shift the development of the church in China from the countryside to cities.
However, the concept "community church" here is totally different from the first three.
With conservatism engraved in their spirits, the three types of churches are the church forms that were produced and sprung up in certain historical backgrounds, but "community church" may be a new church after the new regulations on religious affairs took effect in February 2018.
Actually this new type came into being even long before. Its birth is relevant to the economic and social development and the formation of "civil society".
Below are its main features:
1. A community church serves its community as the worship center, just like a community hospital or a medium-sized supermarket.
2. Apart from church services and gatherings, the believers have interactions in their life. At ordinary times, they meet each other and share their daily life and knowledge. That is to say, they can precisely nurture themselves.
3. With more open evangelism, a community church abandons denominational awareness where people from different denominations worship God together.
4. During the Republic of China, the church in mainland China was the "community church", so different denominations cooperated with each other. The cooperation was recommending their members to attend nearby churches without regard to denominational identity and dividing up districts for every denomination to preach the gospel.
5. If a church provides intensive care to a community, it must shoulder some public responsibilities of the society. Under the initiative of "small government, big society", the Chinese government will buy public services from social organizations including communities.
The community church network is an incompact communication union that plans to do transregional and national ministries. It can be supervised by street committees.
I think that "community church" can be a direction and a helpful way out for the church in China.
Without a system, a preacher of a fundamental and conservative church is more likely to become a church bully that oppresses believers in the name of God and the Bible. So the advantage of a community church is that church staff, as one part of community public lives, is monitored by everybody. For example, any worker who is found to embezzle through the public account has to be put into prison; nobody can be reappointed consecutively throughout his life; if a church has a competitor, the staff has to listen to the voices of believers who can vote.
I hope that my child and tens of millions of children will live in a free society and an open community church. In an afternoon of a summer, they may delightedly play with the church's children in my community!
A Christian in Ji'nan, Shandong's capital, sticks to attending a church two hours away from her home, located in another district, just because her church preaches "truth". She knows a few churches near her home, but she never joins in them. The reasons are that she doesn't know the congregations there and that they give imbalanced sermons (too much grace and forgiveness, but few concerning confession).
I asked her who gave her the criterion, and she answered that she drew the conclusion after having heard sermons in her church for a long time.
I continued to ask her whether she would go to a church in her community, where she could engage in a small talk with other believers about things in the community and family trifles after work. She said yes, adding that it was not enough to connect other Christians on Sundays and the church life today lacked deep links between members. But such church should obey perfect truth!
I replied that only when your distant church stopped being puffed up with pride and regarding itself as the standard could you find a close-by church.
- Translated by Karen Luo
