Houses of worship seek legitimacy
- Source: Global Times
- [00:10 November 04 2009]
- Comments
The congregation celebrates Christmas Eve, 2006 at Zhushikou Church in Beijing. Photos: CFP
By Peng Yining
The service ends at 10:30 pm. Sixteen Protestants sneak out of his apartment into the night, one after another.
Softly, softly, or the neighbor will complain again, says the host's wife, standing beside the door and lowering her voice.
Make sure you are punctual for the Sunday morning service.
Guests nod their heads and and merge into the darkness.
Five years after he was baptized, the 39-year old college teacher opened his apartment as a house church in March 2008.
It's one of eight small congregations in the capital city that name themselves Fu Xing , or Renaissance . They meet every Thursday night and Sunday morning.
All are unregistered, operating independently of the officially recognized Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches.
There has been a sharp rise in both the number and the size of house churches around China in the past decade. The government has to choose between allowing their registration and denying their existence, says Yu Jianrong, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.
The government has not given a clear attitude to either house churches or their assembly, but it needs to make a decision soon, he says.
Beijing has several hundred unregistered assemblies that can be called churches they have a fully-fledged organizational structure with each member fulfilling a certain function. There are also many Bible study groups and other temporary assemblies, he tells the Global Times.
