A Faith Formed in a Rural Church
I grew up in a Christian family and in a rural evangelical church in S Province with Baptist leanings. It was a fairly large church, but it did not have a well-developed system of church governance or a strong theological framework. Most of the believers were farmers with little formal education. Even so, the church had a vibrant spiritual life, and it was where my own faith first took root.
In that church, I saw the vitality of the gospel in rural China. Although it was a rural congregation, it had many different ministries, including camps for young people, older adults, married couples, and students. As far back as I can remember, I attended children’s Sunday school. As I grew older, I joined summer and winter camps. During my school years, I also attended a fellowship gathering every other week. Sometimes they even changed the meeting time to accommodate my school holidays.
That meant a great deal to me. Even as I write this, tears come to my eyes as memories of those years in the church return.
I would love to spend more time writing about my childhood, but that is not really the focus of this article. What I want to write about here is how God has shepherded me through different churches.
As I grew older, I became increasingly aware of my own sin. At the time, I did not yet understand justification by faith, so I often felt trapped under the law. I felt like a sinner peering toward the light from the darkness. I could see the light, but because of my sin, I could never seem to reach it.
I became deeply discouraged with myself, but I did not give up my faith. The uncles and aunties in the church were full of joy and served with great enthusiasm. In them, I saw something of the believers described in Scripture. Their lives helped convince me that the faith was real.
When I was eighteen, I reached a turning point.
The more I searched for truth, the more it seemed to escape me. It felt as if the connection between God and me had gone offline. Rationally, I was certain that he existed. Emotionally, I could no longer sense his presence.
Around that time, I read Ecclesiastes. It suddenly shattered the hopes I had placed in the world, and I became even more discouraged. Pursuing the world was meaningless, but when I tried to seek God, I could not seem to find him either. I no longer knew what gave life meaning or where I was going.
That summer, however, something happened at a church camp. The pastor showed us a documentary called Love in China, which told the stories of several cross-cultural workers who had come to China.
I wept as I watched it.
I remember thinking, this is what makes a life meaningful.
These people had brought the gospel to China. I wanted to continue what they had begun and help more Chinese people hear the gospel.
Later, when I went to university, I left my home church and joined a campus fellowship started by a church in W City. There were many students in the fellowship, including quite a few foreigners. While I was there, I took an introductory Christian course called New Life in Christ. That course helped me come to know Christ afresh and understand that I was a sinner saved by grace.
When Theology Was Not Enough
After graduation, once I had begun working, I came into contact with a Reformed Presbyterian church. That was when I began studying the Bible and Reformed theology systematically.
I eventually quit a well-paying job so that I could attend a one-year discipleship program run by the church.
That year helped connect many pieces of biblical knowledge that had previously seemed scattered. I began to realize that even in the summer and winter camps of my childhood, I had already encountered ideas from covenant theology, kingdom theology, the theology of the cross, and biblical theology. In the discipleship program, I also studied ecclesiology, eschatology, the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms, and biblical counseling.
I loved studying. But I was constantly taking things in without giving anything out. Every day, I was filling myself with more theological knowledge, while there was still plenty of sin in my own life that needed to be dealt with.
So I began to pray. I asked God to renew and change me, and I also asked him to show me a concrete direction for serving.
I had been at the church for less than a year when I began getting to know many new people. Through them, I realized that quite a few people were living on the margins of the church. They were not receiving much attention or care.
The church took theology seriously and placed a strong emphasis on teaching and pastoral care through the Word, but relationships among brothers and sisters could be distant.
So every weekend, I began inviting different young people to the “Brothers’ House” for meals.
What I sensed God calling me to do was not to leave the church, but to help fill the gap I saw there.
Some churches recoil at the very mention of Reformed theology. They think Reformed churches talk only about law and lack love. I believe that is also a misunderstanding of us. We speak about the law so that people may recognize sin, repent, and seek Christ. So when we speak about law, we also speak about grace. And when we speak about grace, we do not leave the law behind.
Learning by Going
During that discipleship year, I also became close friends with an older preacher who had many years of ministry experience and had shared the gospel in many parts of China.
After class each day, Brother Z would take me out to evangelize and visit people. Through him, I heard many stories about gospel work and learned more about churches in different parts of the country.
When the discipleship program ended, Brother Z organized a small group of us who had a burden for ministry to serve for a short time in X Province. It was my first experience serving across regions.
Our first stop was a rural church deep in the mountains in the Little Flock, or Local Church, tradition. There were many believers there, and the congregation was led by a brother who was almost ninety years old.
He told us that he had received very little education. But people in the church told me that his preaching spoke powerfully to them, not only to older people but also to the young. Many of the younger believers had grown up listening to him preach.
We visited during the hottest part of summer, just after heavy rain. The mountains were hot and humid. Yet every day, this elderly preacher climbed onto his electric tricycle with his wife and traveled through the hills to visit brothers and sisters and share the gospel with those who did not yet believe.
Our second stop was a church in a small town. A church from W City happened to be there leading a summer camp for children, so we joined them in serving. They came back every year to hold the camp and had even prepared a house in the town for the local church to use.
Our third stop was a larger church in a city. At the time, they were under considerable pressure and could no longer gather as one large congregation, so they met in smaller groups instead.
I heard many of their testimonies and was deeply moved. They cared about truth, but I also saw vibrant spiritual life among them. God’s word was not something they only talked about. I could see it expressed in the way they lived.
That trip greatly strengthened my desire to continue serving.
I was still young, and I myself had been shaped through a university fellowship, so I decided to focus my ministry on university students. During those years, my work situation changed several times, but ministry continued fairly smoothly.
An Uncomfortable Question
That changed when the campus fellowship later came under pressure and I was questioned by the authorities.
During the questioning, they told me about some church leaders who had been involved in questionable investment schemes that had caused believers to lose money. They also urged me to leave the house church and attend a legally registered Three-Self church instead.
I knew that some of what they were saying was true and some was not. But I also knew that some of the problems they mentioned were not simply invented.
That forced me to ask an uncomfortable question: What kind of witness was our church actually giving to the people around us? Was our church bringing any real blessing to the city where we lived?
I began to wonder whether this, too, was a gap God was asking me to help fill.
We are not called to run away from the world and close the doors behind us while we worship God. We should open the doors and let others see our good works so that glory is given to God.
At that time, one direction I began thinking about was charity and community service.
“We Are Hungry, but We Have No Preacher”
Later, I quit my job and visited a rural church in A Province.
There were more than a thousand believers in the area, but they were divided among dozens of meeting points. Relationships between some of the groups were tense, and they sometimes questioned one another. Disagreements over how offerings were distributed, long-standing issues of trust, and the lack of regular pastoral leadership were all tangled together.
There were also groups in the area promoting teachings the local believers regarded as heretical, so the churches often had to seek help from pastors elsewhere.
One elderly woman made a particularly deep impression on me.
As we drove her home, she said the same thing to me three times:
“We are hungry, but we have no preacher.”
Her words stayed with me.
I began to wonder: How many churches like this are there, hungry for pastoral care but without anyone to provide it?
In the large cities, there are trained workers and many young seminary students. But who will pastor the churches in these smaller places?
After that visit, I began looking for ways to connect the rural church with help from other churches. That was also when the idea of building a network connecting churches first began to take shape in my mind.
Finding a Direction
Later, Brother G, who shared a similar burden for the gospel, and I went to learn from a church in W City.
They were involved not only in urban evangelism but also in cross-cultural mission. Through theological training, they prepared workers and sent them to serve in different regions.
One piece of advice they gave us was that we first needed to become clear about our own calling.
On the way home, Brother G and I talked about this for a long time.
At that point, our main burden was for youth ministry and connecting churches, rather than cross-cultural mission. There were still so many people around us who had never heard the gospel.
We hoped to see more young Christians live as witnesses for God in different professions and areas of society. We also hoped they would become a blessing where they lived and help people who were marginalized or struggling.
Later, we deliberately visited a youth-focused church in H City to learn from them.
Their approach to evangelism was simple. They invited people they did not know into their homes for meals. They first built relationships and then gradually introduced the gospel through conversation and sharing.
When we returned home, we tried this ourselves several times. We also saw people become willing to learn more about the Christian faith through those relationships.
Men, Women, and the Work of the Church
As I look back over these years, I still see a great deal of life in the church in China. At the same time, there are real problems that need to be faced.
For example, in my home church and in some traditional house churches I have encountered, there are relatively few male ministry workers. Many of the men also carry heavy responsibilities at work and at home. As a result, women often take on a great deal of teaching, pastoral care, and leadership.
I personally believe that churches should encourage men to take more responsibility for leadership and spiritual oversight.
But I cannot use that belief to dismiss what these women have contributed.
My own growth in faith would not have been possible without the careful teaching of the aunties in my church. Their love and faith gave me examples to follow. The growth of the church in China and the spread of the gospel have depended in no small part on the long and faithful service of many women.
For me, then, the real issue is not simply removing women from positions of service. The question is whether men are willing to repent and take up the responsibilities they should be carrying. At the same time, churches also need to intentionally equip and nurture men so that they can gradually grow into these responsibilities in spiritual life, truth, and service.
No Church Is Perfect
After passing through so many different churches, I have become increasingly aware that no church is perfect.
A church that places great emphasis on theological knowledge may still need to learn how to practice love in relationships and concrete action. A church that emphasizes ministry results may still need to ask whether individual lives are receiving real pastoral care.
Every church has its strengths. Every church also has blind spots.
None of us is perfect, whether pastor or church member. Even a church with sound doctrine and a well-developed structure will still have cracks and wounds because of human sin and weakness.
In the midst of all this imperfection, we can only look to the Lord, who alone is perfect.
