China

Dear friends, brothers, and sisters in our Lord, Jesus Christ,

By the Grace of our Lord, Chaplains for Christ sent a team to China on one of the most exciting mission trips we have ever taken.  Below is a photo of our team and the 1000 Bibles we distributed.

 

Usually, we go to prisons in other countries and conduct ministry, distribute Bibles to the inmates and do prison training. However, at times we have gone to the persecuted church in various countries to distribute Bibles without doing any prison work, i.e. The Sudan and the Philippines.

About ten years ago, I had a dream in which I was standing in China and handing out Bibles one by one to the people. That dream became a reality at the beginning of September ’08.

 

We found the Chinese people to be more warm, friendly and helpful than any other people group I have ever encountered. I love the Chinese people and the first day we were in Beijing, I had the opportunity to give the gospel message to a group of Taoists who had never been exposed to the Gospel. In fact, they didn’t even know that China has officially recognized Christianity although the Chinese are only allowed to attend the government Christian church which is called the “Three Self Movement”. In order to accomplish our goals, we had to do the same thing that I did in my first trip to southern Sudan – carefully work outside the acceptable boundries allowed.  We went at the invitation of a ranking official in rural China, I cannot disclose the details, but we tried to be “invisible” as long as we could. We stayed in a private home in Beijing until we took a train to a remote area of China.

There, we spent four days distributing 1000 Bibles to eight underground house churches. We personally handed the Bibles one by one to the people, preached, prayed, sang and worshiped with them with no restrictions. Some traveled many miles to be with us in the services and we even ate with them and stayed with them in their homes, most built in caves in the mountains.

 

We were the first foreigners they had ever seen and none of them, except the pastors (usually female), had ever had a Bible nor could they afford one if one were available. They only had hymnals, which they sang from.

 

They didn’t even know how to use the Bibles when we gave them to them. We gave each one of them a tract called “How to Read the Bible” which suggests starting in The Gospel of John instead of Genesis.  (Below is the first page of this tract in Chinese)

 

We have videos and still photos of all that we did. At one of the churches, two unfriendly people came to the service and after we had lunch, the pastor received an angry call from the police wanting to know who we were and what were we doing there. We immediately left and from that point on, there was an “all points bulletin” issued for us and we saw many cars being pulled over and searched – but not ours. We had passed many checkpoints, both police and military, on our way to and from the churches but were never stopped and searched.

Once we had delivered all of the Bibles, we stayed at another “friendly” hotel where many of the usual rules were more “relaxed”.  However, we were alerted that the police were on their way to see us. It was 10:30 PM. From down at the end of the hallway, I began to hear knocks at every door of every room slowly getting nearer to us. Then, they knocked on our door.

When I opened the door, there was a hallway full of police (about 7 or 8), some in uniform and some not. One spoke English and said, “Here they are.” They were polite and asked to see our passports and visas. Then they left – for the moment. They then talked with our Chinese companion from the U.S. and the Chinese official that invited us, who, by God’s grace, had come to say goodbye to us all. Soon they returned to our room and began to ask us questions. What kind of work did we do, please give us your passports again (they looked at every page and wrote down information from them), when did we arrive in China, when are we leaving? etc., etc. They left again, for the moment. They again talked at length with our befriended Chinese official and our Chinese companion. Suddenly, the official and and our Chinese companion were in our rooms telling us to quickly give them our videos and camera discs because the police were about to confiscate them and see where we had been and what we had done.

We quickly gave all of them to her and she hid them in a garbage can in the hallway in case of searches in all of our rooms. Moments after she left, the police knocked on our door. We barely had time to put empty discs into our cameras. They asked for the cameras and opened them to look at the images. “Why are there no images on these discs?” We said, “Well, we begin our tourist visit tomorrow at a nearby tourist attraction. After all, there isn’t much to see in these small towns.” They were very upset and began to search some of our belongings for what they knew to be missing film. We told them they could look wherever they wanted. We knew that they would find nothing including any of the 1000 Bibles because we had passed them all out.

We then spoke with all of the provincial officials who had come looking for us – The Wise High Police Chief of the province, the Minister of Religious Affairs in the province and other police officials. The Governor of religious affairs asked why we had not seen him before we went to the churches. He claimed that he would have personally driven us in his own car and taken us wherever we wanted to go. Right.

After three hours and the providential intervention of our local Chinese official, they left.

We returned to Beijing but stayed in a home. We never did register with the police, which we were supposed to do wherever we went. We knew better.

Finally, we shopped, went to Tiananmen Square and even climbed the “Great Wall”.

What a trip. To God be all the Glory.

Chaplain Rob Brown