Members of the Highland China Missions Team recently spent two weeks in three cities in China: Beijing, Qingdao and Wuhan. We visited church leaders and Christians in house churches, Three Self Patriotic Churches (the government approved church) and in other types of Christian churches. In this series I explore how the trip shattered myths I once held about China, its people and its faith.
The house-church model limits church growth in China.
That’s what I believed before traveling to China. As far as I could tell, there were only two models for churches in China. Model #1 was the Western church model of building a big building, holding multiple worship services, and growing as large as possible. But, this option was only available to the government sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Churches (more on them in a later post). Model #2 was the house-church model. Groups of twenty or thirty crowded into a tiny house or apartment. Growth was limited by the size of the house/apartment.
I imagined that what we’d find in China would be isolated house-churches barely scraping by. Lonely. Isolated. Resourceless. On life-support. And I imagined that Highland would have to adopt that model in our work. Not an inspiring picture.
What we found in China, however, transformed my outlook. For example, American missionaries in Qingdao have planted a church with a vision for significant growth using a multi-site house-church model (pictured above). They’re striving to be one church of eight house-churches of eighty worshipers per house-church (eighty seems to be the number above which draws government attention). Using this model they can grow to more than 600. Their first house-church is already packed. House-church #2 launches soon. They learned this model from another church in Qingdao planted with a similar vision. We also found a network of three house-churches in Beijing using this same multi-site model. The three house-churches share a rotation of preachers and gather together for retreats and seminars during the year. And, we learned of another house-church network planted in Beijing through City to City consisting of 1,000 worshipers spread across multiple house-churches.
Here in the U.S. more than 5 million worshippers fill more than 8,000 multi-site churches–churches with one leadership but multiple campuses/locations. These multi-site churches tend to foster growth (an average of 14%/year) and often exceed church plants in evangelistic impact. The same model is now being adapted by churches in China: one church meeting in multiple locations/house-churches. In this way a church can spread across a large city, keep gatherings to sizes small enough to stay “under the radar,” and bring together greater leadership, talent and resources than any single house-church might if it were on its own. What we saw is a model that allows for tremendous growth in a challenging situation.
