The Back To Jerusalem movement (Chinese:传回耶路撒冷运动) is a Christian evangelistic campaign begun in China by Chinese believers to send missionaries to all of the Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim peoples who live "between" China and Jerusalem.[1] They believe that the Back to Jerusalem Movement is a call from God for the Chinese church to preach the gospel and establish fellowships of believers in all countries, cities, towns, and ethnic groups between China and Jerusalem.[2] The BTJ vision was first conceived during the 1920s by Chinese students at the Northwest Bible Institute, however government restrictions and persecution forced the movement to go underground for decades, and its leader Simon Zhao spent 40 years in prison in Kashgar.
Since 2003, the most vocal international proponent of "Back to Jerusalem" has been the exiled Chinese house church leader Liu Zhenying a.k.a. "Brother Yun". But many Christian leaders in China, such as Samuel Lamb have distanced themselves from Yun and his foreign-funded organisation. Yun intended for "Back to Jerusalem" to evangelize fifty-one countries by sending a minimum of 100,000 missionaries along the Silk Road, an ancient trade route that winds from China to the Mediterranean Sea.[1] Tony Lambert doubts the numbers claimed by outsiders such as Yun are not substantiated, but the ongoing work of evangelism, both within China and beyond its borders, is being done anonymously by Chinese church members, who make no appeals for money.[3]
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