Fangcheng Fellowship

The Fangcheng Fellowship (Chinese: 方城团契) of China is a Christian religious movement founded by Li Tianen in the early 1970s. The Fangcheng Fellowship is now considered one of the largest Henan-based house church networks now estimated to number in the millions throughout China. They regard themselves as a church with more unified principles when compared to the Tanghe Fellowship.

Historical background and influences

In the 1940s, a captain in the Chinese Nationalist army, Gao Yongjiu, was converted to Christianity and became a zealous local evangelist in Fangcheng County of Henan province. During the first year of the Communist occupation of Fangcheng County, he and other Christian groups were largely left alone. Once the Three-Self began to assert control over China's Protestants in the 1950s, however, Gao and two other prominent, independent local Christians were targeted at accusation meetings and jailed as counterrevolutionaries for several years.

In 1970, after being released from a labor camp, Li Tianen began evangelizing throughout Henan. He often lived in the home of fellow Christian workers in Fangcheng County, training up to twenty young people at a time, and travelling to other counties and even provinces for additional teaching sessions. Thousands of Christians were active by 1974, with no fewer than four thousand attending a clandestine training session that year.

In the early 1990s, the Fangcheng Fellowshjip had sent evangelistic teams to thirty provinces and municipal regions, including China's largest cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing. The number of Christians associated with the network was around five million [1], according to Zhang Rongliang.

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