The Pentecostal movement in China began when the first missionaries arrived in China in 1907.[1] Almost immediately they put down roots in at least three places which later strongly influenced the development of Chinese Pentecostalism. These were Hong Kong, Hebei province, and Shanghai.
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Pentecostalism, and the missionaries who were an integral part of it, were products of the convergence of several forces in Christianity at the turn of the century.[2] Some of these forces were a reaction against the secularization and institutionalization of largely middle-class Protestant denominational churches. Not all of these forces or elements were unique to the United States, but they came together there in a dramatic way, so that early Pentecostalism can be seen as a product of U.S. Society. These forces included:
All these elements coalesced in the particular conditions of the United States. Soon after 1900, the Apostolic Faith movement emerged, and then came the great watershed of the formation of the modern Pentecostal movement, the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, 1906-1908.[4] From Azusa Street came the people and forces to form the U.S. Assemblies of God in 1914, and smaller American Pentecostal groups. but right from the beginning in 1906, there was a remarkable missionary thrust coming out from the Azusa Street phenomenon. Within weeks, Christians transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit were heading off to foreign lands, not a part of any mission society, but as "faith missionaries," certain that God would meet their needs.[5] The destination of many of them was Asia.
The characteristics and messages that these early Pentecostal missionaries brought were:
Alfred G. Garr, who was pastoring a Los Angeles church when the Azusa Street Revival began in 1906, was one of the first pastors to receive the baptism of the Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. Within days he felt a call to go as a missionary to India in 1907, then arrived with hiswife in hong Kong in October 1907, where he joined a handful of Pentecostal single women who had come to Hong Kong from Seattle in the late summer or early fall of 1907.[6] Garr had considerable impact in Hong Kong. A Congregational church of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) permitted him to hold meetings there, where he began to present Pentecostal doctrines. One Mok Lai-Chi (Mò Lǐ-zhì/莫礼智), a forty year old school proprietor who was the Sunday School superintendent and a deacon in that ABCFM church, was Garr's interpreter. Soon Mok received the Holy Spirit baptism with the evidence of speaking in tongues. Within two months the ABCFM church committee banned the Pentecostals from the premises, and they had to move elsewhere. But mok let them use his school, and in January 1908, Mok as editor put out the first issue of a Chinese monthly paper, Pentecostal truths (五旬節真理報); Mok remained editor for many years. By 1909 six thousand copies were being printed nd mailed nationwide.[7] This group and newspaper are important because the paper directly influenced the North China founders of the first major Chinese Pentecostal church, The True Jesus Church.
There was also a very early Pentecostal base in North China, in Zhengding County, near Shijiazhuang, Hebei province. Like the Hong Kong base, it was a direct product of Azusa Street in Los Angeles. In about 1904, a certain Mr. Berntsen went to a south Hebei mission.[8] Late in 1906 he got his hands on one of the first issues of the "official" Azusa Street publication, the Apostolic Faith, and was so excited by its description of events there that he immediately left China and sailed back to the United States, headed for Los Angeles. The rapid transmission of this early sectarian publication all the way from Southern California all the way to Hebei is itself remarkable. At any rate, words of a 1907 issue of the Apostolic Faith, "Berntsen went to the altar at Azusa Mission. and soon fell under the power, and arose drunk on the new wine of the kingdom, magnifying God in a new tongue. As soon as he could speak English, he says, ‘This means much for China’.[9]" Berntsen stayed around Los Angeles for a time, then helped form a group of about twelve Pentecostal missionaries who headed for China. They decided to open a new independent mission station in an area where famine had been raging, and chose Zhengding, on the rail line just north of Shijiazhuang, Hebei, not far from Berntsen's earlier station. Berntsen kept in touch with the Azusa Street people, and letters from him are included in issues of the Apostolic Faith until the last issue in May 1908. The Zhengding mission had some permanence. Berntsen and his wife were still listed as being there, along with a few other in 1915.[10] The group at Zhengding began to put out a newspaper in 1912. This was called the Popular Gospel Truth (通傳福音真理報), and gives us some important information. First, it identifies the church name under which the church group operated, the Faith Union (信心會).[11]
Besides Hong Kong and Hebei, a third early Pentecostal group settled in at Shanghai. This group also was aproduct of the Azusa Street revival, although a slightly indirect one. As early as in the summer of 1906, Pastor M.L. Ryan of Salem, Oregon, heard in detail of the inspiring events in Los Angeles, and was profoundly affected.[12] Soon he moved to Spokane, where he gathered a Pentecostal congregation which in the summer of 1907 sent a whole band of missionaries to Asia, led by Ryan himself.[13] Interestingly, as they were leaving Seattle in late summer 1907, they met and overlapped a few days with Brother Berntsen from Hebei, who was landing there on his way to Los Angeles.[14] The Ryan group encountered some confusion and scattering in East Asia, but by the fall of 1907 at least two of its single women members had gone on to Hong Kong, where they soon joined up with A.G. Garr arriving from India, and were in on the founding of the Pentecostal movement there which was described already. Others of Ryan's group went with some other missionaries in the Shanghai area who had abandoned their denominations and come over to join one or another Pentecostal band, or just operated independently. After 1910, there was a rapid growth of Pentecostal missions all across China. These missionaries were not very visible among the general run of foreign missionaries.[15] They preached where they could, held healing services, and expected miracles. Many if not most had no regular financial support, and they seem to have been more peripatetic than most missionaries, perhaps because they generally did not build institutions like clinics and schools (although some did have orphanages).
The Pentecostals were not accorded much respect by the "missionary establishment." One British Baptist source referred disparagingly to "certain sects from America" which entered Shandong after 1912.[16] The China Inland Mission, by now the largest Protestant mission body in China with over one thousand members, found increasing tension within its ranks on the issue of Pentecostalism or the "tongues movement" after 1910. Some of its missionaries were attracted to it, a number were repelled by it, and the all-powerful CIM China Council at Shanghai spent much time debating the proper relationship with the movement during 1914-1915. After consultation with the home councils in Britain and North America, in April 1915 the China Council adopted a long statement condemning the Pentecostal movement, whose meetings were allegedly "characterized by disorder and by manifestations which in some cases have led to mental derangement and maniacal ravings.[17]" And a Chinese-language church newspaper published by the American presbyterians in Shanghai specifically warned in 1915 that in quest of the "gift" of speaking in tongues, people had been known to go insane and kill themselves.[18] The Pentecostals obviously had an uphill task in public relations, at least in the missionary community.
Despite their pariah status among fellow missionaries, these Pentecostal pioneers persevered. Buoyed by the immediacy of their spiritual experiences and by millenarian expectations, they lived on the precipice of history, having direct communication with Jesus and being filled with the awesome power of the Holy Spirit, all this confirmed for them by the tongues phenomenon. Their message, quixotic or heretical as it seemed to many other missionaries, did in fact find a Chinese audience. One feature of the earliest Chinese participants in the Pentecostal movement was that they were nearly all already Christians, but searching for a deeper and more immediate religious experience that they did not find in their particular denominations. Early adherents came variously from Methodist, Presbyterian, China Inland Mission, Congregational, Seventh-day Adventist, and other backgrounds. In Hong Kong the second, third and fourth Pentecostal converts were all members of the ABCFM church where A.G. Garr first preached.[19] Later, the two most important founders of the True Jesus Church came from Presbyterian and London Missionary Society churches, and the founder of the Jesus Family had a Methodist background.
The True Jesus Church in effect had two co-founders. One was Mr. Zhang Bin of Weixian district in northeast Shandong province.[20] Zhang, who had been an elder in the Weixian Presbyterian church for several years, in 1909 was told by his son about an Apostolic Faith Mission (使徒信心會) in Shanghai where one could "receive the Holy Spirit." The elder Zhang set off on a quest that would take him far and wide. he went Shanghai, where the Pentecostal missionaries (very likely Mr. and Mrs. Lawler) laid hands on him, but he did not receive his Spirit baptism. He continued earnestly to seek it at home, and finally in December 1909 he received the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues. In 1910 he went to Suzhou and was rebaptized (by immersion in water), and sometime after that he went to the north, including Beijing, where he received instruction from two members of the Faith Union (信心會), one of them probably Brother Berntsen from Zhengding [21] Sometime before 1916 Zhang, who by now had renamed himself Zhang Lingsheng, claimed he had received a "revelation" (啟示) from God that only Sabbath day worship was acceptable. Zhang then formed a church or group based on this Seventh-Day Pentecostalism which had the name Jesus's True Church (耶穌真教會). Zhang spent at least some of his time between about 1912 and 1918, perhaps most of it back home in Shandong. The other co-founder was Paul Wei. The two of them later got together and use the name True Jesus Church.
The story of the True Jesus Church constitutes a fascinating case of "transnational relations" [22] There was a crucial input by maverick individual foreign missionaries, which occurred outside the established channels of intellectual/religious transmission (Christian colleges and publications, denominational mission churches). Yet the resulting Chinese church paid scant acknowledgment, let alone deference, to its foreign progenitors [23] Nevertheless the Chinese Pentecostal Christian community, the numerical majority of which was represented by the True Jesus Church for much of the first half of the twentieth century, must be reckoned as a legitimate part of the 20th century Pentecostal movement, an international transnational phenomenon of the first magnitude. One cannot help but be struck by the remarkable eclecticism of the church in establishing a Seventh-Day Unitarian Pentecostal Baptist church. This is seen in stark terms in the basic tenets of the church adopted in 1919. Several of these - Holy Spirit baptism, tongues, and healing - are classic Pentecostal doctrines. Even the "Jesus only" non-Trinitarian position probably came from Pentecostal sources; the "Jesus only" impulse was quite strong among early Pentecostal missionaries in the mid 1910s, especially in China [24] The Saturday worship conviction likely came from early American Seventh-day Adventist missionaries and their publications; they were increasingly active in China after 1902 [25]
The second prominent Chinese Pentecostal church is the Jesus Family, founded by Jing Dianying. Although Jing had become a Methodist Christian since 1914, he felt that he had not been spiritually "reborn".[26] He believed that he did not receive the "gift of the spirit" or entered into personal communication with the Holy Spirit. In 1923, he returned to Taian to teach in the middle school, where he became associated with the Assemblies of God. Jing was spiritually enlightened by a particular Assemblies of God missionary called Anglin, who established a Home of Onesiphorus. He was gradually attracted by both its Pentecostal religious teaching and its combination of the sacred and secular life. In 1924, it was in the meeting hall of the Assemblies of God that Jing experienced the "strong shock" that convinced him he had been baptized by the Holy Spirit, for at least he could now speak in tongues. It seems that Jing highly appreciated the "strange and beautiful feeling" derived from this experience and found happiness in this encounter with the divine.[27] The Reverend Perry Hanson , the principal of the Methodist Middle School in Taian, warned that what Jing believed in was "heresy." Jing was ousted from both the school and the Methodist church because he refused to retreat from Pentecostalism. After that, he worked in the Home of Onesiphorus in 1925. This Pentecostal institution was very prosperous at the time and enjoyed a high reputation in the locality. Its success would have left a deep impression on Jing, and the name he chose for his establishment, "the Jesus Home", was strongly influenced by the Home of Onesiphorus.[28] Jing's Christian Trust and Saving Society was unsuccessful, and by 1924 he began to transfer his economic activity from business to agriculture. He hoped that silkworm breeding and silk reeling would support the Christian group, which was named the "Jesus Home" or the Jesus Family in 1927.
In 1914, the leaders of the emerging Pentecostal movement founded the Assemblies of God in the United States. Its purpose, they asserted, was to preserve the harvest of newly won souls. In 1916, a Foreign Mission Division was established and its leaders then attempted to bring under its banner the independent Pentecostals and the missionaries of the theologically similar Christian and Missionary Alliance missionaries. This effort had pretty much succeeded by the early 1920s. The Foreign Mission Division of the Assemblies of God now began the task of recruiting new missionaries, supplying funds for their support, and providing direction over their efforts in the field.[29]
By the early 1920s, there were already forty-seven missionaries who served the Assemblies of God. They included Victor Plymire, who explored the provinces of western China and Tibet and whose son would serve in the Taiwan mission. The difficult years of the 1920s and 1930s, when the Protestant and Catholic mission establishments found themselves threatened by overt Chinese hostility, were even more dangerous for AG missionaries, many of whom worked in remote sections of the hinterland. Not all survived these treacherous times. W.E. Simpson was slain in a bandit ambush in 1932, but the mission continued to grow.
By 1933, there were sixty-seven missionaries in China located at twenty-six stations. The missionaries had also recruited a number of local workers. That same year, 155 Chinese helped the Westerners as evangelists and Bible workers. After the Sino-Japanese War and the disruption it brought (in some cases Pentecostal missionaries were interned by the Japanese), the Foreign Mission Division began an extensive reassessment of their efforts. As a result of meetings held in Springfield, Missouri in 1945, they committed themselves to an overall expansion of their enterprise in China. One hundred and forty eight churches had been planted.
In 1952, the Assemblies of God Mission Board committed its men and women from to the island in the hope of establishing Pentecostal churches in the militarily secure Republic of China [30] They have been there ever since.
In 1958, the two Chinese Pentecostal churches (along with all other Chinese Protestant churches) were compelled to join the Three Self Church. The Three Self Church took on the function of an ecclesiastical authority and all Protestant denominations officially ceased to exist in China. The abrupt unification meant the wholesale abandonment of ritual differences between the denominations and the curtailment of many activities. Unification on these terms was especially detrimental to the evangelical churches. In a sense, the government purposely took the opportunity of the unification to subjugate the evangelicals. Not surprisingly, the old "Three Self Churches" naturally resisted joining the government-recognized union of churches. This conflict eventually resulted in their being banned during the 1950s as promoters of 'American imperialism, feudalism and capitalism', the 'unlawful activities' of faith healing and exorcism, and the 'immoralities' of 'spiritual dance'. All church activities in China, including those of the Three Self Church were banned in 1966. Although church activity was allowed to recommence at the end of the 1970s, any attempts at openly evangelizing in public were officially restricted. The next major Pentecostal outreach did not occur until the late 1980s.
Since the late 1980s, several Chinese house church networks were influenced by the introduction into Henan of Pentecostal patterns of worship and prayer starting in 1988 by Reverend Dennis Balcombe, an American pastor of an independent Hong Kong Pentecostal church, Revival Christian Church(基督教復興教會), in Kowloon. Balcombe's Pentecostal teaching seemed to have influenced the majority of China's major house church movements - particularly Tanghe fellowship and Fangcheng, and two smaller movements that grew up in Anhui province - which became Charismatic in their theology.
Balcombe was born in Los Angeles and converted to a zealous Christian faith at sixteen while still in high school. He was attending an independent Pentecostal church in El Monte, outside Los Angeles, when the wife of the main American preacher suddenly started speaking fluent Hebrew. The pastor's wife had never heard Hebrew spoken in her life. She was "speaking in tongues," a Pentecostal or Charismatic phenomenon that was common in the early Christian church.[31] According to the Pentecostal understanding of tongues-speaking, a person receives from the Holy Spirit, the "interpretation" or translation of the message. Indeed, someone in the congregation received the "interpretation" in English and declaimed it aloud. An American Jew who knew Hebrew happened to be in the church at the time and confirmed the accuracy of the translation. The gist of it was that Dennis Balcombe was going to be used by God as a missionary in China. Balcombe, evidently, did not argue with the message.
For a while, Balcombe attended Bible college in California, but he was then drafted. He spent a year in Vietnam in 1969 with the First Air Cavalry division.[32] During a one-week R-and-R break in Hong Kong, he went into a Pentecostal church and heard another "prophecy" aimed at him, this time telling him that Hong Kong was the place he should go. Balcombe arrived there in 1969 and began to pioneer a new church. What was unusual about it was that, though he was a Westerner, the congregation was overwhelmingly Chinese and the main language was Cantonese, not English. Balcombe's fluency in the language and his passion for the country helped him to further his contacts in China when the country began to open up in the 1980s. Travelling to and from his English teaching sites in Guangzhou, Dennis Balcombe was able to bring scores of thousands of Bibles. These would be stored in the home of a Chinese Christian in the city, then shipped by train to Henan province.
One of the earliest Fangcheng leaders he met on these trips was sister Ding Hei. Ding Hei also learned about the new Pentecostal worship worships, including joyful praise tunes and dancing, that Balcombe had introduced into the Revival Christian Church in Hong Kong. This was introduced to other Fangcheng leaders, who were similarly impressed. They decided to invite Balcombe to visit Fangcheng. In 1988 he did so, and prepared for the journey with a twenty-day fast. The hosts assumed that the visitor would be Hong Kong Chinese and were surprised to see an American visitor.[33] Balcombe began to pray that the assembled Christians would receive the Pentecostal gift and that they, too, would begin to pray in tongues. That night, most of the Chinese gathered to hear Balcombe did receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. As Balcombe later recalled "Sometimes the leaders would draw back and stop what was happening. But slowly but surely, they began to open up to speaking in tongues. After about a year, the resistance was broken [in Henan province]." Though some of the house church networks would not accept Balcombe's Pentecostalism, notably the Born Again Movement (though their leader Xu Yongze has said he does not personally oppose it), the largest networks all did. Within a decade of Balcombe's first teaching, one half to two-thirds of China's house church Christians seemed to have joined the Charismatic fold.[34]