Apostle - To The Chinese Church

One of the greatest miracles of the modern church has to be the explosive growth of Christianity in China.

Despite years of brutal communist suppression under the infamous Mao Zedong and those who followed him, the church has continued to grow and flourish until conservative estimates put its size at more than 70 million people. When we compare it to the estimated figure of one million evangelicals before the Communist revolution began these figures are remarkable. they are made even more remarkable when one considers that virtually the entire evangelical Christian intelligentsia in China was destroyed or silenced and the number of Christians killed by the communists might run into millions.

This means that during the post-WWII period when the Western church has not experienced any significant growth at all (and sadly in many places has decreased in size) the Chinese church has grown some 70-fold. An important point to note is that most of the growth is occurring, not in the government-sanctioned ‘Three-Self Patriotic Movement’ churches, but in the unregistered (and therefore potentially illegal) house churches. this incredible growth has not been without the tremendous sacrifice of Chinese Christians and their leaders, many of whom have been prepared to give up not just their liberty but even life itself for the gospel. One such man was the Chinese pastor who, although sometimes enigmatic and controversial, can truly be said to be one of the great Christian workers of the 20th century – the man known as Watchman Nee.

Watchman Nee was born Ni Shu-tsu or Henry Ni in 1903 in Swatow. He was later renamed ni ching-Fu but after his commitment to Christian work, he called himself ni to-sheng – or ‘Watchman nee’. He came from an evangelical Christian background, his paternal grandfather being a pastor who was a convert of Western missionaries.