What I Learned from the Chinese Church — Ep. 133

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. We're here again with Daniel. We did another episode of your story, how you came to the Anabaptists. I mean, you mentioned you had done some work in China. Yeah, tell us a little bit about that. What was your involvement there? How long did you live there? What was it like? Yeah, we lived there for 10 years as missionaries. We started off as students, and we started an English ministry at first. We're just English Bible studies.

And it's very insane how fast people will listen and actually start to believe. Wow. At least our first few years. We had, I don't know, 30. We weren't even putting much effort into it because we were doing language school, but we had like 30 or 40 people coming to the Lord. We had a little bit of division between the Two Kingdom concept before I even realized it. Some of the house churches that we would plug them in with were okay with them joining the Communist Party, and some would say absolutely not because that's joining.

You have to say that you don't believe in Christ, and you have to lie and swear oaths and all that kind of stuff. And so there were groups on both sides. But there's two very particular things about the Chinese. We were there for 10 years, and the first three years of language school, we were doing things in English, then it slowly switched over to Chinese. And then our organization sent us to Cambodia to do a training to basically tell us to stop using the Bible in the sense of just reading the Bible, but start storytelling because it's worked somewhere in South China.

And we were very skeptical. They told us also to scrap all the ministries we had before and start over. And so that was very difficult, and it wasn't a good idea whatsoever. We came back and we scrapped it. We did what they said, and we tried this storytelling method for a year and had absolutely no fruit, and our other method was bearing lots of fruit. Then you've heard in the last message, you'll have to go back and check that out, that we worked with another Christian and that we didn't see eye to eye on things, and it really changed our life. But one thing I didn't mention was that there's two types of experiences over there.

In our city of 7 million, and there's probably another 6 or 7 million people living there unregistered, there is very rare to run into Christians. And before you know it, you realize you kind of knew all the Christians in the city, it seemed like. Because you would run into someone, and they would, and they're a Christian, they would know everybody you knew. And it's like, there can't be that many Christians if we all know everybody. But whenever you talked about Jesus, they really honed in. They didn't know about it. You'd ask them about Christ, and half the people would say, "Well, isn't that the guy in the Da Vinci Code?" And they would mention some books that were allowed in.

And, "Oh yeah, that's that ladies' religion where all the ladies go worship because it's mostly women Christians over there, unfortunately." And then we went to the countryside. This was the second. This whole village was Christian. It was wintertime, and the snow was really, really deep. And they don't have central heating and air. They cook on big woks, and then they have what they call a kong, which is like a concrete bed that runs across each room. And the heat from the cooking, the smoke goes through pipes under the bed to heat the beds. And the reason this is important is because the air was freezing cold. And so in the winter, everybody would, they're all farming village.

This is a whole farming thing. So during the winter, they don't have work. This was our second year there. We would, in the morning, wake up, sit on a kong. All these people would come over, and we'd eat snacks all day and talk about God mostly, it seemed like. And then this is a very kingdom kind of feel in this village.

And then the next day, we would get up, and we would go to another house, and we'd sit on their kong all day and eat and talk about God and whatever's going on. And then when we went to church on Sunday, we would kneel and sing for hours, it felt like. I mean, my whole body couldn't take it half the time. And it was very normal to them. And I was like, they just say a number. And I'm like, how do they all know all these songs? And where are these songs at? And they're like, they're the Psalms. And they all sang the Psalms, and they all memorized the Psalms. And I'm like, this is incredible.

I might know one or two Psalms, and they just say them, and they know that one person will remember the tune, and then they all start following. And it really put my faith to shame. I'm supposed to be coming here and helping people believe in God, and I'm amongst these people who memorize the Psalms. And then I found this book, this Bible, that just looks like you've seen a lot of torn and used Bibles, but this was the most I've ever seen for sure. I was like, whose Bible is this? This is amazing. And it was a sister who they claimed memorized the whole Bible and didn't need it anymore. And if you look at the Bible, you can kind of believe it.

And I'm like, what do you mean memorize? And like, you can literally, they said you could literally say chapter and verse, and she says it. But they were really serious. Like things like, I made a joke one time, and it wasn't a bad joke, but they were like, we're not supposed to be joking. And this village was very different than Christians I'd ever met, and it really challenged me. But there's a lot of evangelical and Protestant things in China. So you run into some people. Like we had a lady join our second church plant, and she made it a battle the whole time. We had a guy who was reading his Bible and praying and was faithful for a whole year, and he was like, I want to be baptized.

I want to be a part of this. And then she asked him, so when you get in front of God in heaven and he asks you why you should be let in, what's your answer? And he's like, I never thought about that. And she's like, he's not ready. And then I was like, this guy has been reading the Bible with us for a year. Where did you even come up with this question? And we battled. It's like, I'm like, can you please just, now he's wondering, you just told him in like 10 seconds, and now he's like wondering, I'm not ready for this because I didn't know that answer. And I was like. Anyway, there's a lot of confusion in China.

And thankfully, David Brousseau's book on the Kingdom that Turned the World Upside Down is in Chinese. And I didn't know that at the time, but people are passing around over there. But one of the things they have, there's a book, there's a chapter, I don't know which chapter it is in that book that's about being a part of the politics. And I've had multiple Christians over there say, who did he write this chapter to? Because their Christianity, they aren't involved in their government because their government is against it. They're like, why would you be involved with your government and be voting and all that stuff? Because there's this so polarized, you don't mix it at all, and you can't.

So how did your involvement with the Chinese church or even just Chinese culture impact you, change you, et cetera, in ways that maybe wouldn't have happened if you would have stayed in a Western country or a Western-style church? The way they took the Bible very literal, and they took every principle and ran with it. Anything that's absolute, they would really believe it. And the one I said last time, in all things, always, never complain or argue. They took that very serious. If anybody was complaining or arguing, they would say, hey, that's not of us. We don't do that.

That's amazing. Or don't worry about anything. Instead, pray about everything. Anything and everything. They're like, we have to do, we cannot worry. Let's not worry. If someone is worrying, we got to stop worrying. So all those different concepts that with always, never, or anything and everything, they really fought for those things and believed those things where it's hard to go day a lot of times in all churches in America without hearing complaining or arguing or something like that. So that changed me so much.

I hear myself complaining when I do now, where before, and I'm able to say, okay, we got to stop it. So it really helped you.

I don't know, it almost sounds cliché, but come to the Bible with fresh eyes. Like, oh, I didn't think about it quite like this before. Yeah. So on the heels of that then, how can we in the West, Western Christians, hear well, understand well from our brothers and sisters in other countries? Obviously, you would be more specific to China, but how can we learn from them? Exactly that. Like taking the Bible for what it says and don't try to make it fit what feels good to us and actually take those absolutes as absolutes.

We need to make it a part of, take it away completely from our lives or when it says only encourage, actually be encouraging people all the time. I think that there are faults in the Chinese church and there are problems. And for example, it could be a fault that could be turned to something good. They put all their loyalty in one person. So they wanted me to be the pastor the whole time instead of having a group of elders. And I made a group of elders that didn't include me. I mean, I chose over time a group of three men. The whole time they were trying to get one of them to take the place of all of them and get rid of the rest of them.

They just wanted that dictatorship like they have. Like the Chinese leaders are these, they control everything. They're used to that and they want that. And I was always saying, well, Christ is the head and you can treat Christ that way, but then you have elders that you need to listen to and they're going to work together to help out the situation. I don't know if that helps with this question, but they definitely have faults and different things that they've been raised with that change their perspective of something. I'm not saying I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, but I believe Christ should be the one and then not any one person. A way to approach this is just stay, we should stay humble towards those that practice church very differently than us, I guess, or cultures that are very different.

The cultural element, I'm guessing that was challenging at points or probably many times. So how do you feel your experiences in China, the people you worked with, do you feel that that really helped bring you closer or even bring you to Anabaptist thought? Yeah, for sure.

There's a combination of a lot of things, but it started there. I mean, it started in lots of spots, but whenever the Chinese were taking everything very literal, and I was at the point of realizing that everything that I've learned before might be wrong at the same time that I'm watching them take it all literal and not teaching them, but just reading the Bible together and saying, how do we do this? And they said, well, it says do this, so that's what we do. And I was like, okay, that's pretty simple.

My explanation would have been much more complicated. Wow. That's kind of neat. God had to take you all the way to China to complete this journey of coming to this new way of thinking. That's neat. If I didn't go to China, I'm 99% sure God could have led me here somehow, but I don't think I'd be here. Was there anything else you would like to share about your time there and more lessons we can learn from them? One of the things that impacted me about the whole idea of wealth I never thought of as a problem until I watched these Chinese pastors living off of like $150, $300 a month and having a kid and not complaining about it.

I used to think I need to go home and raise more support because we don't have enough. And then after these guys, I'm like, man, I don't need any support. They're living on faith. They really know how to live on faith. And we would be considered very irresponsible for living like that. But they really are living on faith. And so the ability to not know, literally not know if you're going to have enough money to eat possibly. So I thought that really challenged.

When people would say I need to get more money, I'm like, and I'm trying to live as a poor person. And I'm like, I'm so filthy rich compared to, I don't make in the States, I might be considered someone with not much money, but compared to the pastors there, I'm wealthy. I'm the camel.

I don't need to be making more money. You know what I mean? I mean, if I do, I can go to the kingdom, but I don't need it. Well, thanks for sharing about your experience. And hopefully this is inspiring other people to learn from other peoples and other churches and how they do things. And that's really interesting how that was able to start you on this journey to Anabaptism. Yeah, that's powerful.