Today, China officially recognizes roughly 20 million Christians affiliated with “government sanctioned” churches. These are churches registered with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and under state control.
Actual numbers of Christians are believed to be well over 100 million, thanks in part to the courageous pioneering of Wang Mingdao, who in the 1930s established the house church movement.
Mingdao was born in Beijing to a poor Chinese Christian family during the bloody Boxer Rebellion. He became a Christian himself at age 14 through his missionary school. But serious illness at 18 led him to a deeper commitment, where he began studying the Bible intensely. Seeing a need to both uphold the Chinese culture in the local church and resist liberal doctrine seeping in, Mingdao started a house church in 1923. This grew so large that by 1937 he built the Christian Tabernacle in Beijing, seating several hundred.
During this time, Mingdao spoke at conferences across China to establish more grassroots gatherings, often called underground churches. He stewarded their growth, preaching on Scriptural inerrancy, human depravity, the need for repentance and personal salvation and subsequent purity of life. With an insistence on ethical behavior, which remains a prominent feature of Chinese Christianity today, he would delay baptism for converts to be sure their repentance was more than just words but was borne out in their lives. His belief was that churches should be self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating.
When the Japanese occupied northern China in the late 1930s, they set up the Chinese Christian Federation of North China in a bid to control the churches. Mingdao refused to join, even keeping a coffin in his home in anticipation of his execution. The Japanese neither arrested nor killed him, which Mingdao credited to divine protection.