Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [75]
Gao Shengchan had once worried that if the church was too active it might attract the attention of the authorities. But Li Tiejun and the other three leaders had already dedicated their lives to God’s work and they wanted to press forward with no regard for the consequences; there was no way Gao Shengchan could restrain them. For example, when Li Tiejun wanted to put spring couplets with Christian themes up on the church gate, Gao Shengchan opposed this as being too conspicuous. In China there are things that you can do, but you cannot be too loud about doing them, he thought. Gao could not change Li’s mind, and Li Tiejun said that they not only had to have a good product, but they also needed some good propaganda, and the spring couplets were an advertisement. What Li Tiejun said also moved Gao Shengchan: “Our mission is just and honorable, and I refuse to hide our light under a bushel.” In the end, Li had been right. Many people learned about the church from the spring couplets; they came in to listen to the revival meetings and ultimately joined.
Later on, officials from the Bureau of Religion had come to the church and asked them about their activities. But the officials’ attitude was not at all antagonistic; they didn’t say much, and after they’d gone, nothing more was heard from them. Over the last two years, the government had been keeping a very low profile.
Gao Shengchan was a graduate of the provincial university. Before going to prison, he’d been a middle-school teacher and an avid reader of the Reading Journal, right up to the moment he came to believe in Jesus Christ. He was an intellectual, not from a peasant background like Li Tiejun and the others, and so he worried a lot more than they did. He was particularly concerned that the government’s lenient policy might not last long, because the number of believers in the whole country was growing very fast, especially in the terms of the membership of Buddhist organizations and Protestant churches. Gao Shengchan had a number in mind: 150 million. Most of them had joined in the last two years, and the so-called home churches accounted for 80 percent of them. Ever since Liberation, except for the worker and peasant classes, there had never been an interest group that made up such a large proportion of the national population. During past crackdowns on the landlords and rich peasants, on the capitalist class and Rightists, it had always been the great majority against a small minority—but now a divided majority of 1.3 billion was faced by a united minority of 150 million religious believers. Surely the Communist Party could not suppress Christianity the way they had the Falun Gong movement? But how could the Communist Party not be apprehensive about so many Christian believers? Gao Shengchan both hoped that the number of Christians would continue to increase rapidly and feared that the Communist Party might turn on them. He prayed to God to give the Christian churches another ten years of peace in which to develop, and swore that he would work in those ten years to see that the number of Christians reached 350 million. That would equal one-fourth of the population, a critical number that he thought would ensure the security of the church.
In order to protect their long-term development, Gao proposed that each Christian order or sect attend to its own affairs only. The Evangelicals, the Liberals, the Fundamentalists, and the Charismatics should not meet together, and churches within the same sect should not come together too often. He didn’t want the government to have the impression that the home churches were developing into province-wide or even nationwide organizations. Many people who attended the churches didn’t understand his concern, and they criticized him for being insufficiently open, or caring too much for his own church group, or even for trying to set himself up as a supreme leader. Gao Shengchan told them,