Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [77]
What Gao Shengchan was able to do was to insist that the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground should not accept monetary contributions from abroad, nor receive Bibles illegally smuggled into China, nor invite non-Chinese pastors to preach in their churches. Some people had actually accused Gao Shengchan of promoting a “No No No” Patriotic Church. Fortunately, up to this point, Li Tiejun and the others had agreed with Gao Shengchan on these important policies; the main reasons being that the Chinese economy was very strong, church members donated a considerable amount of money, and the church had no need of foreign donations and even less need of foreign Bibles.
There was one sort of positive development that sometimes, however, gave Gao Shengchan a major headache. After joining the church, the faithful had a natural cohesion based on their common identity, and they wanted to express Christ’s spirit of universal love by collaborating on common goals and mutually protecting one another. If some brother or sister in the Lord was in trouble, they felt duty-bound to rush to his or her aid. Gao had heard that there had already been many occasions when collusion between businesspeople and government officials had infringed the rights and well-being of the common people, and when members of the underground churches were among those ordinary victims, their brothers and sisters in the faith organized themselves to resist the business and bureaucratic interest groups. In the mind of the government officials, these incidents could easily be regarded as a confrontation between the believers and the regime. Some local officials already regarded the home churches as a thorn in their flesh and they had put a great deal of pressure on the Bureau of Religion to do something about them. If these incidents kept occurring, they might cause the government to reverse its present relatively lenient policy.
This was precisely why the appearance of Little Xi caused Gao Shengchan both joy and anxiety. His face became flushed. The Lord must have guided her to them, thanks be to the Lord.
Ever since the Warm Springs fellowship had been established, he had stood in the yard and guided many lost sheep back into the Lord’s embrace. The difference was that as soon as he saw Little Xi he knew she was not local; she had a certain air of culture about her; she was an intellectual like himself.
After Little Xi had been in Warm Springs a while, Gao Shengchan saw that she read the Bible quite seriously, and that the questions she asked were very sophisticated and not at all trivial. What she most wanted to understand was why they all believed in God and why the church members, after being suppressed and forced underground, didn’t harbor any hatred—on the contrary, they were even happier than anyone else.
“Because we have love in our hearts, because we have the Lord Jesus Christ,” said Gao Shengchan in his sermons.
Little Xi appreciated the mutual concern the brothers and sisters of the fellowship had for one another; it was much more sincere than the class solidarity she had been taught since childhood. This kind of loving friendship recalled to her the intellectuals she’d met in the Wudaokou restaurant during the 1980s. They had also had a similar sort of kindred spirit. Now it was all gone with the wind.
She could not help wondering to herself, If they didn’t have religious faith, could good people in China still keep on being good? In China’s current conditions, with this political system and prevailing social mood, it’s not at all easy to “guard one’s own virtue