One Sunday morning, Heidi and I walked into the courtyard of our church. For the past several months, we had been going to the Gangwashi Church, a congregation closer to my work. But on that day we stopped just beyond the gate. Something was wrong.
Signs were posted everywhere, and my friends from the youth group were gathered in a circle, holding hands in the middle of the courtyard, heads bowed. As I walked toward them, I read the signs. “Pastor Yang Yudong is no longer fit to preach the gospel, and has retired as of today.”
Dread filled my heart. Pastor Yudong, the seventy-year-old patriarch of the church, was a man of truth. He loved God and even covertly baptized people of any age who wanted to be Christians. Under his leadership, our church grew so quickly it went from one service, to two, to three. Eventually, we had multiple services per day—even a Korean language service. Perhaps it grew too quickly, because the government definitely noticed.
“What happened?” I asked. “Is the pastor okay?”
“Last night, the Communists went to his house and forced him to retire,” an obviously bereft congregant explained. “They’ve kicked him out.”
“Is he speaking today to say goodbye?” I asked. I’d grown quite attached to him.
“No,” she responded in a whisper. “Supposedly, they told him he was done. They put a guard outside his house and forbade him from showing up today.”
I’d attended the Gangwashi Church every Sunday and could tell that it was filled with many Bible-believing Christians, but I wasn’t sure how true a church could be under the authority of an atheist organization. Heidi and I joined hands with our friends outside the church building and cried out to the Lord.
“God, is this Your church?” we prayed. “Is this a real sanctified church? Are You the head of it?”
When it was time for the service to begin, we went inside the sanctuary, where there were hundreds of people I’d never seen before. Instead of our loving pastor sitting on stage as he’d done for years, a line of religious affairs bureau officials stood on the stage. They were wearing dark suits and somber faces. It was odd, even a little funny, to see those proud atheists up on stage at the church.
“At this time, we’d like to invite the president of the Beijing Three Self Patriotic Movement to deliver a word to us,” one official spoke into a microphone.
The man, who himself was around eighty years old, made his way to the microphone.
Heads turned as we looked at him and wondered if this was the new government-selected pastor. Pastor Yudong’s wife sat in the congregation alone, her head bowed in prayer. The eighty-year-old pastor who was the head of all the Three Self Patriotic Churches in Beijing walked slowly up the stairs, and everyone wondered what he’d say on such a day.
“America,” he began, “is a capitalist empire, which has oppressed the people of China for a hundred years.”
We listened in disbelief as he delivered a scathing sermon against American imperialism without even mentioning the odd circumstance of the day. For that matter, he didn’t even mention Jesus. At the end of the diatribe against the United States, he explained that he was going to be the new pastor of the church. It was like an afterthought, similar to an announcement for a potluck. He even explained that Pastor Yudong had been asked to resign because he was too elderly to lead a church of our size.
“But Pastor Yudong is ten years younger than this guy,” I whispered to Heidi.
The entire congregation began murmuring, and the elder pastor held up his hand to quiet us. “Pastor Yudong is not fit to serve here,” he went on. “He is—”
Just then, a door opened on the stage and Pastor Yudong jumped out from a secret hallway. “I’m still here!”
Apparently, he’d snuck out of his home under the cover of darkness, broken into the church, and hidden in a secret corridor that connected the hallway to the stage. All night, he’d crouched there waiting for his opportunity to tell the church what really happened. And this was his moment.
At the sight of the brave pastor, the congregation collectively gasped. A few people screamed in surprise, some stood to their feet, some applauded, others began yelling, and still others prayed aloud right there in their seats. The seventy-year-old walked to the microphone right in front of the Communist officials and began explaining what happened.
“I wasn’t even allowed to say goodbye to you, my beloved congregation of so many years,” he said.
As the pastor was pouring his heart out, one official jumped up, grabbed his microphone, and pushed him aside. The front five rows of the church that were filled with people I’d never seen before were actually undercover police officers, sent to keep order in case of a riot. They stood and began protecting the stage from congregants who were rushing to the defense of the aged pastor.
His wife, sitting in the congregation, stepped up to defend her husband but was pushed down. She grabbed at her heart as she fell. Right in the middle of the church service, she began having a heart attack. Several congregants tried to make their way to her, but the officers blocked any rescue attempts. Finally, a few people got through and tried to take her to the hospital. They didn’t get very far. The officials yelled out to the police, “Arrest anyone who tries to save her!”
The officers immediately apprehended the people rushing to get to her, threw them into police cars, and arrested them. The congregation was ordered to remain in the building, while the pastor’s wife was dying in front of our eyes. A man in the congregation had gotten out a video camera, and the police tackled him and began beating him.
My friend sitting next to me looked at me and said, “Let’s find a phone.” I led him to the back of the church and watched for officials as he picked up the phone and called the emergency line. When the operator answered, he said, “Please send an ambulance. A woman is having a heart attack!”
“What is your location?”
“We’re at Gangwashi Church on Xidan Street.”
My friend pressed down the receiver over and over. “It went dead!” he told me.
He slammed the phone down, then quickly dialed again.
“Why did you hang up?” he yelled. “A woman’s dying!”
“Sorry, we were told not to service that area today.”
The phone went dead again. Not only had the government forcibly retired our pastor, they had also prepared for a bloody riot and wanted to be able to deny us all assistance.
My friend’s face grew red in fury and he banged the phone against the wall. He ran out into the street and flagged down a taxi. When the cab stopped, he leaned into the open window and said, “I need you to take a woman to the nearest hospital!” However, just as he got the words out of his mouth, the police ran up to the car and commanded it away.
“Wait!” he yelled, but it was no use. The police had set up a perimeter around the church and cabs weren’t allowed to enter. He knew the pastor’s wife didn’t have much time, so he ran out beyond the perimeter, saw a taxi, and literally jumped on its hood. “I need you to take this woman to the hospital,” he yelled from the hood.
“We aren’t supposed to stop here today,” the driver protested.
“Well, you just did!”
After forcing the cab to the gate of the church, the congregants who hadn’t been arrested managed to carry the pastor’s wife to the car and gave the driver a handful of cash. “Take her,” they yelled, and he sped off just as the police reached the scene. My friend, after successfully getting her into the cab, was thrown to the ground and arrested.
In 1989 I’d gone to Tiananmen Square because my hope was still in government reform. Only when the tanks started crawling over people did I lose hope in the government’s ability to transform. That Sunday was my “spiritual Tiananmen Square.” As we stood there with our mouths hanging open in shock, we saw atheists barking commands to the police, silencing a man of God, and leaving an elderly woman to die.
Our petition to God was answered. No matter how beautiful the services, the ultimate lord of the Three Self Patriotic Church was communism and God had no place in it.