Underground Church

A little while ago, we got the chance to experience a service at an underground church in China. The underground church movement over here is something I have heard a lot about these past few years, and was something I was really keen on experiencing while over here, so I was very grateful when a new friend from the expat church we’ve been going to offered to take us with him. Some thoughts:

There is no way the government doesn’t know about this church. We arrived a little bit late (as usual) so the worship had already started; before entering, we could hear the music from outside the big room they were using, no problem. There were a few hundred people in there as well, so I can’t imagine they could all arrive and leave at the same time without looking conspicuous. I asked our new friend about this afterwards, and he agreed the in all likelihood, the Man probably had caught wind of this particular church; they had probably just calculated that shutting it down would be more trouble than it’s worth. Or perhaps there was a Christian, or at least a friendly government official in the position that makes that kind of decision. Either way, the group was carrying on without any state interference.

A few looks around confirmed that I was the only non-Asian in the building; I would guess that besides my three friends from our program and myself, there were no other foreigners in attendance. I really wanted to experience an authentic Chinese Christian church service, so I had evidently come to the right place. The lack of diversity was incredible though, the polar opposite of the expat church we go to.

The singing during the time of worship through song was quite loud, louder than at churches I normally go to back home. Also, our new Chinese friend told us something interesting about the worship songs: they are all just adapted from Chinese pop songs. The music is the same; they just change the lyrics to something more worshipful. This makes the creative side of my sad, but I suppose that while English worship music may be a big industry, Chinese praise brands aren’t quite there yet. So practically it does make sense to just use tunes people already know.

We of course had no idea what the pastor was speaking about, but our new friend gave us a rough summary over dinner afterwards. The message surprised me. It was about the relevance of obeying God in pursuing your dreams. The pastor had told two stories, one personal and one well known, that were basically rags-to-riches tales. In both cases, the protagonists worked hard and remained faithful, and eventually were blessed with an unexpected level of worldly success. This immediately reminded me of the “prosperity gospel” that is so often demonized (justifiably) back home, so it surprised me that this pastor over in Shanghai was flirting with it as well. Maybe he wasn’t—after all, I only heard a summary from an individual about an hour after the fact, and our friend could have left out important qualifiers the pastor was careful to include. Hopefully future visits will illuminate this for us.

Anyways, it was really cool to see a bit of this underground movement I had heard so much about. Hopefully as my Chinese gets a little better, I’ll be able to converse a little more with the other churchgoers and get a better feel for life as a native Christian in Shanghai. I’m sure it will be fascinating to hear from them!