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In March, 1998, his long-awaited moment finally came; he was able to sneak in to give some Bible teaching in various house churches. However, at the first meeting, as he was ushered into a low, unventilated room filled with 50 Chinese pastors sitting in their socks on the floor, his first prayer was, "Lord, help me not to be sick in their faces." The smell from their socks was overwhelming, like "a pile of putrefying frogs". Matters were not helped by 10 of the leaders having travelled from a part of Inner Mongolia where three baths a year is regarded as obsessive compulsive behaviour.
He looked at the whitewashed walls, grubby with mould, with sacks strung over dusty windows to keep out prying eyes, and remembered his usual pulpit view of a large air-conditioned church, with deep pile carpeting and Gothic stained glass windows.
He recovered himself and, after being introduced, opened his Bible. He was about to begin speaking when he noticed something "that never occurred in my own church"--there was dead silence, a silence so deep and still he wondered if he were dreaming.
At first, he thought something was wrong, that he had broken some taboo. Then he realized that the silence was connected to the action of opening the Bible: "I have never experienced such expectation. It was when I opened the Bible that this pin-drop silence occurred; they were so anxious to hear the Word of God."
He couldn't speak. All he could remember was the seminar he had just attended in his home country on "How to hold attention during the sermon". Here he didn't have to be interesting. He had already opened the Bible. As he surveyed the pastors, with expectant faces and pencils poised, ready to capture every thought because he spoke from the Book, he wept. He told them, "If you were my parishioners, I would die happy, because there is no curiosity left in our culture for this Book of God. But God has made you all hungry for the Word."
My pastor friend said another thing he learned about leading a church on his visit to China was to "let go". Chinese leaders were not so worried about whether they grew or not, whether the church was situated in the right area, whether the building was convenient enough. They built a "spiritual house" (I Peter 2:4), allowing God to do whatever He wished in a service.
My friend was the pastor of a large church. He explained, "I began to see that I was part of a system, where I was contracted to preach mighty sermons every week, grow the church numerically and make the place a campus for all sorts of discipling activities. I was more a CEO than a pastor. If I had a bad Sunday or a poorer than average string of sermons, people brought me the figures, and my position was under pressure. So I had to try harder, recruit better, visit more people. But having come back from China, I feel God saying, `Why don't you just let go and let Me run the church instead?' " In other words, he was not to play safe any more. He smiled and said, "I'm going back to tell my flock that God will now be in charge of that church, not I, and I don't know where we will end up! To be frank, I'm terrified."
I pray more pastors will come to China with the same burden and the same willingness to learn from their fellow believers in Christ. Many pastors come but don't learn because they view the Chinese church as primitive, coarse and undeveloped. When Billy Graham was accused of turning the clock back 200 years, he exclaimed, "I hoped to turn it back 2000 years." In some ways, the church of China has done just that.
Alex Buchan is Asia Bureau Chief for Compass Direct, an international Christian news-gathering agency.
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