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It seems that Fengjie County, Sichuan Province, in central China has only one Christian church. It's a poor congregation, but believers there scrape together enough money to maintain a building. Now they face a crisis. When the government completes the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, the Fengjie church building will be flooded. Already members are sacrificing to raise enough money to relocate the structure.
Then, last year, someone learned of a widow in the village, not a Christian, who couldn't afford to send her four children to school. The congregation dipped into its building fund to pay her school fees, as well as to buy books.
While working on this project, the church learned of other families so poor they couldn't send their children to the state-run kindergarten. So the Christians opened the Three Gorges Gospel Kindergarten, charging only 100 yuan (about $15) a month--far below the state fees. The kindergarten meets in two side rooms of the old church structure--and will also have to be relocated.
The giving didn't stop there. Last fall, as they worked on the school problem, the congregation discovered several peasant families without enough money to buy seeds for spring planting. Again they went to the building fund to help these impoverished families.
Then torrential rains came, washing out a bridge between the village and the school. Fengjie Christians came out en masse to replace the bridge--paying for materials out of the building fund.
Today the congregation is without money. But it is not worried about the future. Its leader, Brother Li Dajun, says: "If we would just save money for our own church building, we would give up what Christianity is about--love. Love is what distinguishes the church from other organizations in society. And where the church building is concerned, we have faith; we just trust that God will help."
Brother Li made this statement, not to his congregation or even to the editor of Amity News Service, an English-language publication of the China Christian Council where I found the story. No, Brother Li talked about love to a reporter from Fengjie County TV.
"That was a historic first," comments Amity News. "Never before had local media acknowledged the presence of Christians in the area." But the "antics" of this congregation so captured the attention of TV executives that they ordered a special news program on these Christians.
If North American television paid attention to our congregations, would it be for the love we show, even when needing to do something about our structures? Or would it be for the structures themselves? We in North America talk a lot about the media age we live in. We decry what the media are doing to us and our values. We might also consider that doing things the Jesus way could attract media attention, allowing the media to tell the world how love makes a difference. The poor Christians of Fengjie, China, have shown us how.
J. Lorne Peachey is editor of The Mennonite. This article is reprinted, with permission, from the April 8, 1997 issue of the Gospel Herald, one of two periodicals which merged earlier this year to form The Mennonite.
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