As someone who leans toward introversion, I didn’t mind the separation that came from Covid precautions. In fact, I rejoiced! Yay for remote work! Yay for church services live-streamed from my couch! Yay for never meeting anyone, anywhere! But over time, as I strengthened my muscle for personal comfort and convenience, I forgot to exercise the Gospel throughout my life.
The Center for House Church Theology (CHCT) fosters and furthers the international publishing of pastors, church leaders, and teachers committed to the historic gospel of grace in China’s urban house churches. In promoting the theological leadership of China’s urban house churches, they believe dialogue between Christians in China and those from other cultural contexts will lead to mutual edification and sanctification.
We are proud to feature the CHCT and the work that they do at SOLA Network. To this end, we have interviewed Clara Kim, who manages operations and publishing projects for the center. She talked to Aaron Lee, SOLA Network’s social media manager. We hope you are encouraged by CHCT and are inspired by the work that they do.
Editor’s Note: Below is a lightly edited automated transcript of their conversation. There may be typos or grammatical errors. You can listen to the audio here.
Aaron Lee: I’m Aaron and I’m here on behalf of SOLA Network. And I am talking to Clara Kim. And Clara, you’re here for The Center for House Church Theology. I’ve linked to many of your articles on our TGIF roundups. And I also reviewed the book Faith in the Wilderness, which I loved. But can I just hear in your own words, what is the Center for House Church Theology? And what’s your role? How’d you get involved?
Clara Kim: Well, The Center for House Church Theology is really trying to do something that I don’t think has been done before, which is to connect us directly to the words and teachings of the house church in China. Now of course, it historically has been a church that is not officially sanctioned by the Chinese government, so it has been cut off in many ways. They’ve been unable to travel to Christian conferences outside the country, or to officially be in conversation with the global church. Many of its pastors have been persecuted, arrested, or have had to use pseudonyms in their writing. And so it’s been very difficult, if not impossible, in the past to really know what was happening in the Chinese house church, to really hear their words.
And we now have, partly because of technology, connections to some of these pastors and their writings. And we also have amazing translation software now, and an amazing translation team headed up by Ryan Zhang that is able to give us high quality translations of sermons, writings, and things that are happening in cities in modern China.
What’s also new is that there is a lot more in common now between cities like Shanghai and Chengdu and places like Boston and LA. Because we’re all living in this globalized world. And we’re all living in this sort of postmodern era where tradition is kind of out the window. And we’re all trying to figure out faith and life from scratch, since our parents’ faith and life don’t really work anymore. So there’s this amazing opportunity now to connect with what is being preached in these house churches, many of them urban, and many of them quite modern. They’re trying to evangelize and preach Christianity in a context where it’s foreign and where it’s countercultural.
And that is the situation we’re facing now across the world, in the West, in the global south and in the east. And so it’s suddenly become very relevant to have this conversation— to listen and to exchange ideas and to hear preaching and to apply the gospel in completely new ways.
Aaron Lee: When you say house church, let’s just get a basic definition going here. Because when you say a house church, I’m thinking, oh, like a small group that gathers in my house? Is that what you’re talking about?
Clara Kim: Thank you for asking, yes. We cannot assume that people are familiar with the house church because it has been underground or out of the official circulation for so long. The house church in China is really what we might have called an underground church in the past because it was actively persecuted, in times like the Cultural Revolution under the Communist government. It’s not so much underground anymore, but they are still called the house church. And they still very much identify with those early, mostly rural, mostly anonymous churches that existed in the countryside and met in people’s houses. And so today, the house church might look urban and might look bigger and might meet in a public space. But they very much connect to this tradition of church history, of people who just did not follow the government’s supervision or guidelines. They just followed their own faith. It’s the indigenous church in China that follows scripture over the Chinese government and refuses to come under their regulation.
Aaron Lee: And there is persecution? You would call that persecution.
Clara Kim: There have been different eras of persecution throughout their history. From what I’ve read, even before the Communist Party took over there was persecution. Early in the 20th century, there were a lot of people in China who were anti-Christian. When the Communists took over, they were persecuted again—the Cultural Revolution was probably the most extreme example, where they really outlawed religion completely. And there have been eras when they allowed churches to operate without too much interference. But we’ve seen under Xi Jinping, the current Premier, there’s been an increase in interference, you could say.
Aaron Lee: And you said rural areas, right? How should I envision this? Should I envision, like a group? How big, numerically, is a single house church? And then what kind of building are they meeting in, if any?
Clara Kim: I’m probably not an expert on answering this question, because I have not personally attended a house church gathering. But the only thing that unites them is that they refuse to come under the communist party’s supervision. But they can be small or large, they can be urban, they can be in a person’s house, or they can be in a high rise building in a city. The denominations can vary, the way the church looks and functions can vary.
Even their stance towards the government can vary in that some are really trying to try to get along as well as they can and aren’t trying to cause any trouble. Others are a little bit more confrontational and outspoken about how the government has no business regulating them. But what they have in common is their devotion to their faith and what they read in Scripture, over and above what the state church says.
Aaron Lee: Yes. And that’s so beautiful. And I think it’s something that the book conveys really well. I wanted to ask you, Clara, what made you involved with this? What made you say, hey, I want to be involved with The Center for House Church Theology?
Clara Kim: Well I’m Korean American, so I’ve been to China, and I’ve traveled to Hong Kong and Xian as a tourist, but I have no Chinese relatives, except for maybe an eighth century General somewhere in my family history. So I really don’t have a strong personal connection to China.
However, I worked at Redeemer City to City for 12 years. And I became familiar with some of the people involved with what would become The Center for House Church Theology, including Hannah Nation and S.E. Wang, who is our Director of Theological Content— I know him quite well from my time at Redeemer. I was actually involved at Redeemer in trying to get Tim Keller’s books published in China. So I became familiar with some people through that effort, some of the same people that I’m working with now.
So I will just say that as an outsider to this movement, I was really struck by the prayers that I heard some of these Chinese leaders give, some of the personal humility and maturity I saw in the leaders I met. Working in the church planting world for 12 years, you meet a lot of young immature leaders who perhaps have high ambitions and may not be able to follow through with a lifetime of commitment. But the people I met from China were different. They were really committed for life and had already had to face some real risk to do so.
So when Hannah asked me to help her publish the works of these pastors, and leaders that I’ve met over the years, I was a little skeptical. It’s not something that we’ve conventionally seen in America. I do have some background with the publishing world. But when I started reading their words, I was really struck by how wise they were, and how helpful it was to hear from a different cultural perspective.
I think in the West, we just have such a long church tradition that we start to hear the same sermons and we hear the same stories and we even have the same rituals and holidays that have evolved around Christianity just because it’s Western culture. And we’ve lost that immediacy of how shocking and how challenging the Bible really is. And these leaders, because they’re in China, because many of them are the first in their families to be Christian— first generation Christians and first generation churches—they’re really dealing everyday with how countercultural and how beautiful and how difficult it is to be a Christian. Things that we’re all experiencing now in a real way, but our culture hasn’t really caught up, our culture is still sort of telling the same old-fashioned Christian stories, while these leaders in China are having to speak from the heart in completely new ways.
They’re trying to come up with new words all the time to describe the faith to their followers, and to tell them what is really involved with their faith, which is not just going to be a lot of comforting, inspiring words, because it’s really difficult in China. So hearing their words just shakes you up, it challenges you. It’s refreshing, it’s relevant. I was really converted to the importance of hearing from these Chinese leaders, even though I am not Chinese and don’t have much of a background connected to China.
Aaron Lee: Well, I appreciate your work. And I share the same sentiments with you on falling in love with the house church in China. Thank you so much for what you do, and it’s been my joy to follow you guys along. What are the future plans for The Center? Is there another book on the way? What can we expect from you guys?
Clara Kim: Well, Hannah Nation is our managing director. And she always has so many dreams and ambitions about books to come out of the Chinese house church, which is wonderful. I’m just there to help her practically make it happen. We have a book coming out this December that’s inspired by the work of Wang Yi, who is one of the more famous house church pastors in China, who is currently in jail serving nine years. And this book was sort of his vision of telling the story of the house church.
So it’s really putting together some historical documents and some writings of major leaders in the house church. And then we’ve added some documents about his own church and what happened around his arrest and his church’s persecution in 2018. So that book will be coming out from Intervarsity Press Academic in December of this year. We’re very excited about that. I think it’s going to be a very important book for historians and theologians, or people who are interested in China at all. And we have lots more topics to explore. We are going to continue to do articles on our website that are free, as well as different kinds of books and different kinds of publishers. That’s all I can say for now, I think but there’s there’s some exciting projects in the pipeline.
Aaron Lee: Yeah, that’s amazing. I cannot wait for everything that you guys are going to do. Thank you so much, Clara, for the time.
Clara Kim: Thank you.