59: Churches against the law

Hannah Nation tells the story of Wang Yi and the Chinese house church movement. How has the ramp-up in persecution of the church in China affected pastors and congregations? Hannah, who is editing the ongoing prison writings of the house church pastor Wang Yi, tells the story of these churches. She focuses in particular on the story of Pastor Wang. A classical liberal human rights lawyer, he converted as an adult in 2005 and eventually became the pastor of one of the largest and most public of China’s illegal protestant churches. Arrested in 2018, he is now serving a nine-year prison sentence. She discusses his intellectual influences, from Luther and Calvin to Kuyper and Van Til, and traces the development of his thought, from an earlier rights-based approach to his current understanding of the church’s role as free by definition, whether or not it has civil freedoms. She also discusses the impact of the Covid lockdowns on the house churches, their scrupulous following of lockdown regulations combined with their absolute refusal to stop meeting for any non-Covid related reason. Finally, she, Susannah and Peter discuss the lessons that such persecution has to offer the Western church.