Posted on 08/07/2018 12:46:38 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
The 62-year-old Chinese shopkeeper had waited nearly his entire adult life to see his dream of building a church come true — a brick house with a sunny courtyard and spacious hall with room for 200 believers.
But in March, about a dozen police officers and local officials suddenly showed up at the church on his property and made the frightened congregants disperse. They ordered that the cross, a painting of the Last Supper and Bible verse calligraphy be taken down. And they demanded that all services stop until each person along with the church itself was registered with the government, said the shopkeeper, Guo, who gave his last name only from fear of retribution.
Without warning, Guo and his neighbors in China’s Christian heartland province of Henan had found themselves on the front lines of an ambitious new effort by the officially atheist ruling Communist Party to dictate — and in some cases displace — the practice of faith in the country.
Guo’s brick house was largely deserted this summer. Around the door frame, tattered red outlines remained of a scroll that once read “God’s love is as deep as the sea.”
After Jin Mingri, a prominent pastor who leads Zion Church in Beijing, refused local authorities’ request to install surveillance cameras inside his house church, police individually questioned hundreds of members of the 1,500-person congregation, he said. The congregants faced veiled threats, Jin said, and many were asked to sign a pledge promising to leave Zion, which the government agents called illegal, politically incorrect and a cult. Some people lost their jobs or were evicted from rented apartments because police intimidated their bosses and landlords.
Even Protestant churches already registered with the state have not been spared greater restrictions...
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
It would take one whale of a nerve to do it, but I could see gospel pushback to the local officials. Somehow convince them to allow the gospel preaching (whatever the external ornamentation or lack thereof) and see if they don’t prosper themselves as a result — “This will be proof that there is a God.”
China is now attacking Christianity, demolishing Churches, bibles, crosses...
God does not like that.
Sounds like Obama’s America........
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