chierhu

In China, governments can seal down house churches at any time. After they remove crosses of other church, everyone feel in danger, and every believer who participates in worship feel uneasy. It's really scary because I really don't know when he's going to tear down our churches. Soon, the CCP discovered our church through informants. That Sunday was our last service at this church. we were quickly driven out by the police. After the police expelled us from the church, they violently demolished the church with explosives. Then we lost our ability to rent residential or commercial space. I still remember that day thousands of special police and armed police demolished the church I had gone to since I was a child. I watched helplessly as the police led a demolition team and demolished our church. They trampled the cross to pieces and then confiscated the Bibles in our hands. The police confiscated the Bibles from our hands, saying they were "illegal propaganda materials". Then they burned these Bibles because they were banned books. After our priest was arrested by the police, my congregants and I tried to pray in the ruins of the demolished church, but the authorities prohibited us from praying here.

I still remember CCP put a seal on the door of our church (This is the church I go to regularly) with a notice which requires "religious believers to abide by the provisions of laws and regulations and participate in activities at religious venues registered in accordance with the law." This is their excuse. In China, the so-called legally registered religious venues are religious venues that are managed by the government and obey the CCP. In this "church", the images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary were removed and portraits of Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong were placed. CCP agent (party branch secretary) will attend Sunday services and they are responsible for monitoring us. He closely monitors the content of sermons in Three-Self churches. He required pastors to read the new version of the "Regulations on Religious Affairs" before preaching. During worship, we believers were forced to sing the national anthem, and he even forced us to sing 红歌 praising CCP. CCP require us that We christians must adhere to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the core values of socialism. They strictly require religious clergy to preach the Core Socialist Values in their sermons and integrate our into the minds of believers, into our collective religious activities, and into our daily life.Yes, the most terrifying thing is the Sinicization of Christianity, which is they suppression to our Christianity.

To completely ban and destroy the Christian faith, the Chinese Communist Party re-tampered with and compiled the Bible as part of its promotion of the “Sinicization of Christianity.” It deliberately created fake Bibles, fake Bible comes to confuse and deceive all those who believe in God. This "Bible" compiled by the Chinese Communist Party embodies the "core socialist values". If you buy a Bible in China, it must be a version that has been tampered with by the CCP. CCP wants to mutate Christianity and allow Christians to undergo brainwashing by the CCP and become "red Christians" and Christians who love the party and the country.

Our music teacher, she was a fan of Johann Sebastian Bach and she mentioned Lutheran history and Bach's belief when teaching us his music. I especially miss her teaching our class to sing sacred cantatas. This was my initiation into Christianity. That was the last music class she taught us -- she taught us to sing oratorios "St. Matthew Passion". Later, other teachers discovered that "she did not teach us to sing 红歌", so she was reported then arrested and imprisoned. Because she refused to teach us to 红歌, this music teacher was taken to jail, where she was raped by prison guards. After she was sexually assaulted, we wrote in a letter to commemorate her "Soli Deo Gloria," which ended with "Glory to God alone."

I would like to share a story about how I first encountered the Bible in China Once, when I was just a young student in primary school, we had a foreign English teacher who introduced something extraordinary to our class. amidst our English lessons, he would occasionally quote passages from the Bible. This was the first time I learned about the Bible, it was my enlightenment to Christianity. For me, it was both fascinating and frightening. You see, in China, where the state champions atheism, my Christian faith is viewed with great suspicion. The Chinese Communist Party has harshly labeled Christianity and Catholicism as cults, and the Bible? They called it a book of cults. If they found a Bible in your school bag, it wasn't just hidden away; it would confiscated and burned, erasing its words from our presence. Yet, in those brief moments in class, the words of the Bible seemed to offer me a different narrative, one of hope and light. I remember one passage our teacher shared, from the Gospel of John one verse five: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." This verse struck a chord in me, amid the fear and the shadows cast by prohibitions and persecutions. It whispered of a resilience, a persistent light that no darkness could quench. As I grew, so did my curiosity and my faith, nurtured by those stolen moments with biblical verses that promised something beyond the immediate, something eternally beautiful. The story of our foreign English teacher took a dramatic turn when he decided to gift each of us a personal Bible. He had ordered a whole batch of Bible, eager to share the scripture that he held dear. However, those Bibles never made it into our hands; they were seized by customs right at the border. Not long after, Chinese National Security Bureau began to dig into his background. It turned out, he wasn't just any foreign teacher— he was also a missionary. Once his identity was revealed, he was swiftly deported, leaving behind a classroom of bewildered students and a community that had just started to glimpse a different perspective. The consequences didn't end with his departure. The few Bibles that had made it to some of my classmates were confiscated and destroyed— a bonfire of lost knowledge. And our Chinese English teacher, who had dared to use the Bible in our lessons alongside him, faced a harsh fate. She was arrested and brutally imprisoned, a stark reminder of the risks associated with even the slightest deviation from the official line. As I grew older, I came to understand the broader, more distressing pattern of persecution. The CCP wasn't just dealing with individual missionaries or confiscating Bibles; they were systematically reforming, arresting, and often torturing countless Christians across China. It was a chilling realization of the lengths to which the government would go to enforce conformity and suppress any form of spiritual dissent. Reflecting on these events, the words of Psalm 23 came to mind, a stark contrast to the darkness we faced: "Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me." This scripture became a beacon of hope, reminding us that even in the face of severe trials, we were not alone.

The Chinese Communist Party has strict Internet surveillance and control. After my Bible was confiscated and burned, I found that I could not find the Bible online because the authorities banned the sale of Bibles. They are completely removed from online stores in China... I remember that I secretly downloaded a Bible e-book online, but CCP had many Internet police monitoring it in real time. Soon the police rushed into my home and asked me to delete it, otherwise I would be arrested and imprisoned. So I completely deleted the Bible e-book I downloaded online in front of the police, but luckily I "downloaded" the Bible into my brain (I can recite the Bible completely).