How the House Churches in China Meet

Church is determined by function and reliance upon the Holy Spirit, not on bankers and lawyers like we do in the West. If a Westerner is invited to attend a rural underground church, there is a general understanding that that Westerner is there to learn, not to pontificate over them or run roughshod over them. My friend told me about this.

A rural church in China finally allowed a Western preacher to come in, and this man was very arrogant. He wouldn't listen to the warnings of the Chinese brethren who told him to preach more softly. He kept preaching in a louder and louder and louder voice and totally disregarded them and ran all over them until finally the secret police came and invaded the meeting.

They had to throw people into trap doors. My friend himself was thrown into a rice paddy. He had to stay there for 45 minutes, and when he emerged, he lost his shoe and never could find it.

So it's because of such bad experiences that many rural churches do not let foreigners in at all. Because the government churches are registered and the house church is unregistered, the house church is labeled illegal by the government, so the rural church owns no buildings. They only meet in homes with no set time and no official pastor.

They are just all servants of God. Many Chinese believers are up at five in the morning and on their faces, weeping tears of repentance before the Lord until the concrete floor is soaked with their tears. They hunger and thirst for righteousness, and the presence of Christ is in their midst through the Holy Spirit in a large way.

Since their services often last eight to ten hours, they break it up with preaching and singing and prayer. In the West, our churches have pageantry and methodologies. The Chinese have power and the presence of God.

Very patiently do the Chinese wait on the Lord in prayer. They will not move one inch without inspiration and leading to the Holy Spirit. Here in the West, we have various committees that make the decisions in our churches for us, but in China, it's all decided by the Holy Spirit.

The church is not run by man there, but by God through His Spirit. In China, the house church there is an uncompromised church, and they have an uncompromised love for God and for each other. You need to understand that they love each other per Christ's command.

They literally will die for each other, unlike in the where there is a limit to how much will do for a fellow Christian. When they pray, they travail until they prevail with God and get an answer to their prayers, because they believe God is a God who hears prayers and answers prayers. They live in that kind of life all the time.

It's common for them to pray all night, pray ingrown, and intercede and wrestle with God until they get a victory. They believe in prayer and the God who hears and answers that prayer. This is a matter, too.

They are very sensitive to demon possession and demon oppression. They believe this was not done away with in Bible times. After services, they line up and there's prayer for healing and deliverance of demonic activity.

My friend was in a rural house church, and a demon-possessed girl was brought in and placed before him, and he was asked to pray over her, and he prayed for a very long time. As he was praying, he said that she vomited up this fluid six times before it was a yellow fluid, and it came up six times before she was delivered of the demons. The Chinese are very sensitive to the Holy Spirit and walk close with God and can discern demons in someone.

They fast for a few days before they do a deliverance in the name of Jesus. They could walk right into this room and look you in the face and tell you if there's any demonic activity in your life. That's pretty unsettling.