The First and Last Day (1917–1922)

Why do some big ideas catch on, spread, and endure while others fizzle? Analyzing Wei Enbo’s vision of Jesus and the religious revival it sparked gives us insight into the attraction of the True Jesus Church in 1917. Wei’s theophany was recounted in multiple stories revealing overlap but also significant variation. Over the course of retelling, these stories became more abstract and theologically focused, suggesting ways in which religious narratives emerge. This process generated a culturally fluent and linguistically discriminating message of biblical adherence. Chinese Christians seeking increased ecclesiastical purity and personal morality converted to the new movement. Wei’s prediction that the world would end by 1922 reflected realities of social turmoil and Chinese millenarian traditions, but also was in keeping with the charismatic (extraordinary) tenor of the early True Jesus Church movement, which relied heavily on tropes, language, and expectations from the Bible.

Conclusion

Rooted in decades and even centuries of Chinese history, the history of the True Jesus Church highlights the significance of charismatic experience in creating community. Observations from a contemporary baptismal rite and Lord’s Supper rite provide points of reflection for the admixture of miraculous and mundane within the True Jesus Church’s Christian culture.

Four Governments in China (1932–1949)

During the tumultuous period between the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Communist victory in 1949, parts of China were controlled by three different governments: the Nationalist government based in Nanjing and then Chongqing, the Communist-controlled area around Yan’an in the northwest, and the Japanese. Against this backdrop of regional division and contested legitimacy, the ecclesiastical government of the True Jesus Church stands out. The church’s extensive and relatively functional systems of church governance point to the significance of autonomous ideological organizations, whose stable models of functional governance and legitimate authority contrasted unflatteringly with the dysfunctional or corrupt authority of the Chinese party–state. Legitimate moral authority held the True Jesus Church together in a national and even international community during a chaotic time in which other attempts to create shared identity and common purpose across China failed.

A Smaller, Bigger World (1905–1917)

The introduction of new printing, steamship, rail, and telegraph technologies to China increased global awareness and supported universalistic thinking. These new technologies facilitated both the spread of charismatic ideas and organizational processes to protect and propagate these ideas. The international Pentecostal movement in the early twentieth century arose not only from the inherent popularity of charismatic practices and theologies but also from new logistical capabilities in popularizing these practices worldwide, such as mass mechanized printing, telegraph and rail lines, and transpacific steamship travel. This global openness that began with the great transnational missionary organizations of the nineteenth century became more accessible to ordinary people by the first decades of the twentieth century, allowing the Norwegian American Pentecostal missionary Bernt Berntsen to influence the religious worldview of Wei Enbo, who later founded the True Jesus Church.

The Parable of the Cursed Chicken (1974–Present)

In the charismatic culture of the True Jesus Church in contemporary China, extraordinary occurrences are expected within the mundane circumstances of modern life. The church community’s claimed access to miraculous power strengthens the legitimacy of church ideology and church government. These charismatic experiences, often framed in reference to the Bible, inject vitality into church members’ shared life and the organizational structures holding them together. At the same time, church leaders attempt to carefully define and regulate charismatic experience in order to preserve community norms and maintain optimal levels of tension with surrounding society. At the level of individual practice, the church’s emphasis on Christian separation from the world results not in withdrawal, but in engagement with nearly every aspect of everyday life.

Missionaries in the Manchu City (1864–1905)

The large transnational flows of people, ideas, and resources that characterized twentieth-century global modernity had early expressions within the imperial institutions (and aspiring or quasi-imperial institutions) of the nineteenth century. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion, Qing imperial bureaucracy, and London Missionary Society all engaged in the same project of connecting individuals through national and transnational networks held together by charismatic ideas and institutional resources. For the five individuals whose lives intertwine in this chapter (Hong Xiuquan, Christian rebel; Zeng Guofan, Qing imperial official; Samuel Evans Meech, missionary; Lillie E. V. Saville, missionary doctor; and Wei Enbo, cloth merchant), these networks provided expanded opportunities to engage with the world and transform it to reflect a particular universalistic vision. As people sought to realize these distinctive visions and the charismatic worldviews they represented, they created and extended large organizational structures in which their ideals were embodied, but also attenuated.

Introduction

The context for the rise of the True Jesus Church in China includes not only continuities with native sectarian religion and conditions of deprivation that have been noted in existing scholarship, but also crucially global Christian restoration traditions, transnational cultural exchange, and the relationship between charismatic experience and moral discipline. Religious individuals’ experience of the extraordinary is significant not merely for what it may reflect (such as the native religious milieu or participants’ marginality) but also for what such charismatic experience produces, namely, distinctive worldviews and the energy and focus necessary to build and maintain community over time. The history of the True Jesus Church in China provides a framework for understanding the mutually dependent yet mutually corrosive relationship between charisma and organization in institutions with a strong ideological ethos.

Don’t Be Like the Gentiles (1974–Present)

Within China’s diverse civil society, certain groups including Christian churches like the True Jesus Church are autonomous ideological communities (communities oriented around a shared ideology or set of truth-claims about the nature of reality, including the moral dimensions of right and wrong). Autonomous ideological communities (or “truth-claiming” groups) are not hermetically sealed off from surrounding society, but their strong ideological orientation creates a distinctive and complex community culture. Within the True Jesus Church, efficacious charismatic practices such as healing, exorcism, and tongues-speaking strengthen shared community culture by certifying that the church’s sacred worldview, governance, and shared way of life are legitimate (rooted in truth). This shared culture within the church gives rise to discourse that sometimes rejects Chinese society and sometimes affirms it, but always refers back to the church’s own internal truth-claims as the basis for engaging with the wider world. Despite the stereotypically “uncivil” insularity and exclusivity of the True Jesus Church’s teachings, its strong community culture strengthens civil society on a society-wide scale by valuing truth, building trust, and contributing to ideological pluralism.

Saving Comrade Stalin’s Soul (1949–1958)

During the 1950s, the universal ideology of Chinese Christian churches such as the True Jesus Church clashed with the universal ideology of the Maoist party–state. Christian communities’ relative ideological autonomy hindered the party–state’s ambitions for control. Christians, especially Christian leaders, experienced intense pressure to adopt the new code of Maoist speech during this era. Documents from archives in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan and oral history interviews with members of the True Jesus Church in South China show how between 1949 and 1958, top church leaders bowed to this pressure, replacing biblical rhetoric and discursive patterns with Maoist rhetoric and discursive patterns. The contest between religious communities and the state to control the terms of public moral discourse demonstrates the significance of such discourse in demarcating and legitimating community authority.

The Handwritten Hymnbook (1958–1974)

During the Cultural Revolution, organizations and individuals of all stripes came under attack in a chaotic age characterized by the widespread breakdown of social relationships. As “old” art, music, and literature were criticized and replaced by “new” politically orthodox works, clandestine communities formed to preserve and produce alternative forms of culture. The silent prayer meetings of the True Jesus Church are akin to other covert cultural activities such as groups dedicated to reading banned literature, listening to Western music, and creating art. Charismatic experience played a key role in sustaining the life of the True Jesus Church underground because it could occur within informal, intimate settings. The church experienced an inversion of gendered power, as top male leaders were arrested and elderly women became key figures in sustaining the community’s religious life.