Purpose Driven Church, also known as Biaogan Church, is known for drawing young professionals and intellectuals in Wenzhou, a city so thick with Christian believers it has long been called the "Jerusalem of China." The congregation had refused to register with the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the government body that oversees approved Protestant churches in the country.
More than two weeks after the raid, Pastor Tang and the six others remain missing. Authorities in Shanghai and Wenzhou have issued no public statement explaining the grounds for the detention, and no word has surfaced on where the seven are being held or in what condition. Advocacy group CSW has called the case an incommunicado detention, meaning the detainees have been cut off entirely from legal counsel, family contact, and any outside word on their status.
This is how it goes for an unregistered church in China. No formal indictment need appear before a pastor disappears. No court date need be set before a body of believers loses its shepherd. The state simply arrives at daybreak, and then silence.
What a government cannot arrest
Set that scene beside the plain fact of it: a man was doing nothing more than leading a church that met to worship the risen Christ, and he vanished into a system that answers to no one for how it treats him. My friend, that ought to trouble you, whether or not you have ever set foot in Wenzhou. It reveals something about the nature of every earthly power that sets itself above the conscience of a believer.
Governments have been doing this since before there was a China to do it in. Herod tried it. Rome tried it. The Sanhedrin tried it, hauling in men who had done nothing but heal the sick and preach the name of Jesus. And every time, the authorities discovered the same hard truth: you can lock up a man, but you cannot lock up what he believes. You can seal a room, but you cannot seal a gospel that has already gone out of his mouth and into other hearts.
The apostle Paul knew this better than any theologian who ever wrote about it from a comfortable chair. He wrote some of his most enduring words from inside a Roman prison, chained to a guard, awaiting a trial that could end in his death. And what did he say?
"I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day." (2 Timothy 1:12)
That is not a man performing bravery for an audience. That is a man who had counted the cost of following Christ and found the Lord sufficient for it. Paul did not know whether he would walk out of that prison. He did know who held him, and that was enough.
Pastor Tang and his six co-workers are, right now, somewhere behind a wall this world cannot see past. Their families do not know where they are. Their congregation does not know when, or if, they will return. But the Lord who kept Paul in his chains has not lost track of a single one of them. He was not surprised by the raid at 7:30 in the morning. He is not surprised by the silence that has followed it.
There is a temptation, watching a story like this from a free country, to feel only pity, and then to move on. Do not move on so quickly. Ask instead what kind of faith would be worth an unmarked cell. Ask whether the faith you carry, the one that costs you nothing but a Sunday morning, could survive what Tang's congregation is enduring right now without a single public word from the men who lead it. The gospel that took root in Wenzhou a hundred and fifty years ago did not arrive by government permission, and it will not be extinguished by government raid. It has outlasted empires before. It will outlast this one.