Tonight we went to an underground church’s Mid-Autumn Day party. Betcha didn’t know underground churches could have parties, did you? I didn’t. Anyway, one of our occasional Bible study attenders is a member of this church, so he invited us to go tonight. Curious about his church and this holiday, we obliged. Mostly students at this church. It was great to see so many who are apparently regular attenders. There were devotional groups, songs, skits, dramatic readings, games, Bible trivia – mostly from college students who have been going to the church for some time. There were plenty of visitors, though, as it was a special holiday party, bringing their attendance total up to around 65 or so.
There’s no Americans that I know of associated with this church. The pastor operates a music school or something on the side, which my friend tells me brings them a decent amount of money for their church operation. They have a building (besides the music place, where they have a Sunday morning service, probably not as student-ish), an air conditioner, a piano, song books, and a small library. The pastor, who I met really briefly at the end of the meeting, asked me if I had any materials about systematic theology. He’s in his late 20’s, really nice guy, and I’m going to go hear him preach soon. First male Chinese pastor I’ve ever met, and I hope we can be a help to him.
Unfortunately, the whole time I felt like a giant moon cake had fallen onto my head. One of those really miserable headaches. But we had to stop by another university on the way home to pick up a bag of Mid-Autumn Day moon cakes from a L., a friend of ours who made a profession of faith this summer. She really wanted to give them to us, so we swung by there. L. told us after the leaders meeting the other night that she is currently taking the Marxism class that everyone in the university has to take. So L. raised her hand in class the other day and asked her teacher if she believed in God or not. And then L. gave her a bunch of papers about believing in God (I don’t know where they get this stuff – okay, my wife tells me that she gave them to her). The teacher said she thought “Jesus was nice.” Not bad for an atheist Marxist. That’s the problem with tearing out a society’s belief in absolute truth: it’s hard to get them to be passionate about anything.
Probably my favorite thing about tonight was that it was the closest thing we’ve seen yet to a passionate display of Christianity. True, the passion didn’t have much to do with proclaiming the Word of God or making disciples, but there were some young people that seemed genuinely excited to be a Christian, to have a relationship with the Lord. This is one of those Book-of-Acts ingredients that’s so essential. I really hope that someday the casual attenders of our Bible study will be contagiously passionate believers.
The Gospel in China 
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