So here I’ve got an article from Time (in collaboration with Worldchurch) that gives a bit of a more detailed description of the situation with the Shouwang Church.
One of the things I found most interesting is the article’s description of the church members as part of the “bourgeoisie.” I’m really just nitpicking semantics here, because this and every other article I’ve looked at do point to the members of these “home” churches being more commonly from the educated upper-class (making this work choice fair) but I find it to be interesting nonetheless. It’s a fairly loaded word, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was exactly the kind of label that the Chinese government is trying to place on the church.
There are also a lot of additional details of the the organization of the Shouwang Church, including that they they had planned to sent delagates from all around the country to an evangelical conference in South Africa, similar or perhaps the same as I blogged about previously. It also details some of the struggles the church has gone though in the past, such as the planned attendees to that conference being detained within the country, or having a planned purchase of a place to meet in cancelled under pressure from the authorities.
But, once again, this article quotes members of the church saying that they are not trying to work against the government, but also standing firm against the idea of abandoning their own religious views for “so-called ministers who are bureaucrats in reality and who follow the orders of the Communist Party’s athiests” which they consider the leadership of the state-run schools to be.
