China's Opening Door: Incredible Stories of the Holy Spirit at Work in One of the Greatest Revivals in Christianity

By Dennis Balcombe

Go behind the scenes of China’s spiritual revival
 
An amazing true adventure that will inspire and challenge you
 
When the Chinese government opened the country to foreigners in early 1978, Dennis Balcombe jumped at the chance to visit. After basing his ministry out of Hong Kong for nearly ten years, he was eager to finally proclaim the gospel in the country he had come to serve. In less than a year, he was meeting house church leaders and supplying them with Bibles for inland distribution, a path that would eventually lead to his arrest.
 
In China’s Opening Door he shares his story, bringing to light the tremendous move of God that has been happening in the country. Filled with incredible accounts of miracles, Bible delivery, daily persecution, and even imprisonment for preaching the gospel, the book serves as an inspiration to believers everywhere about the power and faithfulness of God.
 
The book also issues a challenge: those who live for God will suffer persecution when they stand up for the truth. Had these Chinese house church leaders submitted to the government’s regulations, they would not have gone to prison, and there would have been no persecution. But the tens of thousands who eventually became Christians would still be in darkness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charisma House
• Release date: Sep 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781621365730

Book preview

Notes

introduction

A VOICE FOR HOUSE CHURCHES

BY FEBRUARY 1994 I had been active in ministry in mainland China for sixteen years. Since I arrived in 1978, I had witnessed thousands of God’s servants and handmaidens being baptized in the Holy Spirit. I had taught the Bible or preached the gospel for hundreds of hours and had seen multiple healings and miracles take place. Amazingly, though I had entered China scores of times and traveled all over this vast nation preaching and teaching, I had been arrested only once, in 1985 in Guangzhou.

That incident traced back to April 1978 when I first entered Guangzhou as a tourist after China opened its door to foreigners. By 1979 I was meeting house-church leaders in Guangzhou and supplying them Bibles for inland distribution. From 1985 to 1987 I was hired as an English language teacher in Guangzhou but was soon using the Bible as text and actively baptizing believers, some three hundred in all. Word eventually got out and this led to my arrest in 1985. Yet despite the many Bibles and baptism certificates the police found on me as evidence of my crime, they let me off with a warning.

A few years after that I was refused entry at the Hangzhou airport and sent back to Hong Kong. However, I was back into the mainland by way of another port in less than twelve hours. There were other occasions when I had some difficulties obtaining visas, but in the end I always succeeded in gaining access to the places the Holy Spirit was leading me.

This occasion on February 15, 1994, was different. I knew I had a big problem. I had just arrived at the Hong Kong Airport with six other Christians after being deported from Zhengzhou, in Henan Province. The seven of us had flown from Hong Kong into Henan to visit believers in the city of Fangcheng, in Henan Province.

Because it was the lunar New Year, the Fangcheng believers invited us to join them in their celebrations and overnight prayer, during which we shared testimonies and short messages. At dawn on the second day of the New Year (February 11), the police raided our meeting place and arrested the seven of us together with some local believers. We were detained for four days for illegal religious activities with all our cash and electronic equipment confiscated.

Thus I became the first foreign missionary to fall foul of a new law proclaimed by the hard-line communist Prime Minister Li Peng. The law stated that foreigners would be allowed to preach, teach, or carry on religious activities in China only after obtaining permission from the appropriate authorities. This meant we would have to receive invitations from the state-sponsored Three-Self Church, the Chinese Christian Council, and the local and provincial Religious Affairs Bureau authorities. This, of course, would be impossible because the Three-Self Church would have nothing to do with me.

Due to our disappearance in Henan for several days the media became interested in our whereabouts. Great pressure was being put on the Chinese government in light of the fact that the US government had given China most-favored nation trade status. The hawks in the US Congress were attacking China for various violations, from human rights to copyright infringements to trade issues. The arrest of an American Christian missionary in China would be additional proof of China’s human rights abuses.

The incident had already attracted considerable concern worldwide, and my associates in Hong Kong realized that exposing me to the media could complicate our already precarious situation in China, where we were deeply involved in the illegal house-church movement. Thus they had arranged to meet me inside the airport after I had cleared Hong Kong immigration but before entering the public greeting area where dozens of reporters were waiting to interview me. They were planning to lead me through a side exit to a waiting car whereby I could totally avoid meeting the reporters.

This seemed a right and logical thing to do, but then I heard the Lord speak to me, saying in effect, Go and meet the press and the crowds outside. I want you to be a voice for the Chinese house-church Christians. Immediately a thought came: This might bring great difficulties to me and to the several dozen preachers who were arrested with us and who still had not been released as well as the whole movement I had been involved with. But then I argued with myself, I’ve been doing this for sixteen years. I’ve seen and done so much. I don’t know how much longer I can do this in the future. At any rate the world needs to hear about what is happening; and this is a golden opportunity!

Finally I walked to the public greeting area of the airport; met my family, friends, and the many reporters; gave them my name card and told them to come to interview me the next day. They did this, and within a few days my Henan arrest was being reported worldwide. Within weeks I was traveling to various nations and continents, sharing my experiences and ministry in China. Indeed, I became a voice for the mainland house churches and believers.

Through the pages of this book I wish to share what God has done in China. Amid persecution and trials, tens of millions of believers have been brought into the kingdom as Chinese Christians, and proclaimed the gospel message with miraculous works of the Holy Spirit following. At risk to their own lives, believers have distributed Bibles to those longing for the truth. And now, after years of repressive communist policies, we are seeing an inching open of doors once closed as the government becomes more tolerant of Christianity. Many unregistered house churches, once relegated to meeting underground, are building facilities with official permission, some as large as twelve floors high. Even in some Three-Self churches, once little more than purveyors of communist doctrine, the truth of the gospel is being preached and there is revival.

I cannot comment on the political situation in China. My purpose for writing this book is not in any way to criticize Chinese authorities for human rights violations or persecution of Christians and missionaries. In fact, I have the highest respect, and even praise, for the present government in leading China through various stages of the open-door policy as China was recovering from the disastrous Cultural Revolution.

Many current Chinese leaders and Communist Party officials themselves were victims of radical leftist policies. In China change does not come overnight but often through painfully slow processes. Even today due to a misunderstanding of the Christian church and the role of preachers by some poorly educated officials, some Christians do truly suffer for the sake of righteousness. And, as in any government, there are truly some evil people who are determined to put an end to the work of the gospel and evangelism.

My purpose for writing this book is to glorify God for the amazing and wonderful works He has done and is doing in China. Often, persecution is the key to both revival in the church and evangelism of the lost. Through the years of persecution, the Holy Spirit has done amazing work in China. The testimonies chronicled in these pages are truly like a continuation of the Book of Acts. They are a testament to the presence, power, and working of the Holy Spirit in China during this twenty-first century.

I pray this book also will inspire and encourage the thousands of Christians all over the world working in restricted access nations, or nations where there is much opposition to the message of the gospel. God has opened the whole of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the preaching of the gospel, resulting in tens of millions of salvations in just a few decades. I believe this will be repeated all over the world in these last days—in closed nations, in the West, in our churches and communities, and in our hearts!

chapter 1

A MIRACLE IN CHINA

WHEN I FIRST moved to Hong Kong in 1969 to proclaim the gospel among the Chinese people, I had little idea of what God had in store for me and this nation. At that time, China was under the control of radicals who initiated a reign of terror called the Cultural Revolution. Even after the so-called Gang of Four was removed in 1976 and more reform-minded communists took over, it took another year before China’s new leaders opened the nation to tourists and foreign investment. The open-door policy began a shift from a centrally controlled economy to one that is market based. That shift has helped China become a leading economic power.

But the economy was not the only thing that began to change with China’s open door. After basing my ministry out of Hong Kong for nearly ten years, I traveled into mainland China on a tourist visa for the first time in January 1978 and took several short trips into the nation throughout that year. I shared my faith upon every opportunity and sought to connect with the Christians in the mainland. I found that there were many believers in China, but most met in homes and were sorely lacking in resources. In one region of Guangxi Province forty thousand Christians who met in homes had only one Bible to share among them.

From this knowledge our ministry, Revival Chinese Ministries, began smuggling tens of thousands of Bibles into China each month with help from mainland believers and Western tourists. I later started meeting with house-church pastors to offer training. During these meetings I spoke about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, something most Chinese knew little about. For the most part, Chinese Christian theology had been shaped by the evangelical ministry founded by Hudson Taylor, China Inland Mission. Many Chinese Christians believed the gifts of the Holy Spirit ceased in the age of the apostles. But when I would meet with pastors in gatherings of several hundred leaders (who often represented hundreds of thousands of believers), I would teach about the work of the Holy Spirit, sometimes for as long as ten hours a day, and then pray for these leaders to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

These pastors would begin speaking in tongues, shouting, crying, dancing, or falling to the ground in worship. Attempts to stop what was happening were usually unsuccessful, and the house-church leaders would leave those meetings empowered by the Holy Spirit. Great boldness came upon them, and miracles began to follow their preaching. This, I believe, is why the church in China has grown so miraculously and today numbers between seventy million and one hundred five million. And I believe this is why official Three-Self churches, once mere parrots of the Communist Party line, are now preaching the true gospel and experiencing revival. The miraculous survival and spread of Christianity in China is, quite simply put, a work of the Holy Spirit.

God at Work in China

During my hundreds of visits to virtually every part of China, I often ask people why they became a Christian. Invariably they tell me it is due to some miracle they saw or heard about. Very few of China’s tens of millions of Christians cannot relate experiences of miraculous healing or other supernatural manifestations. It, of course, has been impossible to lead mass evangelistic campaigns in China as one would host in other parts of the world. But manifestations of the Spirit’s power have brought entire villages to salvation.

While I was visiting Henan in 1991, a sister we have worked with for several decades told me about an older woman who collapsed suddenly during a Sunday service at a church in Daqing. She wasn’t breathing and did not respond to any of their efforts to revive her. So they let her body remain at the side of the church while the brothers and sisters in the meeting worshipped and praised the Lord. This went on from 8:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m. Then suddenly at 10:00 a.m., the woman returned to life. One older brother commented, I have been coming to church meetings for all my life, and I have never seen a meeting like this one.

The Daqing revivals began in 1989 after several Henan preachers from Fangcheng went there to preach the full gospel and prayed for some sixty believers to receive the Holy Spirit. After that miracles were commonplace, and every month hundreds were added to the church. When I visited them in December 1991 the numbers of believers in the house churches had grown to about three thousand believers. In 1994 the number of believers in Daqing had grown to about one hundred thousand, and that summer a large meeting of over six thousand was held in the wilderness. Now in the city and surrounding suburbs of Daqing there are reported to be about three hundred thousand believers. This is all due to the work of the Holy Spirit.

I have heard about—and witnessed!—similar events all over China. In a village in Zhejiang Province there had never been a Christian. One woman there had an incurable disease and after giving birth to a child was at the point of death. When the doctor examined her, he said, She will die immediately, and he forced her family to move her to a room where they keep the dead.

But this woman had previously heard the gospel, and during that time she heard someone say, Call on the name of Jesus and you will be saved. Though she was barely alive the woman found the strength to call out, Jesus save me. After a short period of time that woman began to recover and eventually she was completely healed. This miracle shook the neighboring villages. In one of those villages lived an old man suffering from an infection in his legs—he had several open sores that continually dripped blood. His legs itched and were painful, and he was unable to rest day or night. People avoided seeing him, moreover his own children wished he would die.

When he heard the testimony of that woman, he was so moved that he didn’t close his eyes the whole night. The next morning he begged his two nephews to take him to that woman’s house. With tears in his eyes he said to her, Auntie, I heard that as you were about to die, a doctor named Jesus came to bring you back to life. Where is this doctor now? Please call Him to heal this pitiful man!

After calling out to Jesus this way several times, the blood stopped flowing out of the old man’s legs. Within two days his legs were completely healed. Therefore many people came to know Jesus could heal the sick and cast out devils, and that when they called out, Jesus, save me, their diseases immediately would be cured. They considered the name of Jesus a secret that was only to be told to relatives and close friends. But in this manner the name of Jesus eventually was preached to every district and neighboring provinces. Thousands came to the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

In a similar instance in 1990 the churches around a city in Shaanxi Province received the baptism in the Holy Spirit. After this, the brothers and sisters reached a new height in praise and worship; even the old brothers and sisters danced in worship. Many people were healed while they were worshipping. The fire of the gospel spread to all the other counties in this area, and the Lord added to their number daily.

In a village about ninety kilometers from that city, there was not a single Christian. But within two years after hearing the gospel, 60 percent of the villagers were converted, and this angered the head of the village. He continually interrupted the meetings and scolded the believers. The brothers and sisters prayed fervently for him. A few months later this village head’s only son became very ill, and the doctor could not find the cause. The village leader was desperate and did not know what to do, so he went to church and asked for help. They prayed for him, and he accepted the Lord. They also prayed for his son, and he was healed. Later the village head became very zealous, and he opened his home to the believers.

In yet another miraculous event in 1994 we visited a rural area in Henan that, to my knowledge, previously had no church, and we were amazed to find thousands of Spirit-filled Christians. I asked, What happened here? Zhang Rongliang, the well-known leader of the Fangcheng house-church fellowship, related the following:

During March of 1994, the Lord led several of us preachers to come here to evangelize, and we found there wasn’t a church or even one person who had ever heard the gospel. One of the brethren stood up in the open and taught the life of Jesus to a crowd of people. He began at the birth of Christ and went through the Gospels, covering the main points of Jesus’s life through the resurrection. He taught for four hours. During the teaching, the crowd of listeners quickly grew to over one thousand. Why? As he was teaching, the people saw with their eyes scenes of the teaching. It was as if they were watching the life of Jesus being portrayed by video or a movie. However, there was no video or movie projector, no screen, and no electricity. But everyone saw the same thing.

When he said, Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan, they saw the scene of the baptism of Jesus. This went on right through the crucifixion and resurrection, at which time everyone fell on their knees and repented of their sins. They all said, God is real and alive in your midst. What can we say but to thank Him and believe in Him? Then these biblical scenes went away, and we have not heard of such a thing being repeated anywhere. It was so real that we tried to film it on our video camera. Unfortunately it was not working. God probably allowed this very unusual miracle to take place because many had been fasting and praying for this village where there was not a single Christian.

Kingdom Workers

Our ministry has worked tirelessly to provide Bibles and other Christian resources to the believers in China, and to train house-church leaders. Through these and other efforts God has raised up anointed men and women to carry out His work. In December 1993 a group of American prophetic ministers—pastors David Kiteley, Moses Vegh, and David Copp—visited several districts of Anhui and Henan provinces. They prayed for more than two thousand young house-church preachers and imparted prophetic words and gifts of the Holy Spirit to them.

One of these was a young preacher from Zhoukou District in Henan. The prophecy simply said, The Lord will give you gifts of healing. During March 1994 this brother went out to evangelize and pray for the sick. It was soon evident the Lord gave him a gift of healing people who were deaf and mute; in one month alone twenty-six people were healed.

One of these was a man who was not only mute but also was born with a severe mental deficiency and was widely considered to be an idiot. Though this man had an adult body, he had the mind of a small child and could not even clearly communicate with others. However, after prayer, he began to speak in beautifully fluent Mandarin Chinese. His mental facilities were completely restored. People came from far and near to listen to him speak, and they were amazed at the brilliant mind, excellent speech, and talents he now had. In fact, the Lord gave him wisdom and knowledge far beyond his background as a simple peasant farmer.

This man who was considered to be a half-wit now had the demeanor of a genius. People were astonished and this amazing testimony caused eighty-three people, many of whom were atheists, to believe in Christ. For years after this amazing healing, people were still being saved after seeing this living miracle.

In another great example of God raising up men and women to do His kingdom work, I want to share a story about a young woman named Sister Li. Due to the great revival in Henan in the 1980s, in the early 1990s the churches there sent workers to Sichuan Province to evangelize. A twenty-four-year-old Sichuan girl surnamed Li, who was very small in stature, was one of many who heard and accepted Christ. She was so excited about finding Christ that she witnessed to several children, who also accepted the Lord. Yet persecution in Sichuan was so great that, on the third day after finding Christ, Sister Li was taken by the authorities and paraded through the streets in a struggle session. They put a sign on her and those arrested with her stating those who believe in Jesus are spies and counter-revolutionaries. There was even an article in the newspaper saying she was the leader of religious counter-revolutionary activities in that area.

For many years Sister Li experienced major persecution. Once she was locked up with handcuffs, but after prayer the handcuffs fell open by themselves. The Public Security Bureau (PSB) officials were amazed and put new handcuffs on her wrists, but they also came open. They saw with their eyes the great power of God.

Believing that God might do a greater work in jail, Sister Li determined to fast for three days—during which she neither took any food nor drank any liquids, including water. On the third day the PSB officials took her out again to be paraded through the streets, along with a group of hardened criminals. She prayed for God’s intervention, realizing she was so weak from fasting she could not possibly keep up with these strong criminals and didn’t want the Lord’s name to be reproached.

On the way to the city center the driver of the truck carrying them lost control of the vehicle and it crashed into a large stone. The whole front was smashed and the truck was unable to move; therefore, the police decided