The House Churches in China — Ralph Mahoney

Heard of the book The Shepherd Staff. I put this together for the house church leaders in China. It took about thirty years to gather the material. And about three years to organize and edit it and re-write it.

And we produced this for the house church leaders. You can purchase it in the Spanish language from Vino Nuevo. We have been giving them away to church leaders all over the world. We have it in sixteen different languages.

Persecution and Growth in China's House Churches

And we've given away over a half million copies. The house church in China is a very interesting phenomenon. The government in China wants all the churches to be registered with the government. And they want to tell the pastors what they can teach and preach.

The house church leaders have refused to go along with that arrangement. They feel they have to obey the Lord and what he tells them to teach and preach. So this has brought a lot of persecution against the house church.

They're not allowed to have any training centers. They have to meet in small groups. And as far as the government is concerned, they are illegal. And the phenomena that has happened with all the persecution is that the church in China has exploded in growth.

And today there are between maybe four hundred thousand or more house churches. About three million Chinese are being converted every year. So they have to have fifteen thousand new house church leaders every year, just to have one house church leader for each new house church of two hundred believers.

So at the present time, we have been able to supply two hundred fifty thousand of the house church leaders in China with a copy of the book. All of them have to be carried into China by someone in a box.

Or in a suitcase. And they call it smuggling it into the country. And that's the only way we can get them in. So it's a slow process. We're only able to move three, five, six thousand copies a month across the border.

Fifty or sixty thousand copies a year. And so we've been getting them in now for almost ten years. But there are still many thousands of house church leaders waiting for their copy of the Shepherd's Quiet.

And it's been a great blessing to these house church leaders. We've gone into China on several occasions to meet with some of the key house church leaders. I don't like to go into China because when I go, I put those who meet with me at risk of imprisonment.

But they still plead with us to come. Even though it means they might go to prison. And they are brutally beaten in their prisons. They suffer tremendous persecution. But it just makes the work of God go the faster.

The Heavenly Man and Miraculous Ministry Under Persecution

I don't know if the book is available yet in the Spanish language. But a book was published last year called The Heavenly Man. It may be one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful books I've ever read.

You who speak English should obtain a copy. It was named the book of the year by the Christian publishers in the United States. But the book titled The Heavenly Man is the story of one of the house church leaders in China.

And it's largely the story of his sufferings for the gospel and for Christ. I had heard of The Heavenly Man for many years. God has used him so powerfully in the nation of China. The communists are dreadfully afraid of him because of the great power of Christ in his life.

Like most of the house church leaders, he is a very sweet, humble brother. I was given a picture of him several years ago by a Chinese brother. And I've had the picture of The Heavenly Man and his wife on my little desk for about four or five years.

It reminds me to pray for him. Now his story is in print. And I would certainly recommend it to everyone. But this brother on one occasion fasted without food or water for seventy-four days. Obviously, you're only sustained miraculously if you do something like that.

Usually, without water, you would die in six or eight or ten days. And in a very hot desert climate, you could die in twenty-four hours without water. But he went seventy-four days because he felt God was leading him to do that.

I won't tell you the story or why or the outcome. But he had such strong miracles from the dead being raised, curable diseases being healed, and bringing thousands to Christ, even though they're not allowed any public crusades.

They have to do all of this under very careful conditions. But even under great persecution, it causes the church to grow. And one of the most wonderful things about the house church movement, even though they are very poor, the average support of a house church leader would be between two and three hundred pesos a month.

And yet they have a great vision to evangelize the world, to finish the job of world evangelism. And they have actually planned for the invasion of Asia, not just China, but India, where Hinduism has had a grip on the people for thousands of years, where less than three percent of the population are Christian.

In China today, somewhere around ten percent or more of the people are believers. And in a nation of one billion three hundred million people, that works out to a hundred thirty million or more believers, which I think is more than the population of Mexico.

And they have a great vision to evangelize Burma and India and the Muslim countries, and go back down the Silk Road to Jerusalem. The gospel originally came up the Silk Road to China in the early centuries.

And they believe the Lord is going to use them to go back down the Silk Road and evangelize all those Muslim countries until they finally reach Israel, and they're going to evangelize Israel. So they have large vision, even though they are very, very poor.

But they will get the job done because of their dedication and their consecration. It isn't the money you have. It's the dedication you have. And that's how they have spread the gospel across China. Be prepared for two things if you ever go to China.

The first two questions they will ask you is this. This is what they asked me. Brother Ralph, how many years have you been in prison for the gospel? That's your measure of your stature. The second question, how many times have you been beaten for the gospel?

And when they say beaten, they mean beaten. Because in the prisons, they will tie their hands behind their back. They will put ropes around their arms, and they will lift them off the floor by their hands.

This is very, very painful. Then they will take steel rods, and begin to attack their knees, and break their leg bones, break their ankle bones, break their feet bones, until they come down crippled, unable to walk.

And often when they leave the prisons, they can only hobble for the rest of their life. How many times have you been beaten for Jesus? When they asked me those questions, I said to them, dear brothers, I am just a midget among giants.

But this midget would love to help you if we can. What do you need? What can we do for you? We need training material. We have no training material in our language. We all, the leaders, all have Bibles.

The people do not, for the most part. Typically, 50 believers will share one Bible. Many of them have hand copied book after book of the Bible, so they will have their own copy. But the leaders have the Bible.

But they said to us, we read it, but we do not understand it very well. We need help understanding the Bible. We need training material. And so I said, well, my dear brothers, if that is what you need by the grace of God, we will try to supply that for you.

So I went back to California, and I had file drawers full of training material. And I went to work to sort out the best of it. It had come from authors in Africa, authors in India, Europe, Latin America.

United States, many other parts of the world. But I wanted to give them the best of what we had gathered over 30 some years of training leaders. So we selected it all out and organized it. But because most of these leaders are educationally deprived, we realized it had to be written down to a very simple level.

So I had to rewrite it all to a simpler level, so it would be easier for them to read. And it would also be easier to translate. And it took three years to do that. We ended up with a book of over a half million words, with almost all that a leader would need to train himself or someone else.

And it was first published in the Chinese language. We had such satanic opposition, such demonic opposition, that you would not believe the stories I could tell you. The devil knew what a book like that would do for the leaders.

And he fought it every inch of the way. We had translators in India who were taking it into some of the Indian dialects. Men who had done translation work on the Bible. Men who had been doing Christian translation work for 20, 30, 40 years.

And almost without exception, they said they had never been attacked by the devil like they had trying to do this book. One brother's arm actually became paralyzed as he was trying to do the Malayalam edition.

On and on the stories would go. But we spent most of our days on our knees praying for the translators all over the world, resisting the encroachment of the devil on their lives, so they could complete the work for those languages.

And this has been a great blessing to the leaders around the world. And if you would like to get a copy, they are available from Vino Nuevo. Do you have them here, Brother Joe? No? Okay. We, as I say, we give them to those who teach and preach the Bible to other people.

But we found a lot of people wanted a copy that didn't qualify as a church leader. So we've made them available at a very low cost. Would that I had the faith to give them all away. But we don't have that faith or that resource.

Abraham's Blessing and the Purpose of Receiving Blessings

So we give them to the church leaders and we allow others to pay a modest price for them. I wanted to talk to you about your opportunities and privileges to help evangelize the world. All the blessings that we receive in times like these are given us for purpose.

Whenever you read the covenant the Lord made with Abraham, it's recorded in Genesis chapter 12. The Lord makes seven promises to Abraham. He says, I will bless those who bless you, curse those who curse you.

Let's go and read these promises. I will make of thee a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great. Why? The next verse says, and thou shalt be a blessing. Why does he bless us? So that we can be a blessing.

And then he says, I'll bless those who bless you. Curse him who curses you. And in you shall all the nations or families of the earth be blessed. Every people group in the world was going to be blessed through the offspring and seed of Abraham.

Why did God want to bless Abraham? So he could bless all the people groups, all the linguistic groups in the world. Why has he blessed you during these days? So you can be a blessing. So you can bless people who have never heard the gospel.

Even here in Mexico. There are many in the mountain areas who still are beyond the reach of the gospel. And the Lord wants to use you to help reach them. The Lord wants to make the church in Mexico a missionary sending church.

Missionaries to your own nation and peoples. And maybe to other nations as the Lord leads you. To let you understand how this can be done. I want to tell you the story of a little Chinese young lady I met in China on my last trip there.

Persecuted Chinese Believers' Forgiveness and Ministry

I was smuggled by the house church leaders up into a mountain area. They put me in the back of a van. They covered us up with baggage. Then they put a whole lot of Chinese young people in the van. So that when we went through the checkpoints, which they have about every 30 kilometers, they have what's called the PSB.

It's like the old KGB of Russia. PSB stands for the Police Service Bureau. They are everywhere in China. So every 18 kilometers or so, you're stopped. Every 30 kilometers or so, you're stopped and they search your car.

So these brothers had prayed that the Lord would blind the eyes of the PSB so we could get through without catching me. So when the vans would pull up to the checkpoint, they'd look inside to see who was there.

They'd see all these Chinese young people. They would look at the baggage. They didn't know that I was part of the baggage. So they would pass us on through. And we eventually got up to the place where we were going to have the meeting with these house church leaders.

In that part of China, all the people there live in caves. They're very poor and the mountains are very steep. So they'll just dig a hole in the side of the mountain. And they will go into that hole and make it their home.

And they will put a little face on that to keep the cold air out in the winter. And it keeps the heat out in the summer. So their home caves are actually quite comfortable. In the area where I was at, almost every one of those homes had at least one light bulb in it.

Not much more than that. But one light bulb. They would do their cooking outside. And of course they had no toilet facilities or restroom facilities as we know them. No plumbing. Most of them had to carry their water some distance.

It was in such a cave, but a large one, that we met with these leaders. About 250 of them. And what a sweet, wonderful bunch they were. I don't think there was a single one that had not spent some years in prison and been beaten many times.

But they were not angry with the communists. They prayed for them. They did what the Bible says. They did what Jesus taught. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who despitefully use you. I found absolutely no anger or hostility toward their persecutors.

There was such a grace of God upon them. Such a sweetness. Total forgiveness of all those who had done terrible things against them. That just to be among them, I would just weep. I think they are the choicest saints in all the world.

They will undoubtedly be the ones with the greatest reward in heaven. They have the real thing when it comes to Christianity. They are willing to pay the price. They serve Jesus for only one reason. They love him.

There is no reason to be a Christian in China unless you love Jesus. You are discriminated against economically. You can be hauled into jail any time. You can be beaten, harassed, face starvation. They love Jesus.

A Chinese Woman's Seven-Year Tithe of Her Life

They are willing because of their love for Jesus to do the most incredible things, to share the good news with other people. While I was ministering there with them, I met a young lady who was 27, 28 years old.

She told me her story. In this particular house church group, they teach the believers this doctrine. We don't just bring a tithe of our money to the Lord and give that to the work of spreading the gospel.

We give a tithe of our life. Since they expect to live 70 years, they tithe seven years of their life to the Lord's service. And they said, we don't believe in giving the Lord the end of our life. We believe in giving him the beginning of our life.

So after we finish our schooling, finish our university studies, the next seven years belong to the Lord. We go out across China to spread the gospel. We try to go to the areas where there is no gospel.

So that is what this young lady had done. Seven years before, she had left central China. She had gone to the northeast to a city called Harbin. She had gone in harvest time when the farmers were gathering in their crops.

She had gone out into the rural area near Harbin and found a farmer with fields in which he was trying to get in the harvest. And the farmers tried to hire help during that time to help them gather the harvest.

So she found the farmer and she said, sir, I would like to help you gather your harvest. Well, what do you require in the way of compensation? She said, well, if you'll just let me eat something of the harvest I'm gathering, that's all I will require.

So she went into the fields to begin gathering the harvest. She had permission to take what she needed to eat for herself. At night she would just sleep in the field for she had nowhere to sleep. And the other workers in the field would ask her, why are you here?

I'm here to gather a harvest. They didn't know that she was talking about them. They were the harvest she was after. And so this would open the door. And after she got acquainted with them, worked with them for several days, she would invite them around their lunch time and around their evening time to allow her to tell them stories.

And so she told them her story of how Jesus found her, found her in sin, on her way to hell, and forgave her sin, and gave her eternal life, and gave her joy and peace. And that's something the Chinese are seeking is peace.

And now she knew she was going to heaven. And she wanted them to enjoy the wonderful things she had found. And she would open her Bible and share with them. Well, before the first week was out, she had several converts.

One of them was an older woman who invited her to come to her home to sleep. She found she was sleeping in the field. It's not appropriate for you to be out in the field at night. You're a beautiful young woman.

Someone might attack you. Come. My home will give you protection. So she accepted that invitation. And then this woman introduced her to her other family relatives who lived in the same little rural village.

And she shared with her family the good news. And they began to believe. And before a couple of months had passed, she had more than 70 believers in that village area. And the Lord had identified someone that she began to train to be the house church leader there.

She started investing training into that person to become the house church leader. More than half the house church leaders in China are women. It's the story we have in Mexico. The men say, Here am I, Lord.

Send my sister. We have that same problem in America. And as a result, more than half the missionaries are women. Same is true of the house church leaders in China. More of them are women than men. Now that had started seven years before I met her.

She taught them to do what she had done. To start sharing the gospel with others. And when I met her seven years later, 28 ,000 people had been won to Christ. Meeting in 300 house churches. And she had traveled almost 3 ,000 kilometers to come to that meeting to plead with me for 300 copies of the Chinese edition of The Shepherd's Tale.

She wanted one for each of the house church leaders. I just could have cried. I said, I would love to be able to give them to you. But we have to bring them all in by courier. Thousands are waiting for a copy.

But I'll do my best to try to help you. We had some young people that were traveling with us from Hong Kong. So I asked these young brothers, When you get back to Hong Kong, see what you can do. See if you can find some way to get those copies up to Harbin.

It's almost 2 ,000 miles from Hong Kong. But I got word about six months later that they had got the 300 copies to her. That's what one young lady had done, who loved not her life unto death. What would happen if the young men of Mexico and the young women of Mexico had a similar dedication?

Equipping Every Believer for the Work of Ministry

The church in China is practicing what we've been trying to teach them. The job of leaders is to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. And every house church member is expected to win others for Christ.

Every house church member is expected to pray for the sick, cast out devils, do the work of ministry. All the house churches will have a leader. Every team needs a captain. But it is the members that are doing the work.

Which explains the phenomenal multiplication of believers in China. Now, if we would do that in Mexico, we might see the same results in Mexico. What would it mean if three million people a year were coming to Christ in Mexico?

It wouldn't take more than 20 or 25 years to convert the whole nation. Everybody would be a Christian. It's the biblical way. It's what's working in China. In the midst of poverty and persecution and imprisonment.

And unfortunately, sometimes in death. For many tens of thousands of Christians have become martyrs. But if we could bring that level of commitment and dedication to the work of the Lord in Mexico, what a difference it might make.

Where God's blessing would come. Now, my concerns in all the things that we do in the church in western nations is this. I'm not suggesting it's wrong to pursue blessing. The Lord wants to bless us. And it's wonderful to be blessed.

But if we are blessed without understanding the purpose of blessing, the blessing can turn to a curse. Let me give you a biblical example. Every day fresh manna came down from heaven in the wilderness.

The Lord told them to go out and gather every day. But some wanted to keep it over for a second day. They wanted yesterday's blessing to suffice for today. But when they went to yesterday's store of manna, they found that it was full of worms and smelled very bad.

Keeping God's Blessing Fresh by Giving It Away

Now, that illustrates what happens when you try to hold on to blessing. It will turn stale. It will spoil. It will be bad. Years ago, the Lord taught me a lesson. I was only 16 or 17 at the time. I started preaching when I was 15.

And I was leading a youth group at that time. And the Lord sent a great visitation to us. When I say I was leading a youth group, it was myself and one other young person at the beginning. That was the group.

But as we prayed and committed to winning souls in our school and wherever we could, the blessing of the Lord came. And it wasn't long before we had almost 50 in the group. And they were all young people.

The Lord was blessing. We were really thrilled and excited about what the Lord was doing. We were getting some wonderful training and teaching from a man of God who was visiting the church at that time.

And we were just excited about what the Lord was doing. But I made a terrible mistake. I began to think this way. We're all just young people. We need to be more mature. We need to seek the deeper life.

We need to get more spiritual. And the focus turned off of evangelism and turned onto ourselves, our own spiritual development. We wanted to be deep Christians. Well, that was a trap of the enemy. And what happened in a matter of about two months, the blessing of the Lord lifted.

And what had been a place of life and blessing became a spiritual swamp land. If you don't know what I'm referring to, read the prophet Ezekiel. You may remember that he had a vision of a river flowing out of the temple in Jerusalem.

And as it flowed out toward the desert place, this is in Ezekiel 47, it increased in depth and width. The further it went toward the wilderness, the deeper and wider the water became. And it was a river of life.

Everything the water touched lived. Great multitudes of fish broke forth in this river. And the Lord said, wherever the river flows, everything will be healed. Everything will live. It was a great healing stream of life.

But it goes on to say in verse 11, the only place this river will not heal and bring life and healing to are the miry places and the marshes, verse 11. What had happened in that situation I was describing with the young people, when we focused on our own blessing and trying to be spiritual, we became a miry place.

And no longer did the river of life that had been flowing bless and help us. We were given over to salt, just like the prophet said. And in a matter of weeks, that youth group almost disappeared. My head was spinning.

Lord, what happened? We were trying to be spiritual, trying to be deep Christians. It was then the Lord spoke to me. I didn't call you to be spiritual or to be deep Christians. I called you to go into all the world and proclaim the good news to every creature and heal the sick, cast out devils.

And if you do that, you don't have to worry about being spiritual. You'll be spiritual. You'll be strong. You'll get stronger the more you win the Christ. And I said, Lord, help me never forget this terrible lesson, because I was almost ill from what had happened.

It had been my own immaturity and lack of understanding. But I can tell you as an individual, and I can tell you as a church, that if all the blessings the Lord sends to you are kept to yourself and accumulated like the manna, you'll wake up tomorrow and it'll all be stinking and smelling and stale.

The only way you keep what God gives you is to give it away, pass it on. And as you give, it will be given to you in ever fresh supply. So when I teach on ministering to the Lord, I'm always fearful. Our morning session was ministry to the Lord.

And when people minister to the Lord, they find out that they are blessed. Not only is the Lord blessed, they are blessed. They find out what David found out. What did David discover? In Psalm 22, he said of God, You're holy, O thou who lives in the praises of Israel.

David found out when he ministered to the Lord that the Lord came and lived there with him. He lived in those praises. And when the Lord comes, wow, phenomenal things happen. You feel his presence. The blessing is on your life.

You're laying hands on people and they're getting blessed. But if we only focus on ministry to the Lord, and we don't learn to start ministering to one another, and more importantly, do not go on to minister to the world, to reach the lost at any cost, all our blessings will sour and turn to worms.

Faith, Sacrifice, and Obedient Action in Ministry

The only way you keep the blessing fresh is to pass it on. So when I started out some 50, what, two or three years ago to pioneer churches, we were in situations where we had no money. And the Lord called me to go out and pioneer the first church.

I was already working. Just had married. Had a good job. Making a lot of money for just a young person. And I had very little to spend it on. So I had been saving it up. And in a few months we had several thousand dollars.

Then the Lord dealt with me about going out to pioneer this church. And as the Lord was talking to me about it, and I was talking to him about it, he made it very clear. He said, I want you to learn faith.

I want to teach you faith. So if you're going to succeed in this effort, you're going to have to learn faith. I didn't understand what that meant. I said, wonderful. I would like more faith. How many would like more faith?

Raise your hand high if you'd like more faith. Well, here's what the Lord said to me. Give away all the money you've got. That takes faith. That literally happened. Give it all away. When you go out to pioneer that church, start with nothing.

And see what I can do. So I had a friend that I had won to the Lord in high school. He was trying to get to Brazil as a missionary. He didn't have the money for his airfare. So I spent almost two thousand dollars buying his ticket to Brazil.

And I sent the rest off to a missionary in India who had been a good friend of my wife. So now we were starting out, pioneer a church with less than twenty dollars, and with an old automobile that cost seventy dollars.

That doesn't buy much of an automobile. The old roads that we were driving were so terribly dusty. The floorboards had all fallen out. So all the dust would pour in on us as we'd go down the road. Wonderful way to start out in the ministry.

We rented a little house for ten dollars a month. Put up a tent and began to preach the gospel in this country community. People started believing in the Lord. Thirty or forty were saved, and about half of those fell with the Spirit.

And we were on our way toward establishing a church. And then the Lord spoke to me one day. I was praying, Lord, we need land on which to build a church building. And we need the building. And our income is very, very small.

These are poor country people. They give very little, and we're living on very, very little. I was living on less than five percent of what I'd been living on when I had a job. Just a few dollars a week.

And the Lord challenged me with another step of faith. Take half of what's coming into the church and start sending it to the mission cause, to missionaries around the world. So here's half of our money now going out to other nations of the world.

And the other half we were supposed to take care of the church and get land, build a building, all those things that you need to do. How can you do that when half of the money is being given away? See, that's God's way.

The mathematician would never agree that that would work. When you have a very little, and you give half of it away, how do you ever expect to get land? It turned out in that particular community, even if we had been very rich, we could not have gotten any land.

All the land was virtually owned by a big corporation. They had purchased it all about 25 years before, when the United States was in a great depression. And they didn't want to turn loose one square centimeter.

No matter how much money you offered, they would not sell. So even if we had a lot of money, we couldn't get land. So I'm saying to the Lord, Lord, we need land. We're trying to do everything you've told us.

We're giving away half of all the income to spread the gospel in other nations. We're living on very little. This old tent that we're meeting in is about to fall down. It was getting so rotten that when it would rain, we would all get baptized again.

So the Lord spoke to me one day. I'm going to give you some land. How are you going to do it? And he told me what to do. So a couple of weeks later, the old car I had wouldn't make the trip. So one of the brothers drove me up about 150 miles away to the headquarters of the corporation that owned all the land.

And I went in to see the man responsible. And I showed him the map and the land that we wanted. He said, young man, surely you understand we don't sell land to anybody at any price. Why are you wasting my time?

I said, sir, I'm not asking you to sell me the land. Well, what are you asking? I'm telling you to give it to us. You keep your policy, and we get the land. That's what the Lord told me to tell him. This man looked at me like I was crazy.

He said, well, I'll be in contact with you. Two weeks later, we had the deed to the land. I was 21 when that miracle took place. It was one of my first miracles of faith, I suppose. But the Lord was teaching us faith.

Faith is a simple thing. It's obedient action in response to what God has said. The Bible says in Romans 10, faith comes by hearing the word of God. But the word hearing doesn't just mean that we hear it with our ear.

It means that we do what we're told. If I speak to my son and say, son, now my children are, of course, all grown today. But when they were growing up, I might say, Norman, take the trash, the refuse out and put it in the trash barrel.

Okay, Dad. But I'd come by an hour later, and the trash was still there. What was the problem? He wasn't hearing. Oh, he heard the words. He said, yes, I'll do it. But he didn't obey with action. There was no obedient response to what I said.

So I showed him the board of education. And I said, I'm going to apply this to the seat of learning. Then he heard. Do you understand? Now it's the same way with the Lord. He speaks, but if we do not take obedient action in response to what he said, there is no faith.

You can call it faith. Faith is only obedient action. Faith always involves action. Obedient action in response to what God has said. I had obeyed the Lord when he said, give away all your money. We obeyed the Lord when he said, start sending half of the money to other nations to evangelize them.

So when I was praying and asking how we could get property, again the Lord spoke. And when we took obedient action in response to what he said, the miracle took place and we got the land. Now I'm praying, Lord, we need the building.

Where are we going to get the materials to build the building? We still have very little coming in. And so as I was praying down by the river one day, I saw a man come up to the bank of the river. And to the side of his boat there was a big log, a tree that had been cut down and had been in the river.