Chinese Go Underground to Study Bible

Chinese Go Underground to Study Bible

NewsMax.com Wires
Friday, March 2, 2001

WASHINGTON (UPI) – Caves and tunnels have provided shelter and protection for the Chinese and Vietnamese in their successful wars to advance communism.

In Yenan, in northern China, caves offered shelter for Mao Tse-tung and his guerrilla army in the 1940s. During the Vietnam War, an elaborate and sophisticated system of tunnels accommodated the Viet Cong infrastructure and included field hospitals, schools and command centers.

Now Chinese Christians are copying their nation's red rulers, the Rev. Wolfgang Baake told United Press International after a visit to a clandestine Bible college, somewhere in the Chinese countryside.

Baake is chairman of the German branch of Voice of the Martyrs, an international association aiding persecuted Christians in communist and Muslim nations. Among its clientele is this school, which trains pastors for China's burgeoning illegal house churches.

The way Baake described his trip by telephone from Germany Thursday reminded a reporter of his circuitous travels to meetings with guerrilla commanders in Vietnam.

First there was a day-long train ride from Beijing. Then, in a provincial town a taxi was waiting to take him to a rendezvous point 30 miles away. A two-hour trek on foot through fields and forests followed.

Eventually, Baake and his party boarded a small car that had been waiting for them. With dimmed headlights, it rumbled over unpaved roads to the camouflaged entrance of a pair of dank tubes burrowed into clay.

"They were no longer than eight yards and no higher than two," Baake related. "They housed three instructors, two housekeepers and 37 students from all over China, 16 women and 21 men, aged 17 to 27."

The road to house church ministry is a short but extremely hard one.

"The students spend 10 months underground, then do a two-month internship in their home congregations, and return for another 10 months to the college.

Risking Torture and Death

"Then they are pastors, earning perhaps 20 dollars a month and risking arrest, torture and even death," said Baake.

"While at school, these young people never get out of their clothes. They work and sleep in them. It's cold and damp in those tunnels. There's no heating. Only body temperature provides a modicum of warmth."

According to Baake, the young men and women sleep in separate dormitories alongside the main classroom. "They have roughly hewn bunk beds without mattresses because they would be soggy within seconds due to the high humidity.

"Neon tubes light the underground school. Over these tubes the students dry their towels. They wash at an outside well, but only after their own sentries have given an 'All clear,' " the German pastor reported.

The electricity, he added, was "borrowed" from an overland line.

It propels a washing machine that "seemed of pre-World War II vintage." The school's one luxury is a $10,000 gasoline-driven generator that kicks in when there is a power outage. It's a gift from the German Voice of the Martyrs branch, which also feeds students and faculty. The daily allowance is $1.50 a person.

But the college lacks a kitchen where the housekeepers, an elderly couple, could prepare the meals. Instead, they cook over a pit in the cave.

The college lacks a library, too. Baake said he only saw "the Bible and a couple of other books" in front of the students huddled together behind 18 tables. "The college is not equipped to teach theology," he related, "just Bible studies, exegesis and preaching."

Baake told UPI that the students were well aware of the distinct possibility of martyrdom. "The chance that this might happen has brought us together."

The California-based Voice of the Martyrs organization was founded by the Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, who himself was a victim of severe persecution.

Wurmbrand, who died Feb. 17 at age 91, was a German-Romanian pastor of Jewish descent. First the Nazis persecuted and tortured him in World War II. Then he spent 14 years in jail under Romania's communist regime. Later, as a refugee in West Germany and the United States, he founded his ministry to support fellow martyrs around the world.

Wurmbrand was a firm believer in St. Augustine's dictum that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of our Christian faith."

According to Baake, China proves this to be true.

Official Church Persecutes Others

"There is an officially recognized Protestant church with some 20 million members. 'Illegal' congregations often dread it even more than the state authorities. I was told that the official church often denounces and persecutes the illegal congregations."

But then, he added, "the house churches are growing and growing, and Bible colleges like the one I visited can't churn out ministers quickly enough."

Almost 16 centuries after his death and thousands of miles east of his North African hometown of Hippo, a group of dedicated young men and women are preparing to prove St. Augustine right – operating in cold, dark and humid tunnels, just like the Maoists before them.

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