In the pre-pandemic summer of 2019, I was exploring historic religious sites in a second-tier interior Chinese city with a fellow historian when we came across a reconstructed early twentieth-century house of worship belonging to the True Jesus Church (TJC). As we stood on the street admiring the architecture, we were approached by an older woman asking if we were TJC members. After many years as an active congregant of the large registered church in the centre of the city, she had recently moved to the city's much smaller True Jesus fellowship. She was drawn by the intimacy and mutual support of the tight-knit local TJC community as well as their sincere belief in and prayerful pursuit of miracles. She spoke with admiration of the timely and unexpected provision of a new set of plastic stools for the congregation of twenty-plus worshippers (‘an answer to prayer!’), and then invited us to join them at their next gathering.
Though the TJC is not well known outside academic circles, this large independent Chinese Pentecostal Church today operates in over sixty countries with perhaps as many as three million believers. In China and the true Jesus, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye looks at the growth and development of the TJC, paying special attention to the factors that contributed to its endurance. Inouye's historical research is exemplary, sifting through many different and at times incomplete documentary strands, weaving together a convincing and engaging narrative of the TJC, rich with compelling characters. Using insights from contemporary scholarship on global Pentecostalism and religious experience as well as on the role of cultural technologies such as print media, authority structures and organisational governance, she skilfully elucidates the rise and persistence of the TJC. This careful historical reconstruction of the TJC's development never strays far from the importance and reality of charismatic experiences for the members of the TJC. Rejecting the more common deprivation and religious continuity theories of religious conversion, Inouye follows the lead of recent scholars of world Christianity, emphasising the agency of local Christians by treating these Chinese believers as ‘living human beings, flesh and blood Chinese people who also are Christians with real faith experiences’.Footnote 1 The resulting study greatly advances our understanding of the TJC and its origins, while also bringing welcome nuance to existing scholarship on Pentecostalism in twentieth-century China.
After a helpful introduction that situates the book within the academic discourse on Christianity in China, the first chapter shows the ways in which missionary Christianity – particularly its new methods of organisation and sources of authority – informed the genesis of the TJC. Chapter ii highlights the influence of transnational restorationist Christianity on the founding of the Church, while chapter iii demonstrates the importance of TJC founder Wei Enbo's vision of Jesus and its reliance upon a more instinctively Chinese reading of Scripture to attract local people into the fold. Inouye is quick to insist, however, that historical Christianity nevertheless remains the predominant milieu for understanding the comparatively Chinese theological imagination of the TJC.
In chapter iv, the author examines the lives of several women in the TJC, revealing how this emerging community, grounded in charismatic experience, created new pathways for women to transcend traditional social hierarchies. Chapter v looks more closely at the emerging centralised bureaucracy of the TJC, emphasising the much-needed stability it provided during the turbulent 1930s and 1940s. Chapters vi and vii explore TJC practice in post-liberation China, with the first chapter looking at early efforts to accommodate the Maoist zeitgeist and preserve a public platform for TJC faith and practice, while the second plumbs the ways underground worship and community life helped maintain the unique characteristics of the TJC in the face of mounting hostility to religious faith. Chapter viii takes the narrative into the present, outlining how today's TJC relates to contemporary Chinese society.
Scholars will note how Inouye's understanding of the pre-1949 TJC contributes to the growing view of independent Christianity in China as an active participant in modern China's search for national salvation. Whether the earlier comingling of biblical authority and new imperium of the Taiping (Carl Kilcourse), the later contextualised utopianism of the Jesus Family (Tao Feiya), the adapted symbolism of gospel posters from the Republican era (Daryl Ireland and others), or even the post-liberation TJC's not-always cynical efforts to adopt Maoist slogans for their Church, locally formed Christian communities often appealed to their neighbours with the promise of a new way to live as Chinese people. As Inouye's account suggests, the Pentecostal vision of the TJC represented a possible future for the nation that was Christian and Chinese at the same time.
The final chapter concludes the study by returning to Inouye's overarching theme of the miraculous-mundane, calling her readers back to her initial claim that ‘the True Jesus Church's charismatic Christianity is simultaneously more ordinary and more extraordinary than has previously been suggested: more ordinary because it is not particularly crisis dependent nor uniquely Chinese, and more extraordinary because it gives us insights into striking feats of collective world-making’ (p. 10). Experienced in the minutiae of everyday life, this persistent pursuit and expectation of miraculous intervention nurtures a distinctive imaginary that continues to bind the TJC community together in powerful ways, maintaining their religious-cultural identity even in the face of growing hostility from the Chinese party-state.
China and the true Jesus provides a fascinating window into the world of twentieth-century Chinese Christianity, allowing undergraduate and masters level students to journey with real Chinese believers through a century of richly contextualised lived theology.
