Wang Mingdao refuses to compromise
Chinese church stands against the state
Wang Mingdao is the most prominent independent Protestant pastor in Beijing when the Communist government establishes the Three-Self Patriotic Movement — the state-controlled church — in 1951 and begins requiring all Christian communities to register with it.
Wang refuses. His objection is theological: the Three-Self church is required to subordinate its teaching to the party's direction. He cannot preach a gospel supervised by an atheist state.
He is arrested in 1955. He is tortured. He signs a confession recanting his faith and accepting the state's characterization of his ministry as anti-revolutionary.
He is released. And then, like Cranmer before him, he cannot live with what he signed.
He publicly recants the recantation. He is arrested again and sentenced to life imprisonment.
He spends twenty-three years in prison — the last years in a psychiatric facility, which the state uses to discredit his testimony. He and his wife are released in 1979, both in their seventies, both in poor health.
He spends the remaining years of his life restating what he had always believed. He dies in 1991 at ninety-one.
The Chinese house church movement that was growing when he was arrested is, by his death, the largest underground Christian movement in history — tens of millions of believers, meeting in homes, in the face of ongoing state pressure, holding the faith he refused to surrender.
“I am a man of no importance. But I will not lie.”
— Wang Mingdao, attributed, c. 1955 AD
“for we can't help telling the things which we saw and heard.”
Wang Mingdao recanted, was released, could not live with the recantation, recanted the recantation, and went back to prison for twenty-three years.
Cranmer's hand in the flame. Wang Mingdao's retracted signature. The pattern: the moment of failure followed by the recovery that costs more than the original stand would have.
I am a man of no importance. But I will not lie.
This is the irreducible minimum of integrity — not heroism, not eloquence, not theological sophistication. The refusal to say what is not true, regardless of what the refusal costs.
You are not being asked to go to prison. But you are being asked, in smaller ways, every day, whether you will say what is true or what is safe.
What lie are you being asked to sign? And are you willing to pay the cost of refusing?