Foreign Christians embrace religious life in Beijing
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Xinhua, July 26, 2011
Eleanor Liu never misses church on Sundays, even though she's now 92 and lives half a globe away from her hometown.
The American woman married a Chinese man 51 years ago and moved to Beijing in 1986. With the husband and son both being devout Christians, church is an indispensable part of the family.
When she first came to Beijing, she went to the Young Men's Christian Association in the Dongdan region on Sundays, but in the late 1980s, she started going to Chongwenmen Church, and she liked it there. "It's a church with a long history," she said.
As one of the oldest churches in Beijing, Chongwenmen Church was built by the United Methodist Church in 1870. Every Sunday, the church is crowded, including many foreign diplomats and embassy staff members.
Former U.S. presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. George Carey, and famous American evangelist Rev. Billy Graham have all visited the church.
All the sermons preached from its pulpit are based on the Bible, and the hymns are the same as those in the United States, Liu said.
"When I'm here here in Beijing, I go to church every Sunday," said Liu, who usually spends half the year in the States.
Church life in Beijing is almost the same as it is in Australia, except some details may differ, said John Vickers, an Australian who works as a senior corporate training consultant in Beijing.
In Australia, preaching is usually only 15 minutes, but here it sometimes lasts an hour, Vickers said.
The Eucharist process differs, though, as in Beijing it's only available on a monthly basis, he said, while in Australia it's provided every week.
"Maybe it's because Beijing has too many Christians so it's not easy to prepare the Eucharist every week," he said.
About 5,000 people get baptized every year in Beijing, a city that has over 70,000 baptized Christians.
Beijing has been renovating old churches and building new ones over the past ten years. Now the city has 21 large Christian churches.
The Beijing Haidian Christian Church was originally built in 1933, but the number of attendees has increased so dramatically that it was demolished and a new, larger church was erected in 2007 in Zhongguancun, also known as China's Silicon Valley.
The new church, covering 3,900 square meters, is nearby two of China's top universities, Tsinghua University and Peking University.
Every Sunday, there is an English service at the church that draws about 1,100 to 1,400 Christians, including up to a hundred foreigners.
According to a New York resident who only gave his first name, Patrick, Christians are becoming younger in China and many are well-educated, while in the United States middle-aged believers account for a large proportion.
A Brazilian woman who teaches English in Beijing and who identified herself as Meihua in Chinese, said she appreciates the youthful camaraderie at Haidian Church, where she has many friends about her own age, and she had praise for the priests' English ability.
"The priests speak English very well; I can understand them perfectly," she said.
Gao Baisheng, an American electronics engineer who came to China three years ago, and who insisted on using his Chinese name, said Christians in the United States are not as close to each other compared to their Chinese counterparts.
"Chinese Christians call each other brothers and sisters, which gives me a sense of closeness that I have never experienced with American believers," Gao said.
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