China’s communication about the Christians in its midst has left believers in other countries scratching their heads. Official statements and promises of Bibles during the Olympics contradict reports of crackdowns on house churches. Can both scenarios be true? Is the house church the only place where the Gospel is spreading?

Dr. Mark Bailey, president of Dallas Theological Seminary, shared his thoughts with Crosswalk after he returned from a visit to Kuanjie Protestant Church in Beijing with President Bush.

Dallas Seminary recently began translating its online courses into Mandarin, becoming the only U.S. seminary that enables students in China to attend lectures virtually in their own language. These courses have put Dr. Bailey in touch with Chinese students abroad and in Beijing, and exposed him to aspect of Chinese culture that most Americans hear little about: China’s institutional church. The following is an excerpt from Crosswalk’s interview.

CW: Tell us about the church service at Kuanjie Protestant Church with the president in Beijing. What did you see there?

Bailey: This is my second time to Beijing, and I saw a service very similar to what I’d seen before. Obviously, things are different with security having swept the place and prepared for having the president there for two weeks, just like it would be in this country. But it was a very typical worship service as I had experienced in China before.

[There was] great singing, songs like “Onward Christian Soldier,” “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go, Dear Lord,” great evangelical prayers by Pastor Li (SP) at the Kuanjie church where we attended… The children’s choir that was the result of the work that a couple of churches in the States had done in doing an English in character form of VBS over there last summer, and they sang “Amazing Grace.” The Gospel was plainly presented in prayer, in song as well as in the preaching.

CW: That’s not exactly what Americans expect from a state-sponsored church. Do you find the church in any way tainted by its association with the state?

Bailey: China is a very complicated culture… in my experience, in all the times that I have either preached or spoken there in two different trips, nobody has ever asked me to control or censor my message or asked for a previous script of what I would say. I had absolute freedom to present the gospel straightforwardly, plainly, in churches. There are pockets of freedom that are developing. That’s what we’ve been praying for and what we’ve been dialoguing with the government and church leaders to accomplish there.

[In the past], we’ve used their translators, and we’ve used our own translators… and never has there been censorship or couching of the message that we have preached. That’s been our experience and we know that’s a measure of freedom that we hope would continue to spread.