When all the church’s external support systems have gone or are diminished, we must ask: What resources does the church stand on? What resources do pastors themselves depend on? Union with Christ provides the answer. This essay looks at what we can learn from the Chinese house church about surviving persecution and hardship.

A house church pastor looks back on the choices of his generation when they were forced to choose between loyalty to the state and loyalty to God in 1950. In many ways unprepared for the test they were given, these saints who founded China’s house churches came to understand their path as “the way of the cross.”