evangelist Luis Palau urged them to register with the Communist authorities.
In published remarks, which were rebuked by house church leaders, Palau said that religious freedom was growing in China. Paulau, 71, who accompanied United States President George W. Bush at a church service in Beijing last week, told the China Daily news paper that Chinese Christians practicing their faith within the law "enjoy great opportunities to worship openly to sing and to teach the Bible."
He was quoted as saying that "it (the religious freedom) is growing all over China" and that he had "total freedom to speak at every church and every (religious) gathering" in the country. "Nobody told me what to say and what not to say," Palau told the paper.
In a statement obtained by BosNewsLife the Chinese House Church Alliance (CHCA) urged the evangelist to "retract his irresponsible remarks which deeply hurt the feelings of hundreds of house church prisoners and their families."
"Palau’s China religious freedom remark will be much more convincing if he is allowed to do an open evangelism at Tiananmen Square just like at the National Mall in Washington recently," said CHCA leader and pastor Zhang Mingxuan who was reportedly arrested several times for his activities and kidnapped in Beijing Train Station by Chinese security agents shortly before Palau made the comments.
PRINTING BIBLES
He accused Palau of "propagating that Chinese pastors won’t get arrested unless breaking the law while barely two weeks Beijing house church pastor Cai Zhuohua was sentenced to three years simply because of printing Bibles and other Christian literatures."
Another representative of the South China Church (SCC), a major house church movement, said Palau forgot about many Christian prisoners.
"I do want to let Reverend Palau know there are still 16 pastors and evangelists from our church serving in different prisons in China now," said the US SCC Spokesperson ‘Sarah’ Liu Xianzhi.
MANY CHRISTIANS JAILED
China Aid Association (CAA), a US based religious rights group with close contacts with the house churches, said she served six years imprisonment and was tortured severely until 2004 before being released at the age of 34."Rev. Palau is always welcome to visit our church and pastors in the prisons." Over 1000 SCC pastors, evangelists and believers were arrested and imprisoned since 2001, church officials said.
"We understand Reverend Palau’s passion and eagerness to get into the China charity market," said CAA President Bob Fu, who met Palau last year. However "to equate the church registration requirement by the IRS in the USA for tax purposes to forced registration under the Communist Party s Religious Affairs Bureau for controlling purposes is total misleading."
Most of China’s up to 80 million Christians are believed to worship in ‘house churches’, named this way as they have no permission to gather openly in church buildings. 17 million Christians gather in the state backed church denominations known as the Protestant Three Self Patriotic Movement with an estimated 12 million members and the Catholic Patriotic Association with about five million members, according to Open Doors, a Christian rights group. (With reports from China and BosNewsLife Research).
