If we briefly summarize how the Chinese house church has thought about public affairs over the past fifty years, we can broadly identify two basic approaches. I tentatively call these the “set apart as holy” approach and the “city on a hill” approach. This article attempts to trace the historical background of these two approaches, along with their respective significance and deficiencies, and proposes the “community of virtue” based on Anabaptist public theology as a third approach worthy of consideration by the Chinese house church.
Set Apart as Holy
The “set apart as holy” approach is one of the long-standing traditions of the Chinese house church. For a considerable period, the Chinese house church was influenced by traditional pietistic theology and premillennial dispensationalism. Consequently, it not only paid little attention to political and social issues but also tended to maintain the purity of the church by withdrawing from a fallen society and oppressive political forces.
In 1955, Wang Mingdao, who faced immense political pressure for refusing to join the Three-Self Church, wrote the article “We—For the Sake of Faith,” which can be seen as a manifesto for the house church’s “set apart as holy” attitude. In the text, Wang points out that the house church refuses to cooperate with the Three-Self movement primarily because the latter consists of the “unbelieving faction”—that is, liberals who do not acknowledge miracles or biblical inerrancy. Another part of the reason, however, is that the church should not unite with any political organization. As Wang states,
We not only refuse to have any union with this ‘unbelieving faction’ or participate in any of their organizations, but even with all who truly believe in the Lord and faithfully serve God, we can only have unity in the spirit, and we should not have any organizational form of union, because we cannot find such truth and teaching in the Bible.1
Beyond the fundamentalist branch represented by Wang, other theological theories popular within the traditional house church, such as premillennial dispensationalism, also laid a theological foundation for the house church’s separation from the world. The Little Flock church, for example, traditionally emphasized that believers should constantly look toward the end times to welcome the imminent return of Jesus. Social or political problems in this world not only hold limited significance for Christians but may even distract them as they pursue the life to come. During more than a decade of the most severe persecution, many house church elders who refused to join the Three-Self movement paid a tragic price for their non-cooperation. Through their testimonies, the traditional house church further deepened this tradition of being set apart as holy—that is, maintaining a conservative theological stance and a strong spiritual atmosphere by not participating in, and even rejecting, social or political movements.
City on a Hill
The “city on a hill” approach is a new path that the emerging urban house churches in China began to actively explore after 1990. Unlike the traditional rural house churches, the members of the emerging urban house churches are mostly highly educated individuals and white-collar professionals who are deeply involved in the operations of modern society. The intellectual spheres, and indeed the personal lives, of these believers are inevitably closely tied to society and politics, which naturally makes it easier for them to think more deeply about public issues. After the reform and opening up, the broader environment for the house church also improved significantly compared to the Mao era. Although the house church still has not obtained legal status, overall persecution has weakened. Some official policies can also be interpreted as encouraging religious figures to integrate religious thought with China’s modernization reforms. In this context, some house churches developed a “city on a hill” vision that differs drastically from the traditional underground church.
The 2013 article “Being a City on a Hill” by Sun Yi, an elder of Beijing Shouwang Church, can perhaps be seen as a representative of this new approach. Sun points out that the Chinese house church in the new era needs to live out the public spirit of a “city on a hill” both internally and externally.2 Internally, the underground, secretive, and small-group operational methods of the traditional house church were special countermeasures for special times, but today they are unable to help new types of churches establish a healthy and complete church order or implement professional preaching and discipleship training. Externally, Christians are not only citizens of the kingdom of heaven but also citizens of contemporary Chinese society; therefore, they should fulfill their civic duties, which include advocating for social justice. Christian intellectual and spiritual resources are also important wellsprings for social justice.
This witness to social justice can be relatively moderate, or it can involve stronger political conflict. An example of the former might include the years-long efforts of Beijing Shouwang Church to register with the Religious Affairs Bureau while refusing to join the Three-Self movement. An example of the latter can be seen in Ark Church, founded by Yu Jie in Beijing. They combined their experiences as persecuted dissidents with the biblical spirit of empathizing with vulnerable and marginalized groups—“weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15)—to launch a series of ministries, such as the petitioners’ ministry that provides services for socially marginalized populations, especially political dissidents.3 Furthermore, in the intellectual sphere, scholars rooted in the church, such as He Guanghu, Sun Yi, and Li Quan, actively demonstrate the significance of the broader Christian tradition for social justice, modernization, and the transition to liberal constitutionalism.
The Dilemmas and Limitations of the “City on a Hill” Approach
The “set apart as holy” and “city on a hill” approaches each have their merits and shortcomings. In contexts of severe persecution, the profound spirituality and martyr’s heart forged through suffering by churches that persist in the “set apart as holy” path are commendable. However, when taken to an extreme, this path easily breeds a narrow-mindedness and anti-intellectualism that turns a deaf ear to the outside world, and thus it often fails to encourage Christians to witness to the holistic renewal of the gospel for all of society. The “city on a hill” approach is indeed more suitable in many respects for the context of urban churches during the era of reform and opening up, but over the past decade or so, the limitations of this approach have also become increasingly apparent.
First, the successful operation of the “city on a hill” model relies on the secular regime implementing relatively lenient religious policies. The Reformed churches that inspired this vision historically relied on a close church–state partnership in which ecclesiastical and civil authorities acted in concert. Whether in Geneva or New England, the public influence of the church was inseparable from the political order of the time. Although the Dutch Reformed tradition from the twentieth century onward has made significant revisions to this traditional model, it generally still requires the secular regime to guarantee the basic rights of the church and to be willing to cooperate with it. This presents the “city on a hill” vision with a practical problem in the context of the Chinese house church: if the church lacks institutional guarantees and public space, how can it continue to participate in public life in an open manner? The Reformed churches in China have never enjoyed this kind of “preferential treatment,” not to mention that over the past decade, the already limited public space for the Chinese house church has been rapidly disappearing. In other words, a major objective condition for the “city on a hill” vision was never stable to begin with, and today it no longer exists.
When the secular regime no longer allows the church space to speak out on public issues, and is even compressing the church’s basic space for worship, if the church wishes to continue practicing the “city on a hill” vision, does it first need the government to adopt a more lenient and cooperative church-state relationship? When there is no hope of the government changing its mind, continuing to promote the “city on a hill” vision through methods such as public advocacy will inevitably lead to conflict with the secular regime. At this point, must the church maintain this conflicting and antagonistic attitude, even at a tragic cost, simply because the calling of the “city on a hill” vision lies ahead?
In the midst of conflict, the second deficiency of the “city on a hill” approach also emerges. Although the theological sources of the “city on a hill” vision are generally the Reformed and Puritan traditions, for many churches, this tradition often entered the Chinese house church only after being filtered through American fundamentalism, via missionaries and theologians influenced by fundamentalism, such as Stephen Tong.4 This has caused some Chinese Reformed house churches to inherit the weaknesses of American fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism consistently carries a very strong combative mentality, and internally it always pursues theological uniformity. These two aspects complement each other. When the broader environment is no longer friendly, fundamentalism easily establishes an absolutized friend-enemy relationship, viewing itself as the last pure land.5 This mode of operation often brings harm to the congregants’ spiritual and mental health.
Anabaptist Public Theology and the “Community of Virtue”
So, as the Chinese house church undergoes intellectual and theological enlightenment while simultaneously facing persecution once again, can the church combine the strengths of the “set apart as holy” and “city on a hill” approaches to forge a third path of public theology? I propose here the “community of virtue,” based on postliberal theology and inspired by the Anabaptist tradition, as a possible approach. It does not seek to negate the church’s concern for public affairs but rather reminds us that the church’s public witness does not primarily consist in proposing a certain political program, but in whether the church itself becomes a community shaped by the gospel.
In the contemporary American context, important representatives of Anabaptist political theology include John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas. They criticize some churches for sacrificing unique testimonies of the Christian faith in order to enter the social mainstream and gain stronger social influence. In Hauerwas’s view, the primary ethical responsibility of the church is not to persuade the government to adopt a certain policy or to elect a certain candidate to the White House, but to “let the church be the church.”6
This does not mean that the church can escape the world, nor does it mean that the church has no responsibility regarding public issues. On the contrary, Hauerwas is concerned with how the church exists in the world in a manner different from the world. The political difference between the “world” and the “church” is not merely that the former supports one policy and the latter supports another, but rather a difference in their basic logic of operation. The world often measures success by power, efficiency, profit, and victory or defeat; the church, however, is a community that learns that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matthew 23:11). In the church, Christians learn a public life different from the world through humility, mutual service, patience, forgiveness, and love. The primary identity of the church is, therefore, not as a participant in specific political issues, but as a “community of virtue” shaped by specific character.
Hauerwas once pointed out that the church is a place that tells, practices, and listens to the story of Israel and Jesus. If the church wants to enable itself and the world to truly hear this story, it must become a specific kind of community: living out peace and truth in a world full of lies and fear, and patiently caring for widows, the poor, and orphans in a world full of injustice and violence. In other words, the church’s care is not merely social welfare in the general sense, but a concrete way for Christians to practice virtue and learn what justice is.7
This also responds to a common question: does this church-centered virtue ethics still count as a public theology? At first glance, Hauerwas seems to distinguish church ethics from worldly ethics very clearly, which makes it easy to understand his approach as lacking public character. I believe, however, that this character ethics still holds significance for public theology not because it can be translated into a set of secular theories, but because the church itself is inevitably a public community.
The public nature of the church does not depend solely on whether it holds public lectures, issues public statements, or directly influences a certain policy. As long as the church gathers, worships, governs, serves one another, and opens itself to people in the world, its way of life is already bearing witness in the public square. In other words, the public engagement of the church depends not only on what theories or political resources it exports outward, but also on how the community of the church truly exists in the world.
Similarly, even if the church does not speak out directly on political issues, it still possesses a political nature. If we understand politics broadly as how a community distributes and balances power, cares for the welfare of its members, and shapes public character, then the church itself is a political community. The church must face questions such as the legitimacy of the authority of pastors and elders, how power is balanced, how resources are distributed, how the weak are protected, and how dissenting views are heard. It is in this sense that Hauerwas says, “The church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic.”8
The Inspiration of the “Community of Virtue” Approach
This church-centered “community of virtue” approach of the Anabaptists holds great significance for the house church as it faces a new round of oppression. I venture to highlight three points. First, Anabaptist public theology redirects the ethical focus of the church back to the church itself without sacrificing the political and public nature of the church. This public theology does not need, therefore, to rely on the secular regime to grant the church space to participate in public affairs; instead, it can still practice public and political affairs by building the church into a community of virtue. As the house church faces a new round of persecution, Anabaptist public theology ensures that the house church does not abandon public theology and political theology simply because it lacks the space for public advocacy. Although the broader environment is not optimistic, if the church can think about public and political issues internally—such as where the governing legitimacy of pastors and elders comes from, how the church internally grants and balances the power of leaders, and whether the church should practice freedom of speech and religious tolerance—then the church can still deepen the intellectual dimensions of public theology and political theology, and can even serve as a precedent for social and political transition. If the broader environment changes in the future, the intellectual resources accumulated during this time can contribute to larger social movements.
Second, even if the broader environment does not improve for a long time, Anabaptist public theology can still give Christians hope and meaning in their participation in public affairs. From the Anabaptist perspective, the ultimate focal point of the church’s public witness is not whether it has changed certain specific policies, but whether the church, through these witnesses, has cultivated certain characters or virtues essential for Christians. Some of the church’s public witnesses may fail to change the social status quo or specific policies, but if, through participating in these witnesses, the church congregation cultivates the courage to express its own legitimate needs, the universal love necessary to cooperate with others, and the intellect required to study social and public issues, then the church has already reaped the most precious treasure. Even if the church temporarily chooses not to speak out in a high-profile manner because the environment is too dangerous, it can still practice the virtue of wisdom as a result. Even in an unoptimistic environment, therefore, the public life of the church remains meaningful. Conversely, the public life of the church does not necessarily have to take changing policies as its mission, and thus it can provide a certain degree of flexibility under specific circumstances.
Third, because the public and political witness of the church must be grounded in the church’s own virtues, Anabaptist public theology also demands that the church live out internally the ethical ideals it proclaims in public. If a church has a vision to make the surrounding society more just through public engagement, then that church must first be willing to cultivate the virtue of justice internally, and the church’s own operations must first reflect this vision of justice. When participating in public witness, some churches sometimes fall into a vicious cycle. They claim to establish independent schools and educational institutions for the sake of religious freedom, but when implementing these measures internally, they use highly coercive methods to implicitly force the congregation to give generously. If the church calls for freedom of conscience in the public square but lacks patience with and protection for different opinions in its internal governance, this discrepancy itself will weaken its public witness. Anabaptist public theology is, in my view,an effective witness that prevents this inconsistency between the internal and the external. After all, to quote the American Christian ethicist Rosemary Radford Ruether “an organization that pursues democracy must also be democratic internally; a movement that fights for freedom must itself be free”.
Even churches that lack such social reform ambitions externally can still benefit from the consciousness of a community of virtue. In recent years, many house churches have been attempting to institutionalize, transitioning from the “rule of man” to the “rule of law” or “constitutional rule.” The institutionalization process of some churches, however, is not a triumph of the spirit of the rule of law, but a new round of high-pressure politics. During the institutionalization process,for example, some churches redefine gender and ministry roles; if they lack sufficient communication and pastoral sensitivity, this may cause sisters who have participated in ministry for years to feel excluded, thereby hurting the feelings of the congregation and the traditions of the church. Even churches without such problems, because of their short histories, often feel overwhelmed by the dazzling array of church order traditions when institutionalizing, and thus they swallow them whole and experiment blindly.
In fact, both constitutional theory and the theology of the community of virtue emphasize that political communities generally require certain intangible qualities beyond legal texts to guarantee the healthy operation of constitutionalism. The core of constitutionalism (especially from the perspective of Anglo-American conservatism) is not the charters written by leaders, but the self-evident values—that is, the character of the community—that the political community has forged over many years through the continuous practice of community life. Here, the path of virtue ethics can inspire some house churches to focus not only on charters and regulations during institutionalization, but even more on maintaining the virtues that the church already possesses or ought to possess.
Conclusion
Because Anabaptist theology originated in Europe and took root and blossomed in the United States, applying it to the context of the Chinese church requires considerable localization and contextualization. Yet I believe this effort is worthwhile. I offer this article as a modest starting point to invite further discussion; it is not a negation of other approaches but rather points out that there is not only one approach. In a context where public space is restricted and church institutionalization is still taking shape, the “community of virtue” reminds the Chinese house church that public theology is not only about how the church speaks to the world, but also about whether the church itself lives out a life of peace, justice, humility, and mutual service. This is not a rejection of existing approaches, but an invitation for the church to rethink: when it cannot always change the external world, how can the church first become an alternative community that the world can see?
- Wang Mingdao, “Women shi weile xinyang” [“We—For the Sake of Faith”] (1955), Wang Mingdao Online Library, accessed March 4, 2026, https://wellsofgrace.com/books/wangmingdao/wmd9/htm/chapter03.html.
- Sun Yi, “Zuo shanshang de cheng” [Being a City on a Hill], Shidai [Kosmos], 2013 Fall/Winter Joint Issue, December 20, 2013,accessed March 4, 2026, https://www.kosmoschina.org/%E4%BD%9C%E5%B1%B1%E4%B8%8A%E7%9A%84%E5%9F%8E%E5%AD%99%E6%AF%85/.
- Yu Jie, “Yu Jie: Fangzhou jiaohui tanfang shangfangcun” [Yu Jie: Ark Church Visits the Petitioners’ Village], Independent Chinese PEN Center, March 4, 2017, accessed March 14, 2026, https://www.chinesepen.org/blog/archives/67511 .
- Ren Xiaopeng, “Yizhe qianyan” [Translator’s Preface], in Mark A. Noll, Fuyinpai sixiang de chouwen [The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind], trans. Ren Xiaopeng (Grand Rapids, MI: ReFrame Ministries, 2024).
- George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 190–191.
- Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 99.
- Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, 100.
- Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, 99.
