A new year, a new building for Fuyin Church in Tengtian, Jiangxi Province. This article from China Christian Daily highlights this historic church originally started by missionaries and the China Inland Mission.
New Building of Century-Old Church Completed in Jiangxi
On January 12, 2019, the Fuyin Church in Tengtian, Yongfeng County, Jiangxi Province, celebrated the completion of its new church.
Ning, the deacon of the church, said that, according to Yongfeng records, a Finnish clergywoman named Lin Manying [Finnish name unknown] came to Tengtian in 1927 and rented a house for preaching.
Around February of 1934, Peng Daoyuan and his wife Li Dong'e were sent to work at the Christian church in Yongfeng County after passing the minister's training provided by the Jiangxi branch of the China Inland Mission. They were then dispatched to Tengtian to preach, where they rented a house in April of 1934 to spread the gospel. The Ji'an branch of the China Inland Mission in Jiangxi found that Christians in Tengtian were enthusiastic about the religion and as a result the church grew to 200 members.
In 1928[1] they began to build the church, the first church of the China Inland Mission, and it was completed in 1939. It was a two-story building with an arched chapel. Behind the building were dormitories and a kitchen. The church owned 3.3 mu of land, or about 22 acres.
During the anti-Japanese war, Ren Lujia and Lin Fei [Finnish names unknown], both from Finland, came to Yongfeng to preach in the Tianbao Church, while the Tengtian branch of China Inland Mission was presided over by Peng Yansheng from China. In April 1953, the Ji'an Church sent two graduates from the Chongqing Seminary to spread the gospel in this area. They finished their ministry and left in 1956.
From 1988 to 1989, staff was sent to Tengtian from the Wenzhou Gospel Group in Zhejiang Province but they failed to establish a church there. In January 1993, they came back again. They distributed gospel tracts in the daytime and preached in a Christian's home at night. After nearly a month, the church was rebuilt.
In 1998, the church moved to an ancestral hall. Around 70 to 80 people gathered there. When the old ancestral hall became too dangerous to meet in they gathered in a Christian's home. In 2006, sponsored by the Wenzhou Church, they paid 28,000 yuan for an old dormitory building occupying 273 square meters to be used as a gathering place. In 2016, the building was no longer safe and had to be rebuilt. The new church, which cost more than 900,000 yuan to build, covers an area of 409 square meters, with more than 1,400 square meters covering the entire building area.
A few affiliated churches were founded after the believers started meeting again in 1993.
Original Article: New Building of Century-old Church Completed in Jiangxi, on China Christian Daily
Edited and reposted with permission.
Header image credit: Fireworks over Beijing by Bridget Coila via Flickr.
Text image credit: China Christian Daily
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