Introduction

Abstract

The context for the rise of the True Jesus Church in China includes not only continuities with native sectarian religion and conditions of deprivation that have been noted in existing scholarship, but also crucially global Christian restoration traditions, transnational cultural exchange, and the relationship between charismatic experience and moral discipline. Religious individuals’ experience of the extraordinary is significant not merely for what it may reflect (such as the native religious milieu or participants’ marginality) but also for what such charismatic experience produces, namely, distinctive worldviews and the energy and focus necessary to build and maintain community over time. The history of the True Jesus Church in China provides a framework for understanding the mutually dependent yet mutually corrosive relationship between charisma and organization in institutions with a strong ideological ethos.