Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Maoist China

Abstract

The experience of Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng) and the Christian Assembly (Jidutu juhuichuorJidutu juhuisuo) in Mainland China after the Communist Revolution of 1949 reveals the complexity of church and state relations in the early 1950s. Widely known in the West as the Little Flock (Xiaoqun), the Christian Assembly, founded by Watchman Nee, was one of the fastest growing native Protestant movements in China during the early twentieth century. It was not created by a foreign missionary enterprise. Nor was it based on the Anglo-American Protestant denominational model. And its rapid development fitted well with an indigenous development called the Three-Self Movement, in which Chinese Christians created self-supporting, selfgoverning, and self-propagating churches. But it did not share the highly politicized anti-imperialist rhetoric of another Three-Self Movement, the Communist-initiated “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (sanzi aiguo yundong): self-rule autonomous from foreign missionary and imperialist control, financial self-support without foreign donations, and self-preaching independent of any Christian missionary influences. As the overarching organization of the one-party state, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement sought to ensure that all Chinese Protestant congregations would submit to the socialist ideology.