This is an adapted excerpt from “China’s War on Faith” by Sam Brownback with Michael Arkush, released May 12 from Republic Book Publishers.
Peter Xu never lost faith in his Lord and Savior. Not even when death was near.
In 1997, Peter hung from the metal bars of a sliding prison door for nearly four hours. At one point, the guards—cogs in the system, I keep reminding myself—opened the door as wide as they could, stretching his chest so far that he could barely breathe. The pain was excruciating, and it would only get worse.
Peter was not a young man. He was in his late 50s, one of the fathers of the house church movement in China.
Why was God allowing him to be tortured? None of the servants in His kingdom were more obedient than Peter Xu, more loving. Often at great risk to himself and his family.
Peter knew why.
“I saw it as my portion of the sufferings of Christ,” Peter, now 85 years old and living in Colorado, told me. “I was experiencing my small portion of that Cross. I could feel the imprint of the Cross on me like I was being seared with the Cross. It made me love Jesus even more.”
When Peter was 24, he worked in a coal-mining facility with about 700 others.
It wasn’t his choice. The government had sent him there, hundreds of miles from his home, after he lost his previous job. The government did that routinely.
One day, the leadership at the facility was instructed by the authorities to select 10% of the workforce for ideological cleansing as part of the Four Cleanups Movement, a campaign by the Chinese to rid the party of corruption at the rural level. The cleansing would pave the way for Mao’s Cultural Revolution a couple of years later. Peter was one of 70 workers on the list turned over to the Communist authorities.
The 70 were publicly criticized and humiliated—and tortured. So badly that some escaped the only way they could: by committing suicide.
All of those 70 workers died. Except Peter.
For him, suicide was never an option.
Although he had survived the cleansing, Peter’s troubles were far from over. He got married, and he and his wife, Liu Shifang, started a family, but the Chinese would not leave them alone. They’d had spies in Peter’s church since 1960, Communists pretending to be Christian worshippers. The family took off for Peter’s parents’ house in Hubei Province. But Peter was deemed a “counterrevolutionary,” and he and Liu weren’t safe there, either. The party made sure Liu didn’t find any work. Worse yet, in 1967, she was forced to divorce Peter.
In 1982, Peter finally was caught, arrested, and sent to a labor camp. Amazingly, he managed to escape. The ordeal, however, didn’t slow him down; he went right back to evangelizing for his Lord and Savior. In 1985, he launched his first Christian seminary to train pastors and laypeople. And seven more “house seminaries” followed the next year.
The seminaries weren’t sanctioned by the government, but they weren’t shut down, either.
Even so, one could not be too careful. “Opening up,” in China, has long been a relative term. As some observers in the U.S. suspected (I wish I had been one of them), the Chinese were biding their time, waiting for the moment to continue the class struggle and the drive for global Communism.
In the spring of 1988, Peter was told that Billy Graham, who was making his first visit to China, the native land of his wife Ruth (her parents had been missionaries), wanted to meet with him.
On the morning of the day that he and the Reverend Graham were set to have their secret meeting, Peter was waiting in a park for his final instructions when a stranger tapped him on the shoulder.
“Let’s go for a walk,” the stranger said.
Peter was led to a police station that was packed with members of the Three-Self Church. They took him to a run-down garden where, on the other side of a wall, there was a registration office for a Beijing prison. He was put in room No. 14.
Once he was alone, he prayed.
“God,” he said, “it wasn’t me who wanted to see Billy Graham. He reached out and wanted to see me. I was praying for this, but there was never a sign of an obstacle from you.”
Peter wondered, “Will this, after everything I’ve been through, be the end for me?”
He was allowed two meals a day. He ate only one. Every other day, he fasted completely. Peter planned to keep it up until God took him to Heaven. Which he felt sure would happen any moment.
After three years, however, the Chinese let him go.
He went back to his life’s mission: Spreading the Gospel.
In 1991, at a house church theology teachers’ retreat, he met Xu Quan (her English name is Ruth). In 1996, they got married.
Three months later, Peter was arrested again—along with Ruth and half a dozen other members of his underground church.
Which brings us back to those four hours on His Cross.
“I felt Jesus’ sadness for our sins,” he said, “but how happy He was to take them on.”
After about three hours, a guard came up from behind him: “Just surrender and it will be over.”
I didn’t ask Peter why he didn’t give the guards what they wanted.
I knew the answer. I knew he would prefer to die than to abandon Jesus.
At first, Peter couldn’t understand why the guards hated him so much. What had he ever done to them? Then it hit him. They hated him because they didn’t know the God he served. They didn’t know because no one had told them about Him.
“God,” Peter said, certain he was down to his final breaths, “if you let me out of here, I will preach the Gospel to everyone I can from now on.”
Either way, he couldn’t lose.
“When it’s over,” he thought, “I will be received by God. If we suffer for God, we are a sacrifice unto God.”
Just then, a guard released him from the metal bars.
The warden showed up with a paper and pen. Expecting that Peter, who was barely alive, would finally confess that God was a hoax.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” the warden asked.
“Thank you for allowing me to suffer for Christ,” Peter said.
The warden was beside himself. “He’s a real Christian,” he told the guards.
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