By Mark O’Keefe, Juicy Ecumenism. (Photo: Quan Jing)
It was August 1998, a year of multiplying expansion for the shadowy Chinese Christian “house church” movement, which I penetrated as a reporter for The Oregonian, a newspaper in Portland.
With President Donald Trump in China this week, an examination of China’s treatment of Chinese Protestant house churches shows no progress since 1998. On the contrary, it reveals a lasting crackdown on religious freedom, the ongoing suffering of leaders who refuse to edit the Bible for promotion of the state and a government that punishes any religious leader with the audacity to place God above the Communist Party.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan federal watchdog, has designated China a “Country of Particular Concern” every year since 1999. In an April 2026 news release, the Commission’s vice chair, Asif Mahmood, was blunt: “Under Xi Jinping, religious freedom has worsened to a horrific degree.”
Reporting on the ground in 1998 with the guidance of journalist and author David Aikman, a friend who later wrote Jesus in Beijing, we arranged a landmark meeting in a secret location near Zhengzhou with a dozen Chinese house-church leaders representing an estimated 15 million believers.
For the first time, leaders of the house-church movement gathered in one place, agreeing to be interviewed and photographed by Western media, with their real names used. During a lunch break, the 12 leaders wrote a document outlining their points to the Chinese government, marking the first time house church leaders had issued a joint public statement.
They asked me to publish an article in The Oregonian for Americans first, then deliver their document to Communist officials in China, which I did via FAX and email. What follows is a summary of house-church requests and a sobering assessment of whether things have worsened, improved, or stayed the same.