Seven Years of Sundays
It does not take much to keep me home from church. Rain has done it. A cough, a late Saturday, a stretch of sermons I privately graded and found wanting. I say that plainly because of what happened on June 14 in a hotel ballroom in Jiangyou City, China.
At about eleven that Sunday morning, sixty to seventy government personnel, police and SWAT officers and religious affairs officials among them, surrounded the room where Early Rain Covenant Church was worshiping and took control of it. Thirty-three believers were detained and driven to a registration and detention facility. Parents with children and elderly members were held inside the ballroom for hours and pressed to sign a statement officials would not let them read first. Most refused, and sat, and waited.
Early Rain has no building left to raid. That was taken in December 2018, when authorities broke up the church in Chengdu and arrested its founding pastor, Wang Yi, who is now serving nine years in prison. The congregation has been gathering anyway, in whatever room will hold them, for seven years.
Seven years of Sundays that can end in a detention center. And I have skipped church for weather.
