An Anglo teenager who attends an unsanctioned church in China traveled 7,500 kilometers to be baptized in a small, inflatable baptismal font. The teenager, identified only as Aaron, could not be baptized in his underground church or in the state-approved Three-Self Patriotic Movement, said the Rev. Tzeh Yi Chan, Chinese congregations minister at St. Thomas’, Burwood, a suburb of Melbourne.
Aaron’s mother has a friend who attends the Australian church’s Chinese congregation. Through the friend, his mother connected with Chan and asked if Aaron could be baptized at St. Thomas’, said a report by Hannah Felsbourg of Melbourne Anglican.
Chan said he talked with Aaron about three months before the baptism, and he led Aaron through an intensive training course. Aaron asked his mother to make embroidery that illustrated the pilgrimage they took to Australia for his baptism. They left the embroidery with Chan as a gift.
The Rev. John Carrick, lead minister of St. Thomas’, said that witnessing baptisms strengthens the faith of parishioners while it celebrates the faith of the newly baptized.
“When Christians see people are becoming new believers, there is that real sense of hope that the church is going to continue,” he said. “We’re reminded that it’s not all up to us, that Christ said that he will build his church, and we worked with him toward that.”
Although China’s communist regime has shown more tolerance of capitalism and some Western values in recent decades, it retains a tight control of religious rights.
According to the Pew Research Center, youth under the age of 18 are prohibited from having any religious affiliation by China’s constitution. Sunday schools, religious camps, and youth groups are forbidden and in some places, baptism and church attendance by young people are heavily restricted. China’s schools promote atheism and the government strongly encourages participation in Chinese Communist Party youth groups, in which participants take a vow of atheism.
Even the Roman Catholic Church signed a controversial concordat with the Chinese government in 2018, effectively ceding authority to the regime to appoint new state-approved bishops. Chinese President Xi Jinping pushes Sinicization, which depicts the historic figures of Christian history as Chinese.
Burwood’s Chinese community is one of the congregation’s six “mission focus groups,” including school-aged children, families with young children, migrants, young adults, and seniors. The church runs Introducing God, a six-week program similar to the Alpha Course. “Melbourne has many worldviews, so we assume that the course guests haven’t accepted that the God of the Bible is true,” the church’s website said.
