I saw that Wang Yi was in his office. He looked up and waved me in. As always, he was disarmingly frank. I asked him about his plans to set up a seminary. The idea made me nervous. Had the government approved it?

“Well, no, they won’t approve it, but the question is if they’ll shut it down. We don’t think so. They asked us if it’s internal, and we said yes, so they seemed okay with that.”

“So the idea is that it’s only to train Early Rain church members,” I said. “But will they go out to preach?”

“Definitely; the idea is people from here will become missionaries. They’ll learn here.”

“But isn’t this a sensitive year? You know…” I trailed off, wondering if his office was bugged.

“You mean the big leadership issue?” Wang asked. “Every year is something special. Last year was some anniversary, and a few years ago were the Olympics. Next year will be something else. Right now the Communist Party is not so stable. We can’t know what is going on inside. They may feel they need quiet at all costs, and we’ll have trouble. Or they could also say that they need quiet so will ignore us; after all, we’re not challenging them. We just trust in God and let Him decide.”

As we were talking, a policeman walked in. I thought at first it was just one of the many workers or deliverymen in China who sometimes wear blue uniforms. Then I noticed the insignia. Wang Yi stood up, greeting the officer warmly by name, and quickly led him out. Ten minutes later, Wang Yi returned.

“The local police officer. He comes every week to get the list of those who attended church. We give them this information; we have nothing to hide, and the congregants are okay with that too. In fact, it’s a precondition for joining our church. You have to give your name, address, and contact information and be willing for us to share it with the authorities. We don’t want to be stuck in the old underground-church mentality. It’s not healthy.”

He pointed to a whiteboard on the wall, which was covered with notes and numbers. “There’s the figure for the Sunday morning service: 222. And the afternoon: 92. So the total was 314. We can only seat around 220, so that’s why we have the second service.”

I asked about Lent.

“It’s hardly celebrated here at all,” he said. “We had this break in our history—you know, the missionaries being expelled in 1949 and then the anti-religious campaigns—so a lot has been lost. A lot of people don’t really know too much about Lent. We had a service trying to reintroduce the idea and explain it.”

Like Early Rain, many Chinese churches are looking abroad for inspiration. They want all the traditions and import them as a package, assembling them like a model airplane.

Wang Yi’s church reminded me of The Missionary’s Curse, a book by the British scholar Henrietta Harrison. She traces the history of Cave Gully, a village in northern China that converted to Catholicism in the late 17th century, when local businesspeople heard of the faith in Beijing and brought it back home. They acquired prayer books and some fragmentary knowledge but no systematic understanding of the faith. The result was something highly indigenized. God was seen as another version of the Chinese concept of heaven, or tian. Worship of Mary was conflated with worship of popular female deities in northern China, such as the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Guanyin. The Ten Commandments were a kind of moral formula, familiar to local people through Confucian texts. Western missionaries who tried to correct these practices were rebuffed.