Author: Wanxin Cheng

After I arrived back in Chengdu, I was forced to join my mom’s college student fellowship because I no longer had the excuse, “I am busy studying.” Because the fellowship was in another town, it would take me a total of six hours to attend every time. I initially felt like this was such a waste of time. But when I realized that I became calmer and more efficient after going the fellowship, I changed from reluctantly going to actively going. It was in this inland Chinese Christian fellowship that I witnessed a real truth-seeking attitude. At the beginning, I still misused my critical reading skills to pick out problems with nitty-gritty details and asked very harsh questions during the Bible studies. Subconsciously, it was my pride. I wanted to show these Chinese university students what critical thinking is.

I became a Christian while in China in May 2013. But I had been on a spiritual journey for ten years across two continents. When I first heard about the gospel, I was thirteen and studying at a middle school in Chengdu, China. One of my classmates went to an American summer camp and returned as a Christian. He started sharing the gospel to all of his classmates including me, but I felt angry and harshly accused him of being “corrupted by the Capitalist spiritual opium.” This was what we learned about Christianity in our history class. We were taught that Christianity is a Western religion, and that it was one of the imports forced upon China due to its shameful defeat in the Sino-British War of the 1840s. Young as I was, I was already deeply affected by the atheist, materialistic worldview and the strong nationalistic patriotism heavily embedded in our school curriculum.