- China Gospel Fellowship
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The China Gospel Fellowship (Chinese: 中华福音团契) also known as the Tanghe Fellowship (唐河团契) of China is a Christian religious movement founded by Feng Jianguo (冯建国) in the 1980s. The China Gospel Fellowship is the second largest Henan-based house church network. They regard themselves as a loose-knit fellowship with a greater variety of Christian traditions when compared to the Fangcheng Fellowship.
Historical background and influences
Both the Tanghe and Fangcheng fellowships were influenced by the introduction into Henan of Pentecostal patterns of worship and prayer starting in 1988 by Reverend Dennis Balcombe, an American pastor of an independent Hong Kong Pentecostal church, Revival Christian Church, in Kowloon. Originally from Bakersfield, California, Balcombe had arrived in Hong Kong in 1967 from Vietnam. Two years later, he returned as a resident missionary, quickly learned both the southern dialect of Cantonese as well as Mandarin, and set about building up a church primarily of Hong Kong Chinese and focusing on the needs of Christians inside China. Balcombe himself in the early 1980s made regular trips into Guangzhou to teach English at one of the many commercial English language schools springing up. He used some of his time there both to coordinate the importance of Bibles in China and to get to know the Fangcheng house church leaders who had been assigned the task of taking the train regularly from Zhengzhou to Guangzhou to fetch the imported Bibles.
This growing mutual trust between Balcombe - and later other foreign pastors and teachers as well - and the Fangcheng leadership was to play an important role in the development of the whole house church movement in China. According to Hong Kong-based Chinese Christians who often visited China, beginning in the late 1980s, Balcombe's Pentecostal teaching seemed to have influenced the majority of China's major house church movements - particularly Tanghe and Fangcheng, and two smaller movements that grew up in Anhui province - which became Charismatic in their theology. They embrace practices of prayer and worship that involve speaking in tongues, healing, prophecy, and other spiritual gifts familiar to Christians of the time of the Apostle Paul.
Chinese Independent Churches Established Pre-1949 Established Post-1949 Other Pages of Interest External links
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