Since I was a small boy, I knew I was different from the other boys. My grandfather is a pastor who stays at his church in the town and he has recently retired at the age of 90. My aunt is the preacher of a small congregation in the village where I have grown up.
However, my parents, poorly educated, were then indifferent to any religions, be it filial piety, folk religions or foreign ones — that is, Christianity. But they would sometimes go to church or join in prayer meetings out of their respect to my grandfather. Likewise, I went to church for a couple of times reluctantly, especially when my grandfather came to lead the Eucharist worship or the Spring Festival Revival Meetings. I had to go only because of my respect and obedience to him.
But once a year I would be very active in the church and that was the Christmas celebration. I would happily and hopefully sing songs and recite Bible passages as they told me to. The reason is that the church would give candies, cookies and Christmas gifts. I was also told that Jesus would cleanse me from the sins, forgive my faults and be kind and generous to help me if I prayed to him and the Bible was the inspired and inerrant Word of God. So I had been familiar with the Christian faith and practice before I seriously thought about it later.
Many times when I begin sharing my faith story about my family and my childhood, some hearer cannot help giving his or her comment of hindsight — “Ah, so you grew up in a Christian environment. That's why you now also became a Christian.”
Well, my response to it is that it is plausible and probable but not necessary. Moreover, it seems to me the comment reflects the logic that unbelief or atheism is justifiable because man is irreligious by nature and only becomes religious or spiritual by nurture. I think it is untrue.
As a little boy, like my peers, I was afraid of walking alone in the evenings because adults talked of drowned demons or strangled demons. I did invoke the name of Jesus for protection at times. I was also exposed to the folk religions. Buddhist monks, shamans, witches and their mystic rites were very popular among the villagers. Ancestor worship was observed by all except the Christians. And I often heard from my aunt stories about Sister Li, Lin or Luo's being alienated or mistreated by the non-Christian family members because of her nonparticipation in ancestor devotion and idol worship.
But these Christians also developed a vigorous or even ecstatic style of worship. They cried, laughed, jumped, shaked and spoke in tongues of dadadada or lalalala. So I did believe in the existence of some divinities or demons, but they all scared me.
Thanks to the school education, I began to realize that I was cheated and fooled by the village traditions. As I came into the teenage years, after the primary education in the village, I went to the town for the middle school. I received the orthodox education of atheism, evolutionism, Marxism and governmental ideologies. So we came to know that sciences displaced God/gods and all the superstitions; religions and their deities were just reflection and projection of the fears, desires and hopes of the people; they could be explained or explained away as only a distortion of the social and political realities; continuous class struggle climaxed at the socialist revolution and construction and reform and we were gradually stepping into the glorious communist society of pure peace and prosperity. The middle and high school education was intellectually sound and spiritually nourishing to me.
So in these six years, I lived as a typical Chinese teenager with a renewed mind and a revolutionary vision. I breathed the fresh air of school life while the primitive village faded out. I was smart and worked hard and looked forward to my promising progressive future.
But in the last year, I encountered something which later proved to be the turning point of my view of life and reality. First, the physics teacher, finishing the Newton physics section, introduced the suggested reading of the physics textbook, namely, Quantum theory, Heisenberg uncertainty, chaos and complexity theory. I was troubled by them for I wondered how they could be called sciences by the standard of precise measurement and prediction which the scientific enterprise boasted of.
Then, the history teacher told us more military casualties happened during the 1946-49 Civil War than the anti-Japanese War; 20-30 million people died in 1959-1961; thousands of millions citizens died of Cultural Revolution turmoil. Lastly, the approachable teacher of political propaganda told us privately about his understanding of the Tiananmen Square Incident (we had never heard of that astonishing story before). My heart was troubled. But I still held on to the belief that I had the personal freedom and wisdom to make a bright future of my own.
I easily passed the competitive national examinations and studied in a university in Nanjing. I majored in sociology and my atheist belief was still strong. I read a lot in history and contemporary issues like governmental corruption and inaction, social discrimination and inequality, and I came to know a middle-age librarian who differed a lot from the official propaganda in the understanding of post-1949 Chinese history. I was shocked and from my own readings, I had to acknowledge his interpretation was justifiable. So again I felt cheated and fooled.
Besides, the university life was not what it promised to be and I imagined it to be. The new higher education reform from the government increased the enrollment and tuition. But many universities were really incapable and incompetent. Students were very disappointed and felt cheated and betrayed and abandoned. I was one of these who complained. The university failed me, and my former education also failed me, and what if I could not secure my future? What else could I trust?
Then I threw myself into the internet bars which were flourishing around all the Chinese universities those years. Like every young man I wasted lots of time and did many silly and shameful things with the internet. Now I know that this symptom was partly caused by the worldview crisis.
This boring and baffling life lasted two years and I knew I was exhausted. Then in the summer holiday of 2003 while I was back home, the senior pastor (not my grandfather) of the town church asked me to teach English in the summer camp for the children of the Christian parents. I was very popular among the teenagers and my heart became strangely warmed. I wouldn't say I saw God on their faces or in their laughter. But I really felt a sense of joy and peace and that I belonged to a community of love. After that, the pastor sent me an annotated Bible and urged me to read it.
I went on into the sophomore year and I read it. So after almost a decade, I met my old friends again — Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Peter and Paul. Besides, many articles were included to give historical and cultural background information which met my intellectual curiosity. Gradually, I began to reflect on the Bible reading and learned to pray. I knew it was silly to my roommates, so I was careful not to let them notice it. I would get up early, went to the university park and read my Bible there, alone and joyously. Finally, I found myself grasped by the Gospel stories and greatly troubled by the Jesus they portrayed. I didn't fully understand his words and deeds, but I was just intrigued by him.
Then one night I had a dream. In the dream, I was sleeping in a dark iron house and suddenly a light emerged and I got up to find what happened. It was a man in shiny white robe standing a few steps away from my bed. I said, “What are you doing here?” he said, “You are looking for me.” I said, “No, I am not looking for you, and I am not looking for anyone for I am sleeping. You are interrupting me. Who are you?” He said, “I am the one you are looking for. My name is Gospel.”
I woke up from my dream and my forehead sweated. I also got a headache (I had bought a new pillow on the first day. It was a water pillow. So that must be why my head ached). I remembered the dream clearly, especially the dialogue. Now the dialogue was all in Chinese except the man's last word. He pronounced it in English as g-o-s-p-e-l.
The next morning the first thing I did is to look it up in the dictionary. It was Gospel and the meaning is good news about Jesus Christ. I was amazed and stood there for a long time. It came to my mind again and again that morning. Then for the first time in my life, I knelt down and prayed to Jesus — thankfully, joyfully and out of obedience of faith. I used the same form and same words because I knew what Christian faith and life was like, but now I meant them. I meant them from the depth of my heart.
But it was also true that I recalled I had seen this word “Gospel” once on the internet in the previous year when I came across an English page with words like Bible, Jesus Christ, life and Gospel. But I didn't know its meaning and I didn't spend time finding it out. It might have a meaning of this or that. But since it must be about religion then it has no meaning to me at all. I mean, who cares about that. I had a critical mind, and I had my cynicism. How could a religion help me then?
Well, I could be critical and explain the whole process sociologically and psychologically. I did do that. Worldview crisis, moral failure, and subconsciousness burst-out — well, they all contributed to my conversion. But God can use natural ways to do his miracles. And now I can see God always guides me. While I was still wandering in the wasteland, he gave signs to help me even I didn't notice them. And finally I came back home in his love and life.
When I was going to graduate, my senior pastor encouraged me to study theology and be a minister. I applied for the master of divinity degree program of Nanjing Seminary. I prepared for the examinations, got the first and became a seminary student in fall 2005 just after my graduation from college.
My faith has been strengthened at the seminary. God is faithful to me for making my seminary life interesting and important. He gives me a wonderful environment of community life, corporate worship, spiritual formation, and rigorous study. I hope I can do youth ministry and campus ministry in the future.
Wang Bin is a graduate student at Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, the national seminary under the direction of the China Christian Council. There are 18-20 provincial and regional seminaries and Bible schools in China, along with hundreds of lay training centers and short-term training programs. Wang Bin gave his testimony as a sermon at St. Paul's Church in Nanjing a few months ago and has given permission for it to be reproduced here. He will graduate in July and has accepted a ministerial position at a church in a city between Nanjing and Shanghai.