(Shanghai — January 27, 2026) Within China’s officially recognized church system, the most active and cohesive grassroots organizations, “fellowships,” are facing the strictest regulatory overhaul in history.
This Tuesday, the Christian “Two Associations” (the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and the Christian Council), controlled by China’s official management bureau for religious affairs, released the Administrative Measures of Fellowship Activities at Christian Venues in China via the media platform Weiyan Religion. The measures clearly define who may organize these small gatherings and draw red lines between believers’ prayer lives and state authority.
T/N: Weiyan Religion is the official WeChat account of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs.
In Christian tradition, fellowship groups are typically small groups formed by like-minded believers, youths, working professionals, or retirees, who gather to share life and study the Bible. For China’s tens of millions of believers, if Sunday formal worship is the “large classroom,” then fellowship groups are the “family” where deeper social bonds and spiritual support are built.
However, Article 3 of the new measures restricts this flexibility. It explicitly states that only legally registered churches (locations) may establish fellowship groups. This means that seminaries, temporary activity locations, and even local Christian “Two Associations” themselves are stripped of the right to directly organize fellowship groups, while individual initiatives are strictly prohibited.
This reflects a typical “territorial management” logic, whereby authorities seek to connect “every capillary” to the official surveillance network, ensuring that no uncontrolled religious spark smolders outside the system.
One of the most telling provisions is Article 5: fellowship groups may not be named after industries, professions, or regions.
Over the past decade, many groups such as “white-collar fellowship groups” and “business fellowship groups” have emerged in major Chinese cities. The government has remained highly vigilant toward gatherings based on professional or regional identity, fearing they could evolve into interest groups with social mobilization capacity, or even form cross-regional covert networks.
To prevent potential external influence, the new rules also impose stringent restrictions on the participation of overseas personnel, explicitly prohibiting foreigners from holding any management or organizational roles. At the same time, Article 10 strictly limits “cross-regional” activities, requiring any inter-venue exchanges to complete complex application procedures in advance.
Beyond administrative constraints, the measures also directly cut off the financial independence of fellowship groups. Article 9 stipulates that groups may not set up their own offering boxes and that the church’s management organization must centrally manage all funds.
Without money, there is no independent capacity for activities. By centralizing financial control, authorities can dismantle any small groups that might generate dissent from the material base.
In addition, the content of fellowship activities is confined to “promoting policies and regulations” and “explaining doctrines and church rules.” Major personnel arrangements and significant expenditures must be reported to local religious authorities.
Since the mid-2010s, Beijing has been promoting a policy of “Sinicization of religion,” aimed at ensuring that all religions are politically loyal and culturally compliant. This targeted regulation of fellowship groups is seen as the latest patch in the grassroots implementation of that policy.
Article 12 grants official church organizations (the Three-Self Patriotic Movement Committee and the China Christian Council) direct authority to impose penalties and remove leaders. For fellowship groups that “repeatedly fail to correct,” authorities retain the administrative power to press the “stop button” at any time.
Gao Zhensai, Special Correspondent of ChinaAid
