(Xi’an, Shaanxi – June 20, 2024) On June 11, 2024, Xi’an Fengsheng Church issued a statement to clarify and refute a rumor that has been circulating recently. The statement said that a rumor has been circulating in the church recently: the police found a large amount of cash at the pastors’ home of Xi’an Fengsheng Church, and the pastors have been involved in financial corruption; otherwise they would not have been arrested.
For this reason, Xi’an Fengsheng Church issued a solemn statement: Pastors and preachers of Xi’an Fengsheng Church never participate in the management of the church’s finance and never touch money. On the afternoon of August 17, 2022, when the church was set upon, the police found 10,000 yuan in cash at Pastor Lian Changnian’s home. At that time, a police officer with the surname Wang told Lian Changnian’s wife: “This is your family’s money, take it and don’t give it to anyone.” Late on the night of August 18, Lian Changnian’s wife took the cash away when she left the police station, and the police did not seize any money. Later, more than 500 yuan in cash was seized from Pastor Lian Changnian, and no money was seized from Pastor Lian Xuliang. Pastor Lian Changnian’s youngest son received a 90% scholarship during his graduate studies in the United States. The university subsidized part of his living expenses, and the church members also helped him a lot.
The family members of Xi’an Fengsheng Church should have ignored the rumors, but the rumors spread widely, causing great misunderstanding among the family members. Xi’an Fengsheng Church said in a statement that the church does not expect rumormongers to perceive and understand persecutions from a spiritual height, but they should not stand on the side of Satan to slander pastors who are persecuted.
Xi’an Fengsheng Church is a church under the “China Gospel Fellowship”, the largest house church in China. The church has been persecuted for a long time, and Pastor Lian Changnian has been imprisoned many times. On August 17, 2022, the church was set upon again. The Xi’an Shilipu Police Station took Pastor Lian Changnian, his son Pastor Lian Xuliang, and co-worker Fu Juan away for residential surveillance at a designated location on the grounds of “fraud”. The three were secretly detained in a place designated by the government for half a year before their families got any news about them.
Since the incident, the police have summoned Christians from the church one after another, through both coaxing and coercing to force them to betray and frame pastors, they attempt to sow discord between pastors and believers, describing Christians’ regular offerings to the church as fraud by pastors, and to instigate Christians to sue pastors for fraud, promising that the more money they sue for, the more the government will return to them in the future.
