The China Gospel Fellowship (
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...
: 中华福音团契), also known as the Tanghe Fellowship (唐河团契), is one of the largest
evangelical
Evangelicalism (), also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide Interdenominationalism, interdenominational movement within Protestantism, Protestant Christianity that affirms the centrality of being "bor ...
Christian religious movements in China,
and is a
house church network formed in the province of
Henan
Henan (; or ; ; alternatively Honan) is a landlocked province of China, in the central part of the country. Henan is often referred to as Zhongyuan or Zhongzhou (), which literally means "central plain" or "midland", although the name is al ...
.
History
The Tanghe Fellowship was founded in the 1980s.
In 2002,
Eastern Lightning
The Church of Almighty God (), also known as Eastern Lightning (), is a monotheistic new religious movement which was established in China in 1991. Government sources estimate the group has three to four million members.
The group's core tenet ...
, a Chinese Christian
new religious movement
A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin or th ...
, allegedly kidnapped 34 of the Fellowship's leading members and held them for two months.
[Aikman (2012), p. 81, 367.] In 2004, more than 100 leaders of the church were arrested as part of governmental raids against unregistered churches.
Sources consider it to be among the
one of the largest Protestant denominations in the world, and the third largest in China, behind the state-supported
Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the
Fangcheng Fellowship.
See also
*
List of the largest Protestant bodies
This is a list of the largest Protestant denominations. It aims to include sizable Protestant communions, federations, alliances, councils, fellowships, and other denominational organisations in the world and provides information regarding the me ...
References
External links
China Gospel Fellowship official website
Protestantism in China
Religious organizations established in the 1980s
Evangelical denominations in Asia
{{Christian-org-stub