Have you ever wanted to travel back to the days of the book of Acts to see how the early Christians really lived? Have you ever wondered how ordinary people could set on fire entire regions of their native land? I've wondered many times. Now, after several days of visiting China, I think I have some answers.

I've had meetings with leaders and activists from China's house churches in several cities in China. I have met dozens of men and women whose joy and humility shine from their faces even as they describe being arrested repeatedly by the police, being beaten up, and in a few cases being tortured with electric shocks from a night-stick designed to inflict pain--not on animals but on people.

I have heard stories of miraculous physical healings: a dead baby being restored to life, a woman with leprosy healed, a long-term paralysis victim restored overnight to complete mobility. I have watched middle-aged Christian leaders weep prostrate as they interceded for their brothers and sisters suffering in prison or near-destitution. I've watched them weep in intercession for the country's political leaders who launched upon them the repression that has kept many of them-to avoid being arrested again-constantly on the run and away from their families for months at a time.

I have watched Christians laugh when I asked if they sometimes found themselves confronting demonic powers and commanding those powers to leave a person. "It happens all the time," they all said.

I have heard the hauntingly beautiful words and melody of a Chinese Christian hymn written by a 90-year-old woman who never studied music, but who, inspired surely by the Holy Spirit, wrote more than 50 hymns and choruses. Her work is gathered and published in a completely unauthorized edition by an underground printing press that serves China's "unregistered" house church Christians. And I have seen these same Christian leaders eat and laugh, get tired, get a bit grumpy occasionally and display all of the ordinary human features we recognize instantly in ourselves and others. They are very ordinary people allowing God, through them, to do extraordinary things.

Don Argue, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals and the leader of a White House-appointed delegation of three U.S. religious leaders to China last February, has described the spread of grassroots Christianity in China's countryside as perhaps "the single greatest revival in the history of Christianity." He is right, and he has good reason to know.

Argue and two senior U.S. clerics, one Roman Catholic and one Jewish, received extensive briefings before going to China to confront Chinese leaders with the continuing religious repression. Their visit gained access even to China's President Jiang Zemin. He certainly seemed sympathetic to their point that freedom of religious conscience is good for any country and freedom of Christian evangelism is beneficial to China.

Jiang has indicated before a cautious desire to nudge China as a whole in the direction, ever so slightly, of political reform. The problem is, China's religious affairs as a whole are still run by a militant atheist, Ye Xiaowen, who was appointed by the Communist Party in 1995 to crack down on the burgeoning house-church movement. He forces. every Christian group that meets anywhere to register with the government or be declared illegal and perhaps even "an evil religion."

No one knows for sure how many Christians there are in China. The number who belong to the authorized Three-Self Patriotic Movement is officially 10 million. Most observers agree that the house-church Christians--those who refuse to belong to a government-controlled church--are probably two to three times as numerous.

Pray for China's Christians. Even as they suffer greater repression than at any time since the early 1980's they are demonstrating on an almost apostolic scale the power of God's extraordinary grace.