Kai is under special surveillance. I don’t know this when I first meet him at a Starbucks near his home in Shanghai, but I might have guessed it from our conversation about the 200 Chinese students he has served through his volunteer Christian ministry in Xinjiang Province, home to a Muslim-majority population under obsessive state scrutiny. As he stands to leave, his eyes land on a man seated across the room. “Be careful,” he says, so nonchalantly that I nearly miss it. “I think we’re being followed.” As if to reassure, he adds: “Don’t worry. It’s not you.”

His composure reflects deep knowledge of the way private charity works in China, I find. Rather than neglect his faith’s social teachings based on the challenges of serving in a closed society, he has used regular interactions with state officials to build guanxi, a form of trust, and gain support for his project: pairing disadvantaged students who leave Xinjiang for college with Christians willing to sponsor them. He has spent five years building a network of volunteer hosts through his Protestant church’s connections. Chinese officials now furnish lists of eligible students and accompany him on interviews, he tells me. Kai knows that the state, ever preoccupied with stability, stands to gain from inclusion of ethnic minorities, so he doesn’t let his organization’s unregistered status—technically grounds for termination—concern him. This unspoken arrangement appears by the twin graces of God and guanxi to benefit all parties involved.

For all the religious persecution in China, Kai’s story is not unusual. While the state clamps down on online Bible sales and detains pastors who drift into activism, certain informal Christian charities are persisting, even growing. It is too murky a picture—too prone to regional variation and difficult to measure—to call a trend. But the opening has been wide enough for the online Chinese periodical Christian Times to publish an opinion piece, translated by the United States-based nonprofit ChinaSource in May, calling on churches in China to take advantage of the state’s earnest search for partners in public service. Chinese officials not only lower barriers to charity work, argues author Yan Yile, but even grant explicit support to certain informal interventions: health care, childcare, sports programs, and other services that religious groups around the world have historically undertaken.

Yan wants “love for neighbor” to finally match Chinese Protestants’ zeal for “preaching.” He wants Christians to be known more for what they do than what happens to them. A well-rounded Church in a fearful state still groping for its own identity may seem quixotic. But in pockets of Shanghai that are not very hard for me, an obvious foreigner, to find, this vision is the reality.

**

Through Shanghai’s metro station security checkpoints and carefully controlled foot traffic lanes, state control is ever-present. The Communist Party promotes its 12 “core socialist values” in this gleaming underground expanse, alongside mascara and KFC advertisements: reminders to be civil, just, and friendly. Commuters, under smartphones’ spells, disperse impassively into mega-malls and food courts that blend into the stations. The effect seems lost on them.

Ironically, it is those President Xi Jinping suspects of insufficient national pride who exemplify the values he promotes and who, as The Economist puts it, “foster the social harmony the Communist Party says it wants.” Zhang, a friend of Kai’s, is one such agent of social harmony. He welcomes me readily into Shanghai’s loose network of Christian charity workers. We meet for the first time in a Starbucks near the church he started. He looks like one of the young professionals he leads: late 20s to early 40s, intellectual, urban.

Over coffee, he explains that China’s divorce rate is rising: up more than 10 percent in the first half of 2017, compared to the same period in 2016. Chinese officials are uneasy about the trend. One province recently mandated that couples seeking divorce first take a test to determine whether the marriage may be salvageable. Zhang’s small-scale remedy is public marriage and relationship workshops, which he teaches regularly. Crowds attend evening lectures on the Christian vision of covenantal commitment, while officially atheist cadres look the other way.

Anywhere he finds common cause with the Communist Party, in fact, Zhang is ready to help. Computer programming courses for youth and values-based leadership training are among his recent projects. We discuss the range of social problems that surpass the state’s unaided power to resolve. Regardless of the issue, Zhang knows how to put local cadres at ease—often over tea meetings to which they invite him—and embraces the gray area between the party’s policy and the activity it tolerates. So as not to invite reproach by drawing too much attention, he relies on word-of-mouth advertising and discreet posts on WeChat, China’s approved social networking platform. He greets the guards outside the building where his unregistered congregation meets on Sundays like old friends. He maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with the leader of a local registered Protestant church that occasionally rents him facilities for public events.

Zhang’s work epitomizes the Chinese government’s dilemma surrounding socially active religious groups. His projects advance the state’s social agendas: ideally, fewer people divorce and more children learn skills for a changing economy. But he also gains a public platform—one that religious groups elsewhere in recent decades have leveraged to become powerful forces for democracy. Though Zhang claims no goals of the sort, he is quietly laying the foundations of a more participatory, more socially engaged Shanghai, while technically bypassing registration rules. His is a small example of the way the state weighs potential benefits of a nascent civil society against its own tight grip on power. At one recent presentation of his, Zhang tells me, a party official addressed the crowd first, lest the audience forget who had authorized the meeting.

“Is the Church ready?” asks Yan in his Christian Times op-ed. In these pockets of the Church, at least, the question is a foregone conclusion.

But is China ready? 

**

On West Nanjing Road, near the coffee shop where Zhang and I first meet, street sweepers brush leaves from beneath the suede-booted patrons of Dior, Givenchy, and Prada. A sitting jade Buddha in Jing’an Temple greets beholders arriving from nearby teahouses and the adjacent metro stop. On nearby Nanyang Road, young parents gather at a kindergarten in the shadow of skyscrapers to pick up their children. The calm hum of daily life on this upscale block of modern Shanghai belies its troubled past.

Here, just over 60 years ago, the Communist Party held 12 days of accusation meetings against Shanghai’s most renowned pastor, Watchman Nee, whose teaching stressed the inner spiritual life above social action. After Nee’s sentencing and the cooptation of his church into the official system of so-called “Three Self Patriotic Movement” Protestant churches, some of his followers dissolved into underground “house” churches to wait out the coming Cultural Revolution. When the purges ended and reforms began, the number of Christians surged—to 35 million independent Protestants and 23 million Three Self members by 2010—even as their presence in the public square remained tentative. There were good reasons to move slowly: memories of repression were painfully recent, and aspiring grassroots NGOs of all types were kept contained until around 1995. But even when the barriers finally fell, the Church seemed unprepared to assume a broader role.

It took a disaster, in 2008, for the idea of Christian social engagement in China to gain traction nationwide. After a catastrophic earthquake destroyed much of the southwestern province of Sichuan, religious groups rushed to provide ad hoc relief—though the state expelled them when their work overshadowed its own efforts. Still, the crisis led many Christian leaders to consider how they might channel that momentum toward worthy causes in their own communities. China is still wary of its perceived heroes: officials detained prominent pastor Wang Yi for organizing a memorial service on the 10^th anniversary of the disaster. Charity, however essential, must never undermine state prestige.

News of the Christian experience in China tends to focus on persecution—detentions, church demolitions, instructions to replace pictures of Jesus with ones of Xi—that occurs in periodic outbursts. Unpredictability can breed fear—and inertia. In March, Beijing dissolved the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the 67 year-old department that oversaw religious activity, as part of a wider bureaucratic restructuring aimed at shifting more control to the Communist Party. Observers speculated about impending crackdowns. The move came on the heels of Revised Regulations on Religious Affairs, which mandated that unregistered religious groups register, raised fines for certain types of religious activity, and strengthened the role of local governments in enforcing the regulations. Xi’s various moves to centralize and cement his power have been especially hard on those who speak out, and those whose activities seem insufficiently Chinese. There are good reasons for Christians to monitor the changes that will inevitably impact them.

But many Christians who “love their neighbors” on a small scale work fairly comfortably inside these shifting parameters. Few I met in Shanghai see a gap between the tenets they profess and the ways they are allowed to be of service to their communities. Even some who test the limits, as veteran China reporter Ian Johnson highlights in his 2017 book, The Souls of China, operate without major repercussions.

There are still implicit restrictions. The state must see the value of a project to Chinese society. It must be thoroughly “Sinicized,” free from even the veneer of foreign involvement. Outright activism may lead to imprisonment, but projects that are small, transparent, and apolitical are generally welcome. Parameters for public religious activity are haphazardly enforced, and always subject to change. But where some see restrictions, many homegrown charities find new possibilities for impact, and even scale.

**

“It’s a bit hard to get there without a car,” Zhang calls out from the driver’s seat. “I’ll drive you.” He smiles through slate-gray frames as he pulls up to our meeting point, a station near his home. He’s offered to introduce me to friends who run a ministry training program on the outskirts of the city. Migrants from other parts of China congregate there, eking out a living running shops or delivering packages for Alibaba while fighting authorities’ indirect pressure—often direct, in other regions—to return to their rural roots. They are two sets of people living on the edge, working only at the pleasure of local authorities.

“This is it,” Zhang says, pulling into a compound. The streets are narrow and made of hard-packed dirt. We round a corner, and Zhang waves to a woman waiting outside. Without warning she pulls me from the passenger seat and through a gate that closes quickly behind us.

“Sorry about that,” the woman says as she opens the door to a building. “Non-Chinese can’t be seen in this neighborhood.” Eleven 20-somethings rise behind their desks to greet me before the instructor for the day, a woman who runs a registered and officially recognized school for disabled children, resumes her lesson. In practice, barriers between registered and unregistered Christian groups are proving less significant than I’d imagined.

Jiahao and Lan, a couple in their 40s, bring cohorts of young Christians from across China to their residential program to study the design and implementation of social engagement projects. After four years in operation, they have honed their model: engage prospective community beneficiaries, pray, plan the project, execute, follow up. It has taken them almost as long to gain the trust of local authorities, and to convince their migrant neighbors that they are not seeking a profit. Next year, they plan to start a team-building program for problematic teenagers, based on requests from local parents.

In Jiahao and Lan’s six-week course, students gain interactive experience among their migrant neighbors, running tutoring sessions for children, painting neglected public structures, and starting a campaign to build trust among market-goers and merchants, for example. They create a sense of community where none may otherwise exist: last year, they hosted a Christmas program featuring a local group of square-dancing ladies and children singing carols. The goal, aside from improving their neighbors’ lives, is to build a network of program alumni to replicate the model in their own hometowns. Jiahao and Lan are sure the government knows their organization is a Christian one, but they say it remains operational because of the essential community needs it meets. The two check in regularly with graduates, now scattered across China. What began as a humble initiative—and remains secretive—now reaches many whom Jiahao and Lan will never meet.

**

There is a new frontier for Chinese Christians accustomed to openness at home. Fang, a 29 year-old market research professional, doesn’t think it’s all bad that foreign NGOs, many of them involved in Christian ministry, were largely forced out of China in 2017. After her expatriate-led church was forced to close, a group of Chinese attendees started leading their own services for the first time. These new leaders and other young Christians she knows in Shanghai are active in ministries of various kinds: one to aid prostitutes in the so-called red light district; another to help homeless people recover their official government identification cards. Christians in Shanghai are increasingly self-sufficient, she says. More should be turning their attention to neighbors beyond China.

Fang recently traveled to North Korea for a “mission” trip after completing a part-time training course in Christian ministry taught by a now-expelled foreign organization. Security guards on the train singled out her small group to ask whether they were carrying Bibles: apparently, few Chinese young people visit Pyongyang as tourists, and those who do are often Christians. She saw fear in citizens’ eyes, but also noticed how sincerely they seemed to worship two adjacent statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Her team opted simply to pray silently during their guided tour. She hopes one day to interact more freely, especially given the fact that Chinese Christians have greater access to such parts of the world than their Western counterparts.

Paths to foreign missions are still difficult for citizens of China. Fang introduces me to her friend, an aspiring young missionary named Shaozu. When he decided he wanted to live among marginalized populations in Xinjiang, he turned to the only resource he knew: biblical stories of Paul, the first-century apostle who journeyed across Europe and Anatolia. Though raised by Christian parents in Shanghai, Shaozu received no exposure to modern Christian missionary work, and didn’t know how to access what little information existed on closely monitored Chinese social networks. The pastor of his unregistered church was supportive, but unable to offer practical advice. But Shaozu ultimately found modern resources unnecessary. He enrolled in language classes, took exploratory trips, and prayed. He’d stay 10 years—maybe 15—he told me.

Fang and Shaozu’s activities are the sort the state wants to prevent: they threaten diplomatic relations and invite foreign interference. But with steady streams of Chinese tourists and laborers venturing abroad, there is little China can do to stop people like Fang and Shaozu, whose faith is unmarred by inhibiting memories of purges and public shaming sessions. When Christian mentors or private Bible study urge them to “go,” they may more freely follow.

**

Zhang and I enter his church separately on a Sunday afternoon. As instructed, I wait for 30 seconds after he greets a guard to approach the gate and take the elevator to the eighth floor. The new house church in urban China, I learn, is often nestled within a tall, nondescript office building. Zhang chose it in part because of the number of small, service-oriented business occupants: his congregants would blend in with a steady stream of visitors.

Attendees filter in, about 17 in all. The worship leader starts a YouTube video and begins to lead the congregation in song. The volume is cranked louder than seems safe.

Zhang speaks on the Queen of Sheba as part of a series on understudied biblical figures before we dissolve into small discussion groups. Mei, a technical support engineer, will be baptized next month, she tells me proudly. Ping is a graphic designer trained in the United States. They describe plans to be of service to colleagues in their workplaces this week, and then pray for them. They call each other sisters.

It is here I realize that smallness is a strange source of strength for unregistered churches—and their associated ministries—in today’s China. Modesty and agility ward off detached materialism and cults of personality. In many ways, they mirror the work of the faith’s earliest churches.

It is here that Christians recharge before returning to a city that, though safer in many ways than their grandparents’, is still isolating and unpredictable. But even if the party’s new religion monitors enforce regulations that threaten their pursuits in the public square, individual believers will remain, reconnect, reestablish guanxi, and try again at the next sign of an opening. They are inheritors of the guarded, pious house church, but they have caught glimpses of once-unthinkable opportunities that no longer justify keeping the house’s doors and windows closed.

Note: Interviewees’ names have been changed to protect their identities.