More Persecution, More Growth

In the great southern city of Guangzhou, in a narrow house on Da Ma Zhan lane, there lived a pastor whose church had no permission to exist. His name was Lin Xiangao, though the world came to know him as Samuel Lamb. For decades he led one of the most well known house churches in all of China, and people climbed his crowded stairs by the hundreds to hear him preach. He was a small man with thick glasses and a steady voice. And he had paid for that voice with years of his life.

The trouble came because Samuel Lamb would not stop. He would not register his church under the state. He would not hand his pulpit to men who would tell him what he could say about Jesus. So they came for him. In the years of upheaval under Communist rule, he was arrested, and he was sent away to labour. By his own account, he spent more than twenty years in prison and in labour camps, much of it doing hard work in coal mines. Twenty years. Think of what a man loses in twenty years. The births he missed. The funerals. The slow grinding of cold, and hunger, and the question that must have circled in the dark: is anyone still listening, is the church still there, has it all been for nothing.

Then, after all those years, the doors opened, and Samuel Lamb walked back into Guangzhou. And he did the only thing he knew how to do. He started preaching again. In his own home. Out loud. The authorities watched him. They raided his meetings. They confiscated his Bibles and his tapes. They warned him and they harassed him. And still the people came, more of them now than before, packing the stairs and the rooms and spilling toward the doors.

It was from this life, not from a comfortable study, that his famous words came. More persecution, more growth. He did not mean that prison was good. He had felt the cold of the camps in his own bones. He knew that surveillance is cruel, that families are broken, that fear is real. He was not romanticising any of it. He was testifying to something he had watched with his own eyes. The harder they pressed, the more the church grew. Christ, he insisted, could not be locked up. The Word he carried could not be confiscated for long. You could imprison the preacher, but you could not chain the gospel.

They could not break him, and they could not outlast him. Samuel Lamb kept that house church open and growing until his death in 2013, in the same city where he had been hunted, an old and honoured man. Tens of thousands had passed through his ministry. The unregistered churches of China, once expected by many to wither under pressure, had instead multiplied beyond counting.

His phrase is easy to quote and hard to live, and it was never meant to make suffering sound beautiful. It was meant to make hope unkillable. Samuel Lamb is gone now, but across China there are believers still meeting quietly, still watching the door, still carrying the same conviction up the same kind of crowded stairs. They are not headlines. Most of them have no names we will ever know. But they remember an old man with thick glasses who lost twenty years and gained a city, and who left behind one stubborn, defiant truth: you can lock up a man, but you cannot lock up the living God.