One of the most well-known Christian leaders in China, Pastor Samuel Lamb, died on August 3 in Guangzhou, aged 88.
He was arrested during one of the first big waves of persecution in Mao’s China and was first imprisoned from 1955 to 1957, when the church numbered a few million.
Lamb was targeted because of his refusal to merge his illegal house church into the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the state-regulated Protestant Church. The Chinese authorities sentenced him a second time in 1958, when he spent 20 years in labour camps.
He saw his wife for the last time during the five months that he was on remand; she died in 1977, a year before Lamb’s release.
Afterwards, he again took up his work as a pastor, and saw the exponential growth of the Chinese church.
In 1979 he started his house church in 35 Da Ma Zhan in Guangzhou. Attendance grew quickly and he had to move his congregation to a bigger building in the same city. Today his urban house church is still unregistered, but tolerated by the authorities.
He taught that Christians should obey the government unless those leaders directly opposed God with their law enforcement. ‘The laws of God are more important than the laws of man’, he used to say. Suffering played an important part in many of Lamb’s sermons. He was famous for repeating: ‘More persecution, more growth’.
