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What are China’s Protestants doing outside the walls of their homes and churches? This article is the result of collaboration between the three named authors, all of whom conducted fieldwork for it. It examines the range of community service and charity work (including poverty alleviation, disaster relief, education, nursing homes, medical care, and various forms of evangelism) that Chinese Protestants have in the past and still do undertake within the contemporary Chinese Communist Party-state (CCP). Drawing on extensive fieldwork over several years in multiple sites across the PRC, the researchers ask: (i) in what ways do CCP policies on religion help or hinder Protestant social service? and (ii) to what extent are Protestant efforts in harmony with or beyond the control of CCP religious policies? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social movements research points to the role of networks in recruiting intimates and public spaces in recruiting strangers. But for Chinese Protestants, creative outreach strategies can be a substitute for existing relationships and initiate recruitment. In China, public proselytizing is forbidden, religion is rarely mentioned in the media, and direct contact with potential converts is discouraged. To attract strangers, evangelists in China rely on door-to-door proselytizing in the countryside, cultural performances embedded with religious messages in the cities, and one-on-one conversations when the opportunity arises. By contacting targets in the ordinary flow of life and fashioning appeals using resonant language, Protestant recruiters have become adept at attracting non-networked individuals in "safe-enough" spaces that appear in the creases of a reforming Leninist regime. At a general level, the analysis suggests that networks sometimes play a smaller role in recruitment than is commonly thought, at least at first, and that social bonds may be as much a result of recruitment as a precondition for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]