Barnabas Zhang - Persecution

Persecution

In 1913 Diàn-Jǔ was labelled as a 'devil' and beaten up by his own clan for preaching to them about Jesus and the 'faith of the foreigners'. Diàn-Jǔ had to flee to his aunt's house. He did not return home until five days later. On his way home, he knelt down near a river shore to pray that the persecution would stop, and the persecution ceased. In the spring of 1914, Diàn-Jǔ intended to commence business in the leather industry and aid in the formation of the church there. During his planning stage, he met with fierce resistance from his clan and the church was persecuted. His name Diàn-Jǚ was removed from the family scroll and his house was burnt to the ground.

Diàn-Jǔ then moved his business operations to Qingdao, Shandong, but due to war skirmishes and the ensuing civil unrest, his capital and goods were looted by bandits during the autumn of that same year. At the beginning of 1915, Diàn-Jǔ and Zhang Lingsheng opened a primary school so that the children of the believers and their friends could receive education. The syllabus included hymn singing and worshipping God. Within a year, the pupils achieved good grades and sixty of the pupils were willing to receive baptism. As they travelled two kilometres to the nearest river, the locals there tried all they could to block them on the pretext that they were 'polluting' the river. So Diàn-Jǔ knelt down and prayed in the middle of the opposing crowd. After his prayer, an army officer, whom often attended his sermons, came out from the city to receive baptism. The crowd was afraid of his power and hence the opposition ceased. In the spring of 1915, Pastor Berntsen and Zhào Délǐ (趙得理) from the Church of God in Beijing came to Wei County and resided in Diàn-Jǔ's residence for several days. Berntsen and Zhào Délǐ proposed that their two church congregations be merged into a single entity so that they could cooperate alongside each other and jointly preach the gospel. However Diàn-Jǔ rejected this proposal after he disagreed on a passage written by Berntsen in the Popular Gospel Truth periodical mentioning the Sabbath:

.