Jesus Family - Early Development

Early Development

The Jesus Family gradually developed after 1927. In addition to the family in Mazhuang, which was called the "old family". Jing began to build "small families" along the lines of the old family from that year. The pattern of the development of the small families was uneven. He and his followers established only eleven small families between 1927 and 1937, but they founded sixty three during the Sino-Japanese War and thirty nine new ones during the Chinese Civil War. It is clear that the sufferings during the two wars helped in the Development of the Jesus Family. The total number of families reached 127 in 1952, spread over northwest, east, and south China. At first, most of the families were in rural areas, but small families began in cities such as Nanjing, Wuhan and Shanghai. The total population of all the families grew from around a dozen Christians in the Mazhuang family to about ten thousand members in 1948.

Compared with the surrounding society, the social life of the Family exhibited many distinctive utopian characteristics. First, it adopted the communitarian principle and denied private ownership. The family initially copied the idea from the Home of Onesiphorus, and even its first three looms were bought from that institution. However he encountered many problems as soon as he convened his followers to live together as the Home of Onesiphorus did. The most important thing was that he had no funds to support his small community and often lacked enough food and appropriate shelter for his followers. He could not pay them anything for their labours, as the missionary Anglin had done. In this way, Jing's group adopted utopianism at the beginning of its history. Like all Christian utopians, he advocated that the true Christian should follow what Jesus asked the young man to do in Matthew 19:16, and he called on members to follow the mode of life of the primitive Christian community in the 1st century (Acts 2:43). This meant no private property, the sharing of all goods, and not paying much attention to one's family ties or material concerns. The Family was, Jing said, the best life a Christian should practice. The communitarian system naturally led to an egalitarian way of life. Adult members of the Family shared the same standards in food and dress and all lived in the same rooms except for babies and older people who received some special treatment.

Secondly, the Jesus Family established socially isolated but economically self-sufficient communities governed by specific rules based on scriptural patterns. It was believed that such separation, a most important requirement of communitarian life, would not only protect community members from persecution but also from enticements to deviate from the founder's prescriptions for the true way of life. Most of the Jesus Families were located in the countryside or in the suburbs of cities with no close neighbours. Based on economic functionalism, all the Jesus Families relied on farming and industry, which made them self-sufficient. Production was efficient as a result of a planned division of labour. The foundation was agriculture, and upon this were built various enterprises and departments, which in the Mazhuang family included baking, cooking, carpentry, a machine shop and electrical department, stonemasonry, operation of a smithy, schools and a kindergarten, a finance department, printing, and an outside relations department.