Allen Yuan

Allen Yuan Xiangchen (Chinese: 袁相忱; pinyin: Yuán Xiāngchén; 1914 – August 16, 2005) was a Chinese Protestant Christian pastor. He was a leader among Chinese house churches, and known for his resistance against participation in the state-controlled "Three-Self Patriotic churches".

Yuan’s ministry began after the Japanese surrender in 1945. He was assisted by a Norwegian missionary. Yuan opened a prayer room in Beijing so that he could preach.

When the government set up the Three Self Patriotic Movement to develop national churches under party control in 1950, a year after the communist revolution, Yuan and other pastors refused to join. In 1958 he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison for "counter-revolutionary crimes".

Voice of the Martyrs quoted him speaking about his imprisonment: "During those years in prison my wife suffered untold hardships in bringing up the children. I was sent to near the Russian border doing farm work, growing rice. Wang Ming-Dao [a fellow pastor also sentenced to the camp] and I thought we would die martyrs there. . . ."

"In the labor camp it was very cold," he wrote, "food was bad, and the work was hard, but in 22 years I never once got sick. I was thin and wore glasses, but I came back alive; many did not. I also had no Bible for the 22 years and there were no other Protestant Christians there. I met only four Catholic priests. They were in the same situation I was in; they refused to join the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association."

Yuan was released in 1979 and went back into Christian ministry.

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