True Jesus Church
True Jesus Church belongs to the Apostolic / Oneness Pentecostal family of churches.
Governance: congregational.
Founded in Beijing in 1917; Oneness in theology, Sabbath-keeping in practice, and among the largest indigenous Chinese church movements, with substantial Chinese-diaspora congregations in the US.
Congregation count not yet source-verified against RCMS 2020; NULL rather than estimated.
A church founded in Beijing in 1917 that holds the apostolic faith was restored in China — Sabbath-keeping, Jesus-name, and now planted wherever the Chinese diaspora lives.
Heritage
The True Jesus Church arose in Beijing in 1917 through Wei Enbo (Paul Wei) and fellow evangelists including Zhang Lingsheng and Barnabas Zhang — an entirely indigenous founding, owing its existence to no foreign mission board. It spread rapidly through China and Taiwan as one of the largest homegrown Chinese church movements, and came to the United States with Chinese immigrant communities in the twentieth century, where its congregations serve Mandarin, other Chinese-language and English-speaking believers. It understands itself as the true church of the last days, restored in the Spirit.
Theological family
Oneness in its doctrine of God and restorationist in instinct: one God manifest in Jesus; baptism by full immersion in the name of the Lord Jesus, administered face-down in natural "living" water; footwashing as a sacrament; the Saturday Sabbath kept holy; and speaking in tongues as the evidence of Spirit baptism — summarized in its Ten Basic Beliefs. Trinitarian bodies confess God differently, and most other Pentecostals worship on Sunday; the True Jesus Church teaches what it holds the apostles taught.
Who decides what
Congregational in polity, coordinated through national and international assemblies; local churches are led by elders and deacons, preaching responsibilities are widely shared among trained workers, and major questions are settled in assembly.
What a first-time visitor would find
On a Saturday, a visitor finds reverent, orderly services in Chinese or English; hymns; and a distinctive congregational prayer in which the whole assembly kneels and prays aloud together, often in tongues, at once. Baptisms are performed by immersion in living water — a river, a sea, a flowing source.
What it has always cared about
The Sabbath; the restored apostolic pattern; evangelism within the Chinese diaspora and beyond it; training every member toward ministry; and a self-understanding forged without Western sponsorship.
Its gift to the wider church
A standing reminder that world Christianity is not a Western export: the True Jesus Church is among the largest church movements ever founded, led and spread entirely by Chinese believers, and it brought that fact to American soil.
Commonly confused with
With Seventh-day Adventists, who also keep Saturday but are trinitarian and not Pentecostal; with other Chinese-heritage churches and the Local Church movement, which are distinct in doctrine and organization; and with Jesus-name bodies of the UPCI type, which share Oneness baptism but worship on Sunday.
Range of views inside it
Range in language and generation — Mandarin-, Cantonese-, Taiwanese- and English-speaking congregations under one roof or separate ones — more than in doctrine, which the Ten Basic Beliefs hold uniform.
A note from the mapmakers: We have not verified a US congregation count for this body against RCMS 2020, so we publish none. Nothing here may be asserted of an individual congregation, including its languages of worship. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "True Jesus Church congregations typically…" and yield to the church's own materials.
Sources: True Jesus Church — our basic beliefs (True Jesus Church) · Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (Lian Xi, Yale University Press) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)
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