Allen Yuan

Allen Yuan Xiangchen (; 1914 – 16 August 2005) was a Chinese Protestant Christian pastor. He was acclaimed by Open Doors as "a towering figure in China's house church movement" and known for his resistance against participation in the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which resulted in imprisonment for more than twenty-one years.

Early life Yuan was born in Bengbu, Anhui, to parents from Dongguan, Guangdong, after his father found work on the counstruction of the Beijing–Guangzhou railway. Yuan's family relocated to Beijing during his childhood, with his mother taking Yuan and his siblings away from their father over several extramarital affairs. Yuan was mostly raised by his grandparents, growing up with no close friends. When the government set up the Three-Self Patriotic Movement to organize churches under party control in 1950, a year after the communist revolution, many pastors such as Yuan's mentor Wang Mingdao and Watchman Nee, refused to join. Yuan begrudingly accpeted to preach through the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, but rejected it on principle as he found its teachings too liberal and preferred to self-regulate his church services. During the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Yuan publicly spoke out against the TSPM and as a result, he was labelled a rightist and repeately warned of arrest if he did not accept merging into the TSPM.

Voice of the Martyrs quoted him speaking about his imprisonment: Yuan was released on parole in December 1979 and started his own house church at Miaoying Temple (also known as White Stupa Temple). The house church became one of the largest house churches during his era, with two to three hundred attendees.

While his preaching was tolerated, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement repeatedly urged him to join, which he always refused, to the point that he refused to attend a prayer session with visiting American president Bill Clinton because TSPM preachers were also in attendance. He also refused help from foreign Christian charity, believing everyone had to be self-sufficient. It was noted that both before and after his imprisonment, Yuan had neglected his wife and children, to whom he was often short-tempered, but they remained close. As Yuan was never officially rehabilitated and refused to concede to any wrongdoing, he remained under police observation his whole life and occasionally kept in house arrest.

Personal life He married Liang Huizhen, also known as Lily Liang, in 1938, and they had six children in total. He died on 16 August 2005, in Beijing, and some 2,500 mourners attended his funeral on Eight Treasure Mountain in Beijing.