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It is still very much the same. I have been to two fellowships in my life that overwhelmed me.
One was in China. It was an underground fellowship that met after hours in a factory's warehouse. How I was directed to the location is its own miracle of God, but once in, I passed through two rooms to get to where the brothers and sisters were meeting. Once there, every person had a bag over their heads. It filled me with awe.
I also went to several underground Fellowships in Iran. Christianity has a long history in Iran. A piece of trivia, it was Armenian Christians who taught the Iranian scholars how to build their first printing press. To this day, Armenian churches in Tehran are permitted to stand. When you travel through Syria you see the mark that tells the neighborhood that a building has been claimed for Islam. It makes a striking contrast when you visit Tehran because generally the Iranian communities will not harm the Armenian Christians. For example, during the Iran / Iraq War neither side would accept the medical teams of the other country, either Iran or Iraq, anywhere near their battle lines. Thus, Christian Armenians drove many of the ambulances through the battle areas, and generally, neither the Iranians nor the Iraqi would fire on them.
In China, Christian sites on the Internet are blocked, and possession of any part of a Bible will get you years in prison. I had a friend. He has passed now, but he was arrested at 14, and spent 25 years in prison. He had one page of the Psalms inside one of his books.
There are today more Christians in China than there are in the United States. We estimate around 300, 000, 000 Christian Chinese.
Your posts are a blessing, and they remind me to pray for my brothers and sisters back in China.