History

The vision to evangelize the “10/40 Window” was given to a small band of Chinese Christians in the late 1920s. That vision has remained in the heart of the Chinese church for 80 years and is still alive today. One small group of missionaries made it all the way to Xinjiang in the 1940s, but were stopped and imprisoned there by the government. The Back to Jerusalem Gospel Mission was founded by Brother Peter Xu in 2003 to raise awareness of the vision and train missionaries to fulfill the mission. The ministry is now based in Santa Monica, California.

The Chinese House Church movement has experienced amazing growth in the past 40 years. From a handful of missionaries and Chinese Christians in the 1940s, to between 100 and 130 million believers today, the church has grown in spite of extreme persecution by the changing government leadership.

It is a church dedicated to prayer, to evangelism, and to the vision given by God to reach the unreached with the Gospel of Jesus.

Peter Xu

The founder of Back to Jerusalem Gospel Mission, Pastor Peter Xu Yong Ze, was born in 1940 in central China. He is the fourth generation of Christians in his family. Receiving his call at 25, Pastor Peter himself witnessed, touched, and experienced the mighty work and the great revival our LORD Jesus Christ created in China in the past few decades.

From 1985 up until the present, Pastor Peter and his co-workers have trained and equipped more than 100,000 evangelists. He is the leader of a network of churches numbering over twenty million, and his church network has become one of the largest in China. God has revealed His gracious hand and His mighty arm among the suffering house churches in China. With His signs, wonders, and various miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit, and through the living and enduring word of God, Pastor Xu lead many to repentance, and turned China from being a country of unbelievers to one now having one of the largest Christian populations in the world.

Pastor Xu has been put into prison five times because of his faith. But he responded, "Thanks to God’s grace, I have become the companion with all saints in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus." In March of 1997, his fifth time to be put in prison, 47 Congressmen of the United States came together to make an effort to request the Chinese government to release Pastor Peter. Hence, the world of Christian Believers started the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, IDOP. In answer to those prayers, he was released in May of 2000 and God brought him to the United States in 2001.

Pastor Xu is the founder of the Back to Jerusalem Gospel Mission. His vision is to unite all western and eastern churches along the ancient Silk Road, evangelizing and bringing the Gospel to the unreached peoples of Asia, all the way back to Jerusalem.

Statement of Faith

• We believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God and is authoritative and infallible in the original writings.
• We believe in one God, eternally existent in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
• We believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious death and atonement through His shed blood, in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of God the Father, and in His personal return in power and glory.
• We believe that for the salvation of lost and sinful man, faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and regeneration by the Holy Spirit are essential.
• We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit, by whose indwelling the Christian is enabled to live a godly life.
• We believe in the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life eternal.
• We believe in the spiritual unity of the Church, which is the Body of Christ, composed of all who are regenerated through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.