Early Rain Covenant Church
house church in Chengdu, Sichuan, China
Early Rain Covenant Church (traditional Chinese: 秋雨聖約教會; simplified Chinese: 秋雨圣约教会; pinyin: Qiūyǔ Shèngyuē Jiàohuì; Sichuanese romanization: Tsiu-ü Shen-io Chiao-hue; lit. 'Autumn Rain Covenant Church') is a house church within the Reformed Presbyterian tradition based in the Sichuanese provincial capital city of Chengdu, southwestern China. It was established as Early Rain Blessings Fellowship by Pastor Wang Yi and his wife, Jiang Rong, in their own home in Chengdu, in April 2005. The small congregation has evolved into a house church three years later, and since then it had been variously known as Early Rain Blessings Church, Early Rain Reformed Church and Early Rain Reformed Presbyterian Church before adopting its current name.
Name
According to a pastoral letter from Elder Li Yingqiang, the native name of the church, "Autumn Rain", comes from Psalm 84:6: "When they walk through the Valley of Weeping, it will become a place of refreshing springs. The autumn rains will clothe it with blessings."
Historical background
The first Protestant missionaries to reach Sichuan were Griffith John of the London Missionary Society and Alexander Wylie of the British and Foreign Bible Society, when the two, in 1868, visited many of the most important towns and markets, including the capital, Chengdu. However, this journey was a "prospecting trip" without establishing mission stations. The first settled mission work had not been opened up until 1877.
Among the twenty or so missionary societies working in this province before 1950, the London Missionary Society was the only one of a Reformed background. Griffith John, a member of the Congregational church, returned in 1888 to take up permanent work in Sichuan. Thomas Torrance, a Scottish Presbyterian minister serving under the American Bible Society, was a missionary in Chengdu from 1910 to 1934.
The public source identifies “Early Rain Covenant Church” as house church in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Early, Rain and Covenant.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q120641872. VIAF identifies the subject as 7106169032384487720001. The Library of Congress control number is no2023079395. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005, 1868, 1877 and 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “Early Rain Covenant Church” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.