Local churches (affiliation)
Christian movement, started in China by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee
The local churches are a Christian group which was started in China in the 1920s and have spread globally. The basic organizing principle of the local churches is that there should be only one Christian church in each city, a principle that was first articulated by Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng) in a 1926 exposition of the seven churches in Asia in Revelation 1:11. The local churches do not take a name, but some outsiders referred to the group as the "Little Flock" as they sang from a hymnal entitled Hymns for the Little Flock.
From early on, members of this group emphasized alleged personal experiences of Christ and the establishment of a pattern of church practice according to the examples [e.g. church in Jerusalem] found in the New Testament. Though assemblies identifying as "local churches" can be found worldwide, there are no definitive statistics available on membership, partly because the largest number of members are in China. Estimates range from 500,000 to 2,000,000 members worldwide.
History
Origins
During the May Fourth Movement, Chinese intellectuals and students criticized Christianity for its associations with Western imperialism. Responding to these perspectives, some Chinese Protestant leaders began indigenous church movements seeking to establish Protestant churches in China that were independent of foreign finances, control, or leadership. The Local Church movement arose in this post-May Fourth context.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Local churches (affiliation)” as christian movement, started in China by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as christian movement, started in China by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1318624. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1926.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Local churches (affiliation)” 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.