One of the most well-known Christian leaders in China, Pastor Samuel Lamb, died on August 3 in Guangzhou, aged 88.
He was arrested during one of the first big waves of persecution in Mao’s China and was first imprisoned from 1955 to 1957, when the church numbered a few million.
Lamb was targeted because of his refusal to merge his illegal house church into the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the state-regulated Protestant Church. The Chinese authorities sentenced him a second time in 1958, when he spent 20 years in labour camps.
