Brent Fulton (no relation to me) is the founder of ChinaSource, a Christian organization that works to help the global church better understand China’s rapidly growing church. The author of China’s Urban Christians: A Light That Cannot Be Hidden, Fulton is no newcomer to China: He started working with China Ministries International in Hong Kong in 1985 and has been tracking the rise of China’s churches since then. He announced in September that he will step down as ChinaSource president.

Up on a hill above the Tamsui River, past the renovated Fort San Domingo, stands Aletheia University, a quiet campus filled with leafy trees, an imposing neo-Gothic church with a 32-foot-tall pipe organ, and two pointed arches at its entrance. Walk through the arches, follow a winding stone path in a manicured garden, and cross a bridge over a koi pond, and you’ll reach a red brick schoolhouse, a blend of Western and Eastern styles of architecture. 

At age 17, Kawasaki Eiko boarded a ship from her home in Japan and headed to North Korea, a land depicted as paradise on earth with free education, healthcare, food, and ample jobs. The year was 1960, and Kawasaki and hundreds of other Zainichi Koreans—ethnically Korean residents in Japan—were desperate to leave the poverty and discrimination they faced in Japan after World War II. Propaganda by North Korea and groups representing Koreans in Japan provided a seemingly simple solution: move to North Korea.

When British divers earlier this month located the group of 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped inside a flooded cave in northern Thailand, only one boy, 14-year-old Adul Sam-on, could communicate with the divers in English. 

“What day is it?” Adul asked the divers before telling them the group’s greatest need: food. By that point on July 2, the Wild Boars soccer team had been stuck in the Tham Luang Cave system for 10 days, eating birthday snacks, drinking water dripping from the cave walls, and digging deeper into the cave to keep warm. 

On May 1, four days after the historic handshake between the leaders of North Korea and South Korea, a group of North Korean defectors gathered on the shores of South Korea’s Ganghwa Island, only 8 miles from the North Korean coast. Under a cloudy sky, they threw into the ocean hundreds of watertight plastic bottles filled with rice, USB drives, dollar bills, and antibiotic ointment. Taped to each bottle was a plastic-wrapped book of Genesis and a study guide.

Mary Li Ma and her husband Jin Li collaborated to write Surviving the State, Remaking the Church: A Sociological Portrait of Christians in Mainland China. Through hundreds of interviews with Christians all across the country, Ma and Li show how Christianity transforms the lives of believers, including their views on education, marriage, charity, and nationalism. Here are edited excerpts of my interview with Ma, who grew up in China and professed faith while earning her Ph.D. in sociology.

How did you come to Christ?

TAIPEI, Taiwan—On a sweltering summer day with a heat index of 110 degrees Fahrenheit, a man and a woman in formal attire posed on the steps of Shan-Chih Hall in Tatung University. The train of the young woman’s blue gown fanned behind her as her fiancé—perhaps near heat exhaustion in his three-piece suit—held her waist, obeying the direction of the photographer.