Gongshan, China - When China's communist army razed his church, Jesse's grandfather climbed into the forests stacked up above his valley and carved a hole in the trunk of a tree to hide his bible.
Half a century later the wilderness is retreating but his grandson, sitting in front of the church and scripture school rebuilt from scratch, no longer needs it.
His unusual Protestant faith -- which bans smoking and drinking, celebrates the most sacred communion ritual with honey instead of wine and calls followers to five singing and dancing services a week -- is spreading fast.
"I heard the music when I was walking past the church, it drew me in," says weatherbeaten farmer He Chunhua, a recent convert and the only Christian in his family.
"I could not understand the words, but the singing still touched me," added He, one of the few believers who do not belong to the Lisu ethnic minority that dominates the valley near the Myanmar border.
The number of church-goers in Jesse's sparsely populated and poor home county in southwestern Yunnan province has roughly tripled since a decade ago to around a modest 6,000.
Each summer, after the snow thaws and remote valleys become accessible again, the school trains around 50 believers to help strengthen their own churches and spread the faith.
Students pay around 150 yuan ($20) a month for food, board and tuition, studying in an area a long day's travel and a world away from the wealthy, largely atheist cities of the east coast.
Gongshan is tucked into one of the remotest corners of China, where steep hillsides dotted with huge fronds of bamboo and traditional wooden Lisu houses plunge down to the raging torrents of the Nu River, whose name means angry in Chinese.
FIRM ROOTS
Christianity had firm roots in the region and it was a missionary, James Fraser, who first developed a written version of the Lisu language.
He was one of a string of Catholics and Protestants who headed up the valley to preach from the late 19th century -- and the Lisu's strict but musical faith likely reflects the teetotal culture of many evangelist groups at the time.
But after Mao Zedong's 1949 civil war victory, the valley's churches were destroyed, bibles burnt or hidden and believers like Jesse's grandfather had to worship alone for fear of persecution by the Communist, and officially atheist, government.
"I used to hear him chanting scriptures, at midnight or one in the morning. I knew it was the Lisu language but still I didn't understand it. Actually I thought he was a bit mad," Jesse said with a smile.
Everyone in the village of wooden houses with thin walls knew about the prayers, but the old man had "a strong character and a long knife", Jesse said, so cadres left him alone.
With Mao's death and China's gradual opening, the climate for believers thawed. A group of grey-haired worshippers gathered at Jesse's house for improvised services and a younger generation was gradually drawn in by the teaching and singing.
The country now has 40 to 80 million active Christians, experts say, evenly divided between state-sanctioned churches and underground ones that meet at members' homes.
Gongshan's church and school, and the growing network of white-washed chapels strung out along the valley -- many furnished with little more than planks and a rough table -- are testament to hard work and a more tolerant government.
CHALLENGES
But although Protestantism is one of five religions officially sanctioned by Beijing, believers still operate on a precarious basis.
In a post-Mao society where an ideological vacuum has spawned corruption and eroded ethics, Chinese leaders are wary that religious revival could be a force for subversion.
A Protestant minister was jailed for three years in 2005 for illegally printing Bibles. Earlier this year the Protestant vice-principal of a Chinese Communist Party training school said she was demoted for organizing a Bible study session.
Despite a full class at the school the church still has room for expansion.
Between Communist Party members, drinkers who can't quit and the simply uninterested, less than a third of the Lisu in the area are church-goers, estimates Luke, a teacher at the school who like Jesse added a biblical name to his Lisu and Mandarin ones.
But he feels no need to compromise their strict faith to attract new believers.
"We will support people who are ready to become Christians in giving up drinking, but we cannot baptize them until they stop," said Luke, as chanting from the makeshift classroom drifted across the church's courtyard.
"Its a way of showing your faith to the outside".