Posted on 09/13/2011 8:28:19 AM PDT by marshmallow
Many of China's churches are overflowing, as the number of Christians in the country multiplies. In the past, repression drove people to convert - is the cause now rampant capitalism?
It is impossible to say how many Christians there are in China today, but no-one denies the numbers are exploding.
The government says 25 million, 18 million Protestants and six million Catholics. Independent estimates all agree this is a vast underestimate. A conservative figure is 60 million. There are already more Chinese at church on a Sunday than in the whole of Europe.
The new converts can be found from peasants in the remote rural villages to the sophisticated young middle class in the booming cities.
Driven underground
There is a complexity in the structures of Chinese Christianity which is little understood in the West. To start with, Catholicism and Protestantism are designated by the state as two separate religions.
Throughout the 20th Century, Christianity was associated with Western imperialism. After the Communist victory in 1949, the missionaries were expelled, but Christianity was permitted in state-sanctioned churches, so long as they gave their primary allegiance to the Communist Party.
Mao, on the other hand, described religion as "poison", and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s attempted to eradicate it. Driven underground, Christianity not only survived, but with its own Chinese martyrs, it grew in strength.
Since the 1980s, when religious belief was again permitted, the official Churches have gradually created more space for themselves.
They report to the State Administration for Religious Affairs. They are forbidden to take part in any religious activity outside their places of worship and sign up to the slogan, "Love the country - love your religion."
In return the Party promotes atheism in schools but undertakes "to protect and respect religion until such time..............
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
I for one welcome our new Christian overlords!
Many Chinese Christians have a vision to take the gospel westward and evangelize Islamic Asia. With God’s help, I think they could do it.
I haven’t heard of Chinese Christians evangelizing Muslim countries.
You may be mixing up China with Korea, where many Korean Christians are actively seeking secular jobs in Muslim countries so they can evangelize.
And here in the Philippines, they had a course for Christians going to the Middle East for jobs to learn to evangelize. There are a million Filipinos in the Middle East, and not only Protestant Christian groups but Catholic lay groups like Couples for Christ are active.
Some countries like Kuwait and Dubai allow them to worship and have churches, but in Saudi it’s all underground. One of the unreported stories of the world is that Saudi has a million Christians (Filipinos, Lebanese, African, Kerala Indian, mainly Catholic) but no church. The story is ignored by the Christian press for fear that the underground priests and ministers will be arrested, but the secular press is also not very interested in this story.
It’s called “Back to Jerusalem.” See the book by that name written by Paul Hattaway. These Chinese believers want to bring the gospel full circle, westward from China across Asia to the Middle East. They’re dreaming big.
thanks for the tip. I hadn’t heard of that, but it makes sense.
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