Thirty-five years ago this week, I made my first of three delightful visits to China and first-hand contact with Christians there. My last trip to China was in 2004, and in the 18 years since then there have been some definite changes: both increased persecution and increased growth.
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| Grace Church, Shanghai |
Visiting Grace Church in Shanghai
(1987)
In August 1987, I went to an
academic meeting in Hong Kong. When the meeting ended, rather than fly directly
back to Japan as originally planned, I decided to take the train to Guangzhou
(Canton) and fly from there to Shanghai—and then from there to Nagasaki three
days later.
On Sunday morning, Aug. 23, I
hailed a taxi and showed the driver the address of what in English is called
Grace Church. He took me there without difficulty, and it turned out to be a
delightful morning. I was greeted (in English) by an elderly gentleman and then
introduced to a Mr. Wu.
Mr. Wu sat by me and translated
the sermon during the worship service, which was attended by 1,500~2,000
people. After I treated him to a nice Sunday dinner at a local restaurant, he
took me to see the first Baptist church built in Shanghai. His grandfather was
pastor there in the 1920s.
Grace Church was originally a
Baptist church also, but it was forced to close in 1966 at the beginning of
Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Four years after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976,
the church was able to reopen, and from then until 1987, the church had
baptized 1,600 people.
Hearing Christian Philosophers
in Beijing (1994)
My second trip to China was in October
1994 when I was able to attend a fascinating symposium of Christian
philosophers from the United States and philosophers at Peking University.
(This year, Peking [the old spelling of Beijing] University was
ranked [here]
the best university in China and the 12th best in the world.)
I was not only impressed with the Christian philosophers,
particularly Alvin Plantinga,* who had come from the U.S. but also by the
brilliance of the Chinese philosophers, who were eager to learn more about
Christianity. I was told that one or more of them were “crypto-Christians.”
Visiting Churches in Shandong (2004)
Shandong (Shantung) is a province of the People’s Republic
of China on that nation’s eastern coast, the part of China closest to South
Korea.
On the last day of July 2004, June and I left Japan, which
had been our home for one month shy of a full 38 years. We took the two-hour
45-minute flight from Fukuoka, where we had lived for 36 years, to Qingdao on
the eastern coast of Shandong Province.
The next day we made a three-hour trip to Penglai (Tengchow)
and visited the church Lottie Moon first attended in China. (If you don’t know
who Lottie Moon was, see
this 12/26/12 blog post.) We had a delightful conversation (in Japanese)
with Rev. Shin, the 80-year-old pastor there.
The four-hour return trip to Qingdao took us by the inland
city of Pingdu (Pingtu), where Lottie Moon started a church, and, appropriately,
the senior pastor was Rev. Wang, a woman. (Her picture is in the link above.)
So, What About Now?
In recent years, you may have read stories about the persecution
of Christians and the destruction of Christian churches in China—and there have
been many such cases. Opposition to Christianity increased after 2013 when Xi
Jinping became president of China.
But in Sept. 2020, The Economist posted an article
titled “Protestant
Christianity is booming in China.” With about 3% of the population being
Christian, there are now more Christians in China than in France or Germany.
Much of this growth has been since 2004 when I was last in
China—and has primarily been by adult conversion not by the birth of children
to Christian parents. Moreover, this growth has been without the assistance of
Western missionaries.
If present trends continue, which they may not, in a few
decades there may well be more Christians in China than in any other country in
the world. Imagine that!
_____
* My Sept.
15, 2017, blog post was about Plantinga.
The first comment received this morning was from Thinking Friend Greg Hadley, a Missourian who has long lived in Niigata, Japan, which is due east of Beijing:
ReplyDelete"This was a delightful and very interesting posting about Christianity in China. Thanks for sharing it."
Greg, I wonder if you have visited China. I was surprised to see that there seem to be no direct flights from Niigata to China. If there were a direct flight to Beijing, it would be just a little over three hours.
DeleteA Thinking Friend who lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., wrote,
ReplyDelete"It’s remarkable to see that the percentage of Christians in China is much greater than in Japan!"
Yes, depending on the statistics one uses--and there are widely varying statistics for both the percentage of Christians in Japan as well as China (some claim that as many as 5% of the Chinese population are professing Christians)--the percentage in China is about twice that in Japan.
DeleteAnd then a Thinking Friend in Kentucky said,
ReplyDelete"I’ve learned some things I didn’t know about Christianity in China."
Good! As a lifelong teacher, I intend for most of my blog articles to help readers learn new things as well as to think about things old and new.
DeleteThank you for this informative narrative of your experiences with Chinese Christianity. I look forward to hearing more about it your future blogs.
ReplyDeleteI would have to confess that for quite some time I've had mixed feelings, to say the least, upon learning about growth in Christianity. I remember thinking--when I was in college and a self-righteous young Christian intensively active in the church--Christianity would be better served by a lot fewer Christians. The "faithful remnant" sort of thing, I guess. Today, with the politically right-wing, theocratic sellout of most of America's evangelicals and fundamentalists, I don't feel any pleasure at the news of large numbers of people gravitating to Christianity. That sentiment is fed as well by what I've learned over the years about Christianity's participation in Western imperialism, USAmerica's slavery, the Church's inability to condemn Nazism and fascism, etc. Now, we have the specter of the Russian Church blessing Putin's murderous invasion of Ukraine. I want to pray, "How long, O Lord, how long?!"
Now, if I had it to do over, I'd probably go with Unitarian-Universalism. I've preached quite a bit in UU churches in the last 12 years and find it both more challenging and more gratifying. It's very different having to ground a sermon's claims for a vastly varied congregation without the crutches of biblical authority and doctrine.
I've always envied your 38 years in Japan. It sounds rich and meaningful. I found Japan extremely "civilized" during the weeks we were there. I sometimes wonder, had I in my early years as a Christian known more about missionary work as something other than the typical view of considering all human beings as being lost and needing conversion, if I might have gone in that direction for my years of ministry.
Anton, I appreciate your sharing matters related to your personal "faith journey. What you wrote in the first paragraph gives me the opportunity to make an important statement about my own uneasiness with the growth of Christianity in China.
DeleteMy only contact with Chinese Christians was with those who were a part of churches registered with the government. The greatest growth of Christian believers in China, though, is by the "underground" churches, which are "illegal." Those churches tend to be conservative evangelical types of churches, many of them "Pentecostal." There has been growth in the registered churches, and I am very pleased about that. But I have mixed feelings about the nature and growth of the underground churches.
A few minutes ago, I received these comments from Thinking Friend Eric Dollard in Chicago:
ReplyDelete"Thanks, Leroy, for relating your experiences in China.
"Judy and I spent five weeks touring China in 1998. I remember seeing only one church from our bus. It was out in the countryside by itself and of English, not Chinese, architecture, so I could tell it was a church, at least originally. Although we visited many Buddhist temples and monasteries and one fascinating Taoist temple complex in Beijing, we did not visit any churches.
"Unfortunately, Xi Jin-ping is turning China inward and forcing Sinification on non-Chinese populations, especially the Uighurs. Western scholars and non-Chinese Christians are being expelled and churches are being suppressed. This does not bode well for religious persons, whether Christian or some other religion (i.e., Islam), or for independent thought and innovation. Xi views himself as a second Mao and he has initiated a second, albeit slow-motion, Cultural Revolution.
"The recurrent efforts by Chinese leaders to homogenize the Chinese population date back to Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who died in 210 BCE. He founded the short-lived Qin dynasty and left the now famous Terracotta Army, discovered in 1974, about twenty miles east of Xi'an. It is one of the sites we visited in 1998."
Thanks for your comments, Eric. That was quite a tour you and your wife had of China. My three visits there didn't add up to a full two weeks, and you spend five weeks there!
DeleteI am not surprised that you didn't see churches on your guided tours, but there are many large church buildings in the major cities, and most of them were built before WWII and are Western in appearance, although there are some that look much more like Chinese buildings.
Here is the link to pictures of some of the churches in Beijing:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=christian+churces+in+beijing&form=HDRSC2&first=1&tsc=ImageHoverTitle
Here are comments received yesterday afternoon from local Thinking Friend Bill Ryan:
ReplyDelete"This is really interesting, both the memoirs and the comment about the present. With China's increasing anti-Western attitudes and sword rattling related to Taiwan, who knows what could be the repercussions against Chinese Christians if it is perceived that theirs is a 'Western' religion. If their Christianity reflects their own indigenous Chinese identity, it probably has a much better chance of surviving and being deeply meaningful to them."
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Bill. I'm glad you mentioned the tension over Taiwan, for heightened political tensions there would likely increase pressure on Christians in Taiwan as well as on the mainland.
DeleteOn Aug. 15, my blog post was partly about religious nationalism--Hindu nationalism in India and Christian nationalism in the U.S. There certainly seems to be a growth of nationalism in China also--but it is anti-religious nationalism.
And this morning Thinking Friend Andrew Bolton in England shared these comments:
ReplyDeleteThanks for your blog on China. I travelled to China for 9 years working for my church. Our small but dynamic congregation has not met since 2018 because of government restrictions now on even small (under 60 members) ‘family churches.’
"We are still in touch using secure email. The congregation is still in touch with each other as a fellowship."
Leroy, I found this fascinating. I wish I had had the opportunity to visit China in the context of a conference of theologians or philosophers. When I visited on my own--with the family--we did attend worship at a huge church, and had a wonderful, warm experience. I find myself wondering what my successor at Seinan would say to all this.
ReplyDeleteLocal Thinking Friend Ken Grenz send the following comments this afternoon:
ReplyDelete"Very interesting. At Europe’s rate of decline (along with the U.S.), Asian predominance of Christianity isn’t hard to believe. I believe Christianity was once predominantly African (Coptic) but then turned European. The Asian Expression could readily live without a Constantine! Interesting that the Chinese variety is so indigenous."
Thank you for sharing your experiences and observations of the church and Christians in China.
ReplyDeleteAs second century theologian, Tertullian is often quoted as saying: "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." I think this has proven to be the case throughout the church's history, likely even in China today. I am sceptical that the Chinese communist government will repect, let alone allow religious freedom, hence the continued reports of Christians being persecuted and churches closing down.
We spent 12 years (1989-2001) teaching in a Univ. in Shanghai and relating to churches there and in Shandong. At that time there were at least 12 churches in Shanghai each with over 1000 each Sunday. Today we hear that there are at least 20 churches with this number. We taught an English Bible class in one of these churches with over 100 students. In Shandong there were a few large churches but most were small. There is more persecution among the house church movement. The Amity Printing Press in Nanjing continues to print bibles and other religious literature with government permission. Persecution is centered primarily in the House Church movement where heresy is often found.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Ron, for these comments. You know far more about the situation in China than I do, so I appreciate you sharing this information with me and the readers of this blog. Thanks for mentioning the work of Amity Printing Press, for this is something many people in this country are probably not aware of.
DeleteThanks, too, for saying what you did about the House Church movement. It is my understanding that their work is primarily "underground," and as I said above (in response to Anton) I have mixed feelings about those churches and not necessarily happy that much of the growth of the number of Christians in China is from those who become members of the underground (house) churches. I have seen various charges about the "heresy" found in some of those churches and wish you had written a bit more about that.
On Saturday afternoon, local Thinking Friend Chris Sizemore sent an email with this brief comment:
ReplyDelete"I assume that the recent growth has been the result of proselytizing efforts by local churches."
Thanks, Chris, for reading and responding to this post about Christianity in China. "Proselytize" is defined as the "attempt to convert (someone) from one religion, belief, or opinion to another." But in my limited understanding of what is happening in China, there are not organized proselytizing efforts by local churches because of governmental disapproval of such. Most of the growth is most likely due to believers sharing the joy of their Christian faith with family and neighbors.
Delete