Assessing Christianity in Contemporary China

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.

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 12^th 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!

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* My Sept. 15, 2017, blog post was about Plantinga.

Leaving Lottie: My Sad Journey Away from the LMCO

This month I have been feeling nostalgic for the early Decembers fondly remembered in past years.

Those were times when I was privileged to preach/speak in Southern Baptist churches about world missions, which I always did with gladness—and with appreciation for the support received from those churches as an SB missionary. But, sadly, things have changed.

An Enthusiastic Supporter of the LMCO

Except for active Southern Baptists, past and/or present, few know (or care) what LMCO stands for. It means the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, which has been a lifeline for missionaries deployed by the International Mission Board (IMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention. 

An IMB webpage explains that the LMCO “is an annual offering collected by Southern Baptists to support international missions. The offering was officially named in 1918 by Woman’s Missionary Union in honor of the missionary to China who urged churches to start it and give sacrificially.”

(For information about the SB missionary Lottie Moon, see my 12/26/12 blog article about her and the LMCO.)

The same IMB webpage reports, “Through the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, Southern Baptists have given over $5 billion to international missions.” That’s a lot of money!

My family and I were on missionary “furlough,” now called “stateside assignment,” in 1971, ’76, ’81, ’86, and ’91. Each of those years provided opportunities to visit churches, especially in early December, to promote giving to/through the LMCO—and to thank Southern Baptists for their support.

A Reluctant Supporter of the LMCO

Since 1980, the Southern Baptist Convention steadily became more and more conservative/fundamentalist. In that same period, my own faith had grown in the opposite direction. In the 1990s I increasingly became only a rather reluctant supporter of the LMCO.

After 2000, it became even more difficult for me to promote the LMCO enthusiastically, as I had done for decades. The problem was the adoption of a revised Baptist Faith and Message document that, among other things, mitigated against women serving as pastors.

After being forced to retire as an SBC missionary in 2004, my support for the LMCO virtually ended in 2005. Reflecting back, I grieve over that sad separation from a long and meaningful relationship.

A Non-Supporter of the LMCO

As the SBC grew more and more conservative, being a Southern Baptist meant not only opposing women in ministry but also being stanchly opposed to pro-choice (=anti-abortion) and pro-LGBTQ (=anti-gay) positions.

Naturally, the change in the SBC meant that newly appointed missionaries, and those older missionaries who chose to remain with the SBC, were mainly those who agreed with SBC’s theological and ethical positions.

It was not too surprising, then, that an overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. And it seems that Baptists in other countries have been influenced in the same direction by SB missionaries.

Brazil is one of the countries to which Southern Baptists have sent the most missionaries for the longest time. As a boy, I grew up hearing about the Bagbys of Brazil. Buck and Anne Bagby arrived in Brazil as SB missionaries in 1881. Five of their nine children later became missionaries to Brazil.

But just as Baptists in the U.S. have been, and still are, big supporters of Trump, in recent years Brazilian Baptists (and other evangelicals) have been strong supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro (b. 1955) has reportedly remained a Catholic. But in 2016 he was baptized (immersed) in the Jordan River by an evangelical pastor, and he attends the Baptist church where his wife is a member.

Mrs. Bolsonaro’s church is the Attitude Baptist Church (interesting name!), which was organized in 2000 mainly through the work of an SB missionary.

“Bolsonaro’s faith-based enablers” is a Dec. 1 Christian Century article that describes how Bolsonaro and his evangelical support in Brazil mirror Trump and his evangelical support in the U.S.

As an outspoken critic of Christian fundamentalism for the past two decades, I am sadly no longer able to affirm a mission board and the long-esteemed LMCO which now mainly supports conservative evangelical missionaries who nourish similar believers in other nations, such as Brazil.

In Praise of Lottie Moon

“Southern Baptists have only one saint and her name is Lottie Moon.” So wrote Texas pastor Chuck Warnock in his fine review of Regina D. Sullivan’s book Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend (2011). 

I am writing this in praise of “St. Lottie” (she has never actually been called this), whose full name was Charlotte Digges Moon, and in commemoration of her outstanding work and life, which ended soon after her 72^nd birthday 100 years ago, on Christmas Eve, 1912. She was on her way back from China to the U.S. and died on board the steamer Manchuria as it lay at anchor off Kobe, Japan.

At the beginning of the 1870s, Southern Baptists did not think single women should be appointed as missionaries, but in 1871 Lottie argued publicly that women should be allowed to do paid religious work.

Consequently, Lottie became one of the first single Baptist women to be appointed as a missionary—with the understanding that she would be involved only in “women’s work for women.” Among other things, that meant not preaching or engaging in any kind of public activity when men were present.

But Lottie soon began to ignore the restrictions. As Sullivan says, “Moon was never one to be dissuaded by an argument that centered on gender.” Her breaking with her culture and board policy culminated with her, alone, beginning new mission work in the city of Pingtu. It was the first time for a Southern Baptist woman to start a new mission point.

As Southern Baptist missionaries for 38 years, June and I were indirectly linked to Lottie Moon, for in each of those years the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering (LMCO) was a major source of funding for the Foreign (later International) Mission Board that provided our support in Japan. And I have spoken in numerous churches through the years, encouraging generous giving to the LMCO.

In July 2004 when June and I left Japan as missionaries for the last time, we spent a few days in China before coming on back to the States. Our most memorable time there was seeing the places where Lottie Moon had lived and worked. We visited the church where she had worshipped soon after her arrival in Tengchow (now Penglai) in 1873. And then we went to Pingtu (now Pingdu), where Lottie had lived and worked from 1886 to 1891.

We visited a church in Pingdu that resulted from Lottie Moon’s work there. Appropriately, the senior pastor there is Wang Xia, a woman—and a fourth-generation believer whose ancestors were among the earliest Christians in the city.

The picture shows Pastor Wang on the left and the couple who were living on the property by the house where Lottie had lived—and which we are standing in front of. 

For a long time Lottie Moon has often been considered “saintly” because of what was written about her sacrificing her food, and ultimately her life, for the sake of the poverty-stricken people of China. According to Sullivan, those stories are likely fabrications for the most part. (Writing as a scholar rather than as the promoter of a cause, makes one more objective—and more nearly accurate.)

Lottie Moon deserves our praise, though, for her courageous work for gender equality among missionaries and for sparking the formation of the Woman’s Missionary Union among Southern Baptists as well as the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, which has raised more than $1.5 billion for missions since its inception in 1888.

We may not want to call her St. Lottie, but she is well deserving of appreciative remembrance on this 100^th anniversary of her passing.