Official Chinese surveys now show that nearly one in three Chinese describe themselves as religious, an astonishing figure for an officially atheist country, where religion was banned until three decades ago.
The last 30 years of economic reform have seen an explosion of religious belief. China’s government officially recognizes five religions: Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Daoism. The biggest boom of all has been in Christianity, which the government has struggled to control.
Read or listen to it all and make sure to take the time to follow the slide show.
I’m glad to see NPR doing a major (5-part) story on the amazing growth of Christianity in China. No one really knows just how many Christians there are in mainland China these days, but if the estimate used here of about 100 million Protestants alone is any where close to right, and you add in the Catholics (also millions of them), then our Christian brothers and sisters may have already surpassed the threshold of reaching 10% of the huge national population (about 1.3 billion). And that strikes me as a very significant threshold, because leading church historians estimate that when Constantine converted to Christianity in AD 312, that’s about the proportion of the Roman Empire that had converted to the Christian faith at that point, roughly 10%. Occasional violent persecution by the Romans had failed to wipe out the Church, and the same is true in China.
The future for Christianity in China looks bright indeed. As bright as the promises of our faithful God.
Now if only we were doing so well in India, or Japan. Or Europe…
David Handy+
From my own sources (local and via UBS), the figure of 100 M is seen as “conservative”. Yet the word is that like all such revivals, two key elements need prayer: depth as well as numbers, that new converts would go deep into the heart and mind of the Gospel of Jesus; and leadership, training that would enable such depth to occur.