…As the century of missionary activity was winding down in the 1940s, J. K. Fairbank summed up the prevailing view well when he said it had \u201cbecome evident that few Chinese people were likely to become Christians and that the missionaries\u2019 long-continued effort, if measured in numbers of converts, had failed\u201d\u009d.<\/p>\n
Looking backward\u201d\u201dand ignoring the possibility God had other things in store for China\u201d\u201dthat was not an unreasonable conclusion. According to Stark and Wang, \u201cThe best statistics place the number of Chinese Protestants [at the time] at 1,005,699\u201d\u009d. And since it was widely believed many of those were \u201crice Christians,\u201d\u009d it wasn\u2019t hard to imagine that number collapsing under Communism. But it didn\u2019t. Sixty years later, tens of millions of Chinese are believers.<\/p>\n
This doesn\u2019t take away from the contributions of foreign missionaries; in fact, their efforts before 1953 laid the groundwork for the rise of Christianity we\u2019ve seen since. \u201cHad the missionaries never gone to China,\u201d\u009d in other words, \u201cit is doubtful there would have been any books written about Chinese Christianity\u201d\u009d. The missionaries A Star in the East<\/i> mentions never saw the fruit of their work, but it was God\u2019s work, which means it was not in vain. This is an encouragement to missionaries currently serving in China\u201d\u201dor anywhere, for that matter.<\/p>\n
3. Persecution has profoundly affected the nature of Chinese Christianity.<\/b>
\nA number of years ago I was talking with a Chinese Christian friend about Christianity in China. She was a very opinionated woman who always pushed me to think hard about things. \u201cWhat we need,\u201d\u009d she said, banging her fist on the table, \u201cis more persecution. It\u2019s way too easy to be a Christian in China today.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n