Explosive Christianity in China

The Souls of China

If you are looking for a book about religion in  China after Mao, you probably couldn't do better than the one by Ian Johnson. But let me spare you from wading through 450 pages!

Most of the book needn't be read, for it is about different false religions in that land. The worthwhile chapters are the first and last along with all the chapters about the Early Rain Church in the 16 million city of Chengdu, where Wang Yi is pastor.

The Revival of All Religion

This book makes a good case for the general religious nature of mankind. The communists could not rid their people of the God-given natural religious impulse of mankind. Idols to every god is how the Athenians expressed this nature.

Mankind is incurably religious.

So it was inevitable that when Mao clamped down on religion it would merely go underground, and when this was impossible, that the Communist Party would seek to adapt its attiude to religion to take into account this fact. Document 19 expressed their new but still controlled attitude towards religion.

After the death of Mao in 1974 the nation went into crisis. Their god had died. As they became richer they realised that their unhappiness was not tied to their poverty:

“We thought we were unhappy because we were poor. But now a lot of us aren’t poor any more, and yet we are still unhappy. We realize there something missing and that’s a spiritual life.”

And so they began to seek for answers:

“..hundreds of millions of Chinese are consumed with doubt about their society and turning to religion and faith for answers that they do not find in the radically secular world constructed around them. They wonder what more there is to life than materialism and what makes a good life..”

So that now, Johnson says,

“It is hardly an exaggeration to say China is undergoing a spiritual revival similar to the Great Awakening in the United States in the 19^th C.”

The result has been a dramatic increase in all religious activity, but especially a turn to the true and living God.

More people are Christians than belong to the Communist party and the rate of growth of evangelical Christianity is around 7% per year!

Reflections

My sad  guess is that this book (2017) probably contributed to the arrest and imprisonment of pastor Wang Yi in late 2019. The author, who does not appear to be a believer, just writes - as journalists think they must - all the truth without any idea of its consequences. So many details about Wang Yi and the Early Rain church should have been left out. Why the members of that church trusted a secular journalist is also strange.

Jesus, especially in Mark's Gospel, continually kept good news out of the public eye so that he did not bring forward his arrest and death.

We learn so much about the white-washing of history by the communists. One of the truths that led Wang Yi to Christ was the way missionaries to China had done such good and been responsible for many of their best institutions. All of this he had to find out for himself!

We learn how Wang Yi is able to use the massive positive influence of Christianity on China as a major tool in his evangelistic outreach.

We learn that faithfulness to the Gospel will result in persecution. Wnag Yi and his wife were imprisoned. His wife has been released but he has been given a nine-year sentence and his 13 year old son has to live under surveillance.

We learn above all else that Christ will build his church and the gates of hell will not prevail against him or his kingdom.

So let us double our efforts at reaching out to the lost and pray that the Lord will grant to us a harvest of disciples.