The coming Chinese Christendom

John Piper has some amazing comments about the growth of the Church in China. Piper emphasizes the beginnings of Protestant Christianity in China two hundred years ago this month with the arrival of Scottish missionary Robert Morrison.

Actually, Morrison was only one in a stream of missionaries who have labored to give the Word of God a foothold in China. Middle Eastern missionaries from the Assyrian Church of the East (sometimes, and misleadingly, called "Nestorians") established the Gospel in China in the seventh century, as commemorated on the "Nestorian Stele" still visible near Xi'an. Franciscan missionaries arrived in the late thirteenth century, and Jesuits in the sixteenth. In the nineteenth century, Robert Morrison's work was continued by the great Hudson Taylor, who (according to one estimate) was responsible for bringing more people to Christ than anyone else in history since the Apostle Paul.

As encouraging as the growth of the Chinese Church was under the oversight of such men, it was nothing to what followed the rise of Communism and expulsion of the missionaries in 1949. At that time there were just under a million Christians in China; now their numbers may surpass a hundred million. In a provocative article in the Asia Times Online, columnist "Spengler" writes that the massive numbers of conversions in China should make us see the future of Christianity as Chinese:

Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report by the National Catholic Reporter's veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200 million Chinese may comprise the world's largest concentration of Christians by mid-century, and the largest missionary force in history.... Christianity will have become a Sino-centric religion two generations from now. China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past 200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelization. If this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it. Islam might defeat the western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East.

Spengler adds that the spread of the Gospel is the one thing that may actually succeed in bringing political freedom to China: "Freedom of worship is the first precondition for democracy, for it makes possible freedom of conscience. The fearless evangelists at the grassroots of China will, in the fullness of time, do more to bring US-style democracy to the world than all the nation-building bluster of President George W Bush and his advisers."