Read this article: Christianity Finds its Fulcrum in Asia.
Talk about being gripped and on-fire for the Lord… Chinese are radically converting to Christianity in hoards… 10,000 each day! South Korea, which is 30% Christian, sends more missionaries into the world than any other country besides the United States. There are an estimated 110 million Chinese Christians, 90% of which are pentecostal. And “evangelical Protestantism had almost no adherents in China a generation ago.”
That, my friends, is called an explosion.
But beyond the numbers, the article presents some fascinating ideas and reflections. For instance:
People do not live in a spiritual vacuum; where a spiritual vacuum exists, as in western Europe and the former Soviet Empire, people simply die, or fail to breed. In the traditional world, people see themselves as part of nature, unchangeable and constant, and worship their surroundings, their ancestors and themselves. When war or economics tear people away from their roots in traditional life, what once appeared constant now is shown to be ephemeral. Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia, which transcends race and nation. In China, communism leveled traditional society, and erased the great Confucian idea of society as an extension of the loyalties and responsibility of families. Children informing on their parents during the Cultural Revolution put paid to that.
Now the great migrations throw into the urban melting pot a half-dozen language groups who once lived isolated from one another. Not for more than a thousand years have so many people in the same place had such good reason to view as ephemeral all that they long considered to be fixed, and to ask themselves: “What is the purpose of my life?”
And this one really got me tingling!
As Aikman explains in Jesus in Beijing, some Chinese evangelicals and Pentecostals believe that the basic movement of the gospel for the last 2,000 years has been westward: from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Europe, from Europe to America, and from America to China. Now, they believe, it’s their turn to complete the loop by carrying the gospel to Muslim lands, eventually arriving in Jerusalem. Once that happens, they believe, the gospel will have been preached to the entire world.
Uhhh… then what happens? Christ returns :)
For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.
