Church Weekly for 25 November 2007
My dear readers,
1. Evangelising our Chinese Brethren
Since the late 1980s our evangelistic efforts have reached to China through Pastor Pang Kok Hiong, who had earlier received God’s call. In those early visits he met up with Pastor Wang Ming Dao in Shanghai, which was a blessed experience. The Tienanmen incident in 1989 caused a temporary setback to Pastor Pang’s ministry. Providentially God opened a “backdoor to China” through Saipan (an island in the Mariana group in the Pacific, east of the Philippines). In 1992 Pastor Pang established a gospel outreach in Saipan with the help of Rev Lee of the Korean Presbyterian Church in Saipan.
In these 15 years Pastor Pang has ministered to many thousands of the Chinese factory workers in Saipan, made dozens of trips to China for follow-up care of the returnees, and conducted training camps for house church leaders. The converted returnees, taking up new appointments, carried the gospel to Jordan and Cyprus where new churches were founded. It was amazing how the gospel seed has taken root both in China and overseas. So far over 2,500 converts have been baptized. Truly the gospel seed has fallen on fertile ground among the Chinese people. All glory to God.
2. Quote: (April 28, 1941) “Christianity in China” – a historical survey
“Christianity is staging a comeback in China this year—a comeback almost unbelievable to those who remember its plight there in 1927. The change is due entirely to the war with Japan and the part missionaries have played in the struggle. But no amount of missionary heroism could have revived Christianity so quickly if Chinese nationalism had not done a complete about-face in its reaction to the white man's religion.
“In 1927 the Chinese revolutionaries hounded churchmen from one end of the Yangtze to the other as "running dogs of imperialism"—and the imperialism they hated was largely Anglo-American. Today England and America, no longer hated, are two Christian friends on whose support Christian Chiang Kai-shek is counting to free China from the non-Christian Japanese invaders.
“Fifteen years ago Christianity in China was in flight. Missionaries, their wives, children and chattels, were pouring out of the interior of China in terrified streams, seeking safety in Shanghai. In Chungking they took refuge with foreign businessmen in a frightened huddle on the South Bank. In Chengtu they gathered on the spreading campus of West China Union University while a few friendly Chinese paced back & forth at the gates to ward off anti-Christian mobs. Of the 8,250 Protestant missionaries in China in January 1927 only 3,183 were left at their posts a year later—and most of these stations were on the coast.
“But in 1941 the Governor of Szechwan Province comes each Sunday morning to worship at the once-beleaguered university chapel in Chengtu. In Chungking, the Christian leader of China rules with his Christian wife, aided by a Christian Finance Minister and a host of other Christian officials.
“The precipitous outward flow of missionaries has been reversed. Chiang Kai-shek not only invites all missionaries forced to leave Japanese-held areas to come to the interior, but his Ministry of Finance makes all arrangements to fly them free of charge from Hong Kong to Chungking. Businessmen, officials, visitors wait bookings on the crowded planes but missionaries are given seats ….” (End of historical survey)
3. New Government Statistics on China’s Christians
(A more recent report: this article by Paul Davenport is dated 2000 - Ed)
HONG KONG (Compass) -- Totals for the number of Christians in China leaked from two Chinese government bodies reveal far larger estimates of the number of Protestants than official church leaders have previously admitted. At a January Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB, the government body responsible for oversight of religions) conference, delegates were told the number of Protestants in China was 25 million. A leaked report from China's security organization -- the Public Security Bureau (PSB) -- put the total at 35 million.
Official spokesmen, such as China Christian Council Chairman Dr. Han Wenzao, have long denied the possibility that there are more than 15 million Christians in China. Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) statistics claim there are only 13.3 million Protestants. The TSPM is the official Protestant church organization in China. These leaks clearly show the Three Self leaders have been deliberately deceiving their Western audiences by pretending the total of Christians is far lower than their own government supervisory estimates, which they must have had access to," said a Hong Kong-based China watcher. Many Western missions maintain the true number of Christians in China is likely to be 60 million and up. An Open Doors spokesman said they estimate there are 60 to 80 million Christians.
Statistics in China are notoriously unreliable. First, it must be clarified that published statistics often differ significantly from those compiled for the government's own use and kept classified. Numbers of Christians published in government handbooks and by the state-controlled TSPM give very conservative (and often out-of-date) figures that are the bare minimum. They usually include only those Christians registered and baptized in an official TSPM church or meeting point, and they omit unregistered house church believers and children under the age of 18.
Figures released privately by TSPM pastors for their local area or province are usually significantly higher. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the TSPM is still claiming publicly that the total number of Protestant Christians in China is only 13-15 million while the government itself may have internal statistics estimating 25-35 million. Foreign observers claim the government is still underestimating the number of Christians. And some house church leaders in China have stated their combined movements number 58 million, although they admit their estimates are not based on extensive data gathering.
Does this mean that all statistics emanating from China are totally unreliable? Not at all. There is plenty of evidence of church growth from both TSPM and house church sources reporting numbers attending local churches and those baptized in a particular locality each year. Careful collation of the available evidence down to the county level shows amazing church growth over the past two decades. The government's internal statistics of 25-35 million Protestants have only to be compared to the 700,000 Protestants in 1949 when the Communists took over for proof of the scale of the ongoing revival. Alex Buchan contributed to this article. (Slightly abridged – Ed).
Lovingly in the Lord
Dr SH Tow, Senior Pastor