The jet lag has subsided finally, and I am fully back in the world of North America after an April in Asia that will haunt me for a good season. So much of our American perception of the world beyond our borders is rooted in a mixture of out-dated reality, media-reinforced cliche and cartoon over-simplification. The world has changed and is changing faster than some of our notions and ideas. Nowhere more than China!
If you think the main storyline there is still "sinister government persecuting courageous Beijing congregation", you are missing the story in an odd side-show. There is a much bigger story unfolding.
I am old enough (barely) to remember when another fellow named Nixon surprised the world by suddenly appearing one morning with Mao Tsetung in Beijing. That moment was akin to when one hits restart on a computerized device. After centuries of a seriously dysfunctional western presence in China, distorted and often guided by western economic, political and religious bullying, there was a quarter century of vastly reduced interaction between China and the West. Slowly that began to shift in the 1970s, picking up steam in the years since. China is now flooded once again with western influences, from Paris fashion (with mostly European models) to American music to every sort of religion you can imagine - and then some. Jimmy Carter pled with the Chinese premiere in the late 1970s to allow its churches to reopen. Amazingly, they decided to return to the very old tradition of Chinese religious freedom that long pre-dated Communism.
Today, China has 56,000 registered Protestant churches with an average of about 500 participants each. Add in Catholics and the underground (unregistered) churches, and you are looking at possibly 80 million human beings, up from around 2.5 million in 1980. Currently, we are talking about 7 percent of the population. (The underground churches are hard to count, and many of them would be classified as quasi-Christian or as cults by Americans.) But there remains a pent-up demand for spiritual exploration in this country of 1.3 billion so that every time a new church is opened, it fills up with almost no evangelistic strategy or special effort.
In Shanghai, we were given a private tour of the former Anglican cathedral, freshly renovated, and still locked up - but set to open for worship again in June of this year - for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. (Photos attached.) It will be full by Christmas.
And we would expect a church with over 200 million nationwide adherents by the year 2030, the largest group of active Christians in any nation on earth, perhaps half a billion by my 100th birthday. We have never seen a church grow this large this fast in any time or place. China is now the cutting edge of the 29th chapter of Acts. We are now entering a phase of Christian history when Asia forms the heart of the Christian movement.
And it is Asian churches who are planting the most viable missionary congregations now in the Middle East, bringing the latest 400 year old Christian wave full circle around the earth. (The first United Methodist church in Dubai was recently planted by Filipinos.)
China is living through a season of spiritual formation not unlike the Great Awakenings in the United States. From this there will likely emerge a mature Christian movement in this century, with a distinctively Chinese flavor, with fresh and provocative theologians and powerful new music and art. Right now, from what I experienced in April, I would classify the Chinese church as a movement in adolescence. It is growing like a weed, learning the language, the stories and the categories of a different worldview - and expressing its faith in an off-the-rack theology that is still more Saddleback than Shanghai. But many of us remember youth group days - and the clunky theology that helped us make sense of it all in our spiritual adolescence. China will grow far past its current patterns and ways, almost certainly. And we will all be the richer for it.
As communication with our Chinese Christian sisters and brothers becomes easier, we need to nurture such connections. These folks have an experience of the Risen Christ that is electric and relevant to all the rest of us. I thought about that as I worshiped at a former Methodist church, packed to the rafters, on Peoples Square in Shanghai 11 am Easter Sunday. We sang "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" in Mandarin, with the balcony windows open, the music drifting out onto the streets, and liturgical dancers moving in sync with the soaring poetry of Charles Wesley.
This is a church that will inspire us, challenge us, and occasionally even offend us, as they make a 2000 year old gospel indigenous to China. Don't look for a democratic church in China. Certainly do not look for a church that embraces the politics of the Christian right, or even the Christian left in America. But as Chinese-American tensions may occasionally threaten the peace of the world in the years ahead, I am praying that it will be Christians on both sides of the Pacific that help us to step back from the political spin du jour and take a longer, wiser view. I am praying that we will discover more deeply than ever before that in Christ there is, ultimately, no East or West. As the environmental movement eventually garners a worldwide passion among Christ followers in the twenty-first century that rivals the passion of the abolition movement in the nineteenth, I am hopeful that the church in China will lead us all, and that Christian conscience will finally break the political stalemates that keep us from seriously addressing and arresting global climate change.
Yes, they still have a difficult, sometimes micromanaging government in China. It is unclear the future of that. I would guess that there will be more freedom in China by the end of the century, rather than less - but I have no idea how that will go. Yes, churches get hassled in China over silly zoning issues and permits - but they do also in Canada, and to some degree in Oregon. Prophets and artists still get thrown in jail in China, especially if they are critical of the government. And CNN could allow you to believe that's the whole story.
I just want to say, for the record, there is another, far more amazing story being written, and we are only now beginning to really hear it. I encourage you to double-check the facts and consider carefully the sources. Set aside everything you thought you knew about China. Because one thing is clear - very clear. God is doing a new thing there, and it is no time for falling back on old assumptions.
With our eyes and our minds open - let's see what unfolds.
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