Late last week The Telegraph published a story about the rise of Christianity in China under the attention-grabbing headline "China on course to become the world's most Christian nation within 15 years."
One thing that I have noticed over the past couple of years is the growing influence of Calvinism among Chinese house church Christians. At a conference I attended in Germany last year, one of the speakers even listed it as a major challenge facing the church in China.
As the news of the battle for Sanjiang Church in Wenzhou began to break over the last week and I read the accounts, I was reminded again why fully understanding Christianity in China from the West is so hard.
On April 4, the western press began reporting on a church in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province that was surrounded by thousands of parishioners who were blocking a crew sent to demolish the church. As reported, local officials had initially ordered that the cross be removed from the church, and later said the church was built illegally and had ordered its destruction. The story was a hot topic both inside and outside of China, and has come to be known as The Sanjiang Church Incident.
An interview with Dr. Fenggang Yang about a new exchange program at Purdue University.
The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity (三位一体) is that there is one God (一神) in three persons (三个位个).
People often ask me for recommendations of books to read about Christianity and the church in China. There are a lot of books out there; some better than others.
At the Desiring God Conference for Pastors in Minneapolis last week, conference host John Piper spoke on the life of Hudson Taylor in a message titled, "The Ministry of Hudson Taylor as Life in Christ."
I recently came across a piece on PRI's "Here and Now" program about how the Tiananmen Square incident became a "watershed" for conversions to Christianity.
In the historical news department, the Catholic news service UCA recently wrote about the discovery of a gravesite in Henan Province that is believed to be a burial site of the Nestorians, the earliest Christians to reach China in the Tang Dynasty.
China's "official" churches (those operating under the auspices of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement) are fairly often associated with terms such as "restrictive," "government-sanctioned," or even "Communist-controlled." Granted, one does not have to look too far within China's religious bureaucracy and its associated policies and practices to find evidence that would justify such notions. Unfortunately, however, the perception of the official church which these labels create tends to mask much of what is actually happening on the ground in TSPM-affiliated churches.
I'm already two weeks into my current episode of jet lag, so I know there is no excuse. However, I still find myself waking up in the morning and wondering, "What day is this anyway?"