More on Asian Christianity...

Can the Western press understand what vibrant Christianity looks like? The abduction and killing of South Korean missionaries by the Taliban has spurred many to explore the growth of the faith there.

To understand the phenomenon of Korean evangelism, he says, you need to go to where it all began. It is 4:30 on a frigid Monday morning in Seoul, but the parking lot is full and the church filled to its 9000-person capacity. In a city that also worships the work ethic, this is how tens of thousands of Koreans begin their work week. At the Onnuri church, it's a two-hour prayer service. Onnuri calls itself an evangelical Presbyterian church. It began 20 years ago and has seen massive growth.

Rev. Yongjo Ha of Onnuri Presbyterian Church explains more about mission:

When we were hopeless, the Western missionaries came, and they introduced us to the hope in Jesus Christ, so we have a very holy obligation to share this hope in Jesus Christ with those people who are still in their misery.

Read more in this week's Religion & Ethics News Weekly Report from PBS. Hat tip: Titus One Nine.

The rise of Asian Christianity

Section of the Great Wall of China

As the risk of generalizing, it will come as no great revelation to anyone who has spent much time with Asian Christians that they are people of prayer and passion for souls. So it's not surprising to see so much in the news lately about the rise of Asian Christianity, including its missionary thrust. Part of this is due of course to the hostage situation in Afghanistan, but this has really only spotlighted the trend in Korean and other Asian missions work for a wider audience.

This week's National Catholic Reporter featured a column called The uphill journey of Catholicism in China, which discussed the massive growth of Pentecostal and Charismatic groups in China, while noting the relative lack of success of Roman Catholics here.

Perhaps the most remarkable burst of religious energy is in China's Pentecostal Christian population. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1949, there were roughly 900,000 Protestants. Today, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, which puts out the much-consulted World Christian Database, says there are 111 million Christians in China, roughly 90 percent Protestant and mostly Pentecostal. That would make China the third-largest Christian country on earth, following only the United States and Brazil.

The Center projects that by 2050, there will be 218 million Christians in China, 16 percent of the population, enough to make China the world's second-largest Christian nation. According to the Center, there are 10,000 conversions in China every day.

Religious data is notoriously imprecise in an officially atheistic state, and not everyone accepts these eye-popping estimates. In the 2006 update of his book Jesus in Beijing, former Time Beijing bureau chief David Aikman put the number of Protestants at 70 million. Richard Madsen, a former Maryknoll missionary and author of China's Catholics, told me he would put the number still lower, at 40 million. That's in line with the CIA World Factbook, another widely consulted resource.

Various reasons are suggested for the relatively slow growth of Catholicism, but the writer, reporter John L. Allen, Jr., suggests the answer lies in the Pentecostals' expectation of the miraculous.

How would a "Christianized" China affect the region - and the world? Allen says,

By universal consensus, China is an emerging global superpower. Its economy grew at an average annual rate of 9.4 percent over the last 25 years, and today has a GDP of $11 trillion, making it the second-largest economy in the world after the United States. Foreign companies have poured more than $600 billion into China since 1978, far eclipsing what the United States spent rebuilding post-war Europe in the Marshall Plan. China now has a middle class of 200 million people, 80 million of whom are quite well-off. The country exports more in a single day than it did in all of 1978.

How things shake out religiously, therefore, is of tremendous strategic importance, even for people who don't feel any particular spiritual stake in the result. If Christianity ends up at around 20 percent of the population, for example, China could become an exponentially larger version of South Korea (where Christians are between 25-50 percent of the population, depending upon which count one accepts) -- a more democratic, rule-oriented, basically pro-Western society. On the other hand, if dynamic Muslim movements create an Islamic enclave in the western half of the country, with financial and ideological ties to fundamentalist Wahhabi forms of Islam in Saudi Arabia, at least that part of China could become a wealthier and more influential Afghanistan. If growing religious pluralism in China becomes fractious, it could mean that a well-armed and wealthy superpower is destabilized by internal conflict, posing risks to global peace and security.

Asia Times columnist Spengler discusses Allen's article in a piece entitled Christianity Finds a Fulcrum in Asia, exploring both the religious and geopolitical aspects:

Where traditional society remains entrenched in China's most backward regions, Islam also is expanding. At the edge of the Gobi Desert and on China's western border with Central Asia, Islam claims perhaps 30 million adherents. If Christianity is the liquidator of traditional society, I have argued in the past, Islam is its defender against the encroachments of leveling imperial expansion. But Islam in China remains the religion of the economic losers, whose geographic remoteness isolates them from the economic transformation on the coasts. Christianity, by contrast, has burgeoned among the new middle class in China's cities, where the greatest wealth and productivity are concentrated. Islam has a thousand-year presence in China and has grown by natural increase rather than conversion; evangelical Protestantism had almost no adherents in China a generation ago.

Read more here.

Photo by Michael Mooney, some rights reserved.

Get ready for your summer missions trip

The excellent site called Heal Your Church Web Site is out with a great article entitled Maximize Your Summer Missions Impact With Disruptive Technologies. The big idea: instant updates and even live reporting from that missions trip are now available. What more can churches be doing to connect congregations with the field other than showing PowerPoint slides (or regular slides) the week after everybody get home tired and tanned? The writer says:

In my line of work, individuals measure ‘tech time’ in terms of ‘dog years,’ meaning one multiplies by a factor of 7.

This means that if you’re are returning to a missions field with the same technological mindset you perhaps traveled with in 2003, then basically you’re hitting the road with know-how that’s 28 years in the past … which for those of us old enough to remember what it was like back then … your digital thinking is ‘disco-era’ … and nobody wants that!

That's a good warning, and it's followed by practical suggestions. Read more here.

Internet Evangelism Day

I dropped the ball on this one even though I had every good intention of talking about it. Internet Evangelism Day was this past Sunday and although it's still not on many folks' radar, the concept seems to be taking off.

Be ready for next year or just pick up useful hints on how to make your church website more evangelistic and less "churchy" all year around by visiting Gospelcom's Internet Evangelism homepage.

Anyone who hasn't yet appreciated the potential of this medium to reach those who need a relationship with God needs to re-think a lot of things. All Christian webmasters and bloggers know, or should know, that their product is read by all sorts of people in all sorts of places. I can't explain why our humble blog, which mostly focuses on Connecticut, is well-read in Australia and New Zealand relative to our total numbers, nor why we've picked up a reader or two in Kansas. But it shows the power of the Web for good as well as for ill.

One suggestion for our friends at Gospelcom: they need to call it something other than IE Day. There is a famous product in the computer world which I used to use and which is often referred to as "IE." They're up to IE7 at the moment. :)

What's the best outreach and evangelism resource for churches?

We're not sure... it depends on the DNA of your church and your location, among other things.



However, Outreach Magazine has named Bill Hybels' book Just Walk Across the Room: Simple Steps Pointing People to Faith as the "Best Outreach Resource of 2006."

With more than 100,000 copies sold since its August 2006 debut, Just Walk Across the Room: Simple Steps Pointing People to Faith by popular Christian author and megachurch pastor Bill Hybels continues to affect its readers and transform the way churches approach evangelism.

The book, and its related resources, center on the power of Christians to fulfill the Great Commission through intentional friendships, faithful prayer and the ability to share the Gospel by telling their own spiritual stories. Hybels writes: “When you communicate your personal faith story with sincerity, you will see supernatural sparks fly as God uses it for His glory and your listener’s good....”

Building off the book’s foundation, Hybels and co-author Ashley Wiersma created a four-week churchwide evangelism campaign by the same name, which more than 1,000 churches have already completed. The “Just Walk Across the Room Experience” has allowed church members to learn and respond to Hybels’ teaching through a small group DVD curriculum or through 90-minute satellite broadcast events held in October 2006 and January 2007—with more simulcast events planned for this fall.

Hat tip: Christian Post.