This past Thursday was another of YWAM’s monthly global prayer days, when YWAMers from around the world gather to pray around a central theme. This month’s topic was China, and I took a carload of my colleagues from Belfast to a little Carmelite convent in North Dublin to join a handful of the other YWAMers, representing Dublin and Banbridge.

Each month, a newsletter [1] is sent out from YWAM Int’l with the prayer day topic and usually a collection testimonies, as well as a suggestion on how to pray. This month’s newsletter featured a selection of stories from missionaries in China, as well as some statistics on the number of Christians in China (130 million, or 11-13% of the population, according to the newsletter) and a history of Christianity in China. This history is rich and complicated – not just the story of 19th century missionaries trudging their way up the Yangtze, but reaching back to 7th century Nestorians, and being presently and significantly rolled into China’s relationship with the West of the last couple hundred years.

In the West, we have confused the political pursuits of various nation states with the mantle of the Church for many hundreds of years. The banner of Christ has flown alongside campaigns for power consistently across Western history – through colonialism and Manifest Destiny, present and past. In many areas of the world, Christianity has been and is often still seen as a Western religion, going hand in hand with the other ideals of the states and cultures that employ its vocabulary. The colonized, formerly colonized, and non-Western countries have often had the understanding that our own nation’s present values, be they representative democracy, capitalism, materialism, colonialism, etc., are part of the package that also includes Christianity. This fallacy creates a tremendous problem for overseas missions: someone may reject one of these Western -isms and thus be averse to the gospel because they came in the same package. However, Christianity is the Kingdom of God, not Christendom, which is a kingdom of someone else with a bunch of religious vocabulary thrown in.

I will not delve into 19th and 20th century Chinese history, which saw both the Boxer Rebellion and the Cultural Revolution as reactions to foreign influence, into which Christianity was lumped with violent consequences for both Chinese and foreign followers of Christ. Today, Christianity is on the rise in China, in a mix of underground house churches, a regulated state church, and student movements. Despite the historical stigma on Christendom, people are being drawn into a meaningful relationship with Christ and community within the Church. Loren Cunningham, the founder of YWAM, postulates that Church growth could come to some sort of ‘tipping point’ at around 300 million or 25% of China’s population (what this ‘tipping point’ would then lead to is still unclear to me, but I think some sort of large-scale societal transformation is implied, or maybe mass conversion).

At the same time, China’s political and economic power is on the rise. In my understanding, it’s unlikely that they somehow ’supersede’ the United States as the world’s leading economy in the next couple decades [2], but nonetheless China is certainly the top three economies, and some foresee a future where China is the world’s leading superpower. Loren Cunningham recently said:

In 2000, I felt God saying that China could become the leading power this century, providing they continued to move towards God and His Word, and provided the West continued to turn away from God and his Word. I can’t see any nation close to China to become the world leader after Europe and North America lose their leadership, which they will do unless they turn around. The West can return to God. It would be wonderful if both the West and China came in peace to evangelize the world, but this looks unlikely.

There’s a lot about this quote that I won’t unpack or comment on, because it would take me in a completely different direction, but as we prayed together last Thursday, and as I thought about this statement, I realized what a fascinating and precarious situation the Chinese Church is in. With the increasing economic and political power of their nation, as well as an increasing number of Christians with increasing sense of legitimacy and influence, they have very important decisions to make. Indeed, if this ‘tipping point’ of Christians came about as China became a superpower, they might be somewhere near where our Christian forebearers were in the early centuries of the Church, first under a hostile empire, then with increasing power in that empire.

Of course, I welcome and pray, as others, that the believers may start to exist with more freedoms, less state interference, and have more influence in all aspects of society. But my most earnest prayer for the Chinese church is this:

• That they would feel and exist united to a global Body of Christ, and would not feel isolated.
• That they would hold first their citizenship in the Kingdom of God before their citizenship in their nation.
• That they would remain pure and dedicated first (if not solely) to the purposes of Christ, not the purposes of power and wealth.
• That they would learn from our mistakes and our history – the violence, the materialism, the emptiness of power over others, the idolatry possible in our nationalism.

Moreover, this is my prayer for all Christians living in a place of power and wealth – especially where our influence is heard, if not accepted, by the powers that be.

Links/References:

1. Prayer Day website – November 2009: China. Loren Cunningham quotes came from the recent Nov. 2009 newsletter, which is available if you sign up.
2. NPR’s Planet Money Podcast Episode 103: Here Comes China.