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.

An informal fundraiser for Mikael & Renee, missionaries with YWAM in Northern Ireland. Donations welcome, but not required!

Sunday, 4 October 2009, between 7-10pm.
Drop in at the Heisey farm for a good time playing games, eating food, navigating a hay tunnel, or just socializing. Everyone’s welcome!

Any donations will go toward Mikael and Renee’s ministry in Northern Ireland over the next year.

Need directions? Follow our link to Google Maps

Please, invite your friends. If you’re able to RSVP (including numbers of people you might bring), that would be helpful to us. You can RSVP or find out more info using our event posting on Facebook, or send us an email using our contacts page.

Heisey farm
2059 Sunnyside Rd.
Manheim, PA 17545
USA
717-665-2284

The sun made an unaccustomed appearance this Saturday, and even though the clouds were in contest and the weather wasn’t particularly warm, people all around this island headed to the beach and into their gardens for one last attempt at pretending summer hadn’t ended two weeks into July. Nonetheless, it was a good day for bouncy castles, grilled sausages, and face painting. Renee and I spent most of the late afternoon and early evening playing with kids and helping at the back-to-school event being held behind Feed cafe on the Shankill Road in working-class West Belfast. The cafe is a joint venture of our Lebanese YWAM colleagues Ramy and Roula Taleb and a local Christian businessman, as an outreach, and a place where people can come for prayer and conversation, and more recently, a safe hangout for local kids to come and be helped with homework.

We had made our way to the cafe up the Shankill Road that afternoon on foot because of the parades of marching bands and partying onlookers crowding the street. We hopped over cases of beer, ducking the blinking tips of cigarettes, and parrying precariously strewn lawn chairs. Someone told us later that eighty bands were on the street that day, all of the protestant flute & drum variety. From the sky they might have looked like neatly sorted jelly beans in their uniforms, escalating through the neighborhood according to color, village, and slogan.

When we arrived, ice cream and popcorn were in full demand at the cafe, and there was a man asleep on the sofa – a well-known, neighborhood alcoholic and a sort of cafe refugee who feeds the fish in the cafe aquarium. The bands and the party, we were told, were for his brother, an alleged paramilitary who was gunned down by the SAS (British special forces) while sitting on his bicycle. And while the crowds drank themselves into double negatives, and the local strongmen divided their praise, our friend slept through the day, unnoticed and unbothered.

We set up our little village in the car park behind the cafe. Our establishments were those of inflated castle, inflated football goal, facepaint station, balloon sculpting station, and friendly guides, bearing encouragements, prayer, and hot-dogs for the kids. Somehow the merriment and binge drinking down the street faded into an inaudible blur, and we had our own good time.

Throughout our celebration with the kids that day, I was impressed by how little the general occupation of the neighborhood affected them. In one way, maybe they had simply grown accustomed to drunkenness and revelry; however, I largely think their ability to play, laugh, apologize, bounce, kick, run, trick, and cry are a testament to a child’s ability to be true to their own playfulness and curiosity no matter their situation or environment. I’ve seen this around the world: minus food, minus bouncy castles, minus face paint, minus shelter, they are children the same (I remember a slum in Thailand where the only open play space was amongst graves…). No wonder Our Lord challenges us to become like children. If somehow we manage, perhaps our imagination and sense of self will not be oppressed by our present occupations.

Please pray for Ramy and Roula in their work through the cafe. In the midst of the practicalities of serving, cooking, and cleaning, they are ambitious in their outreach. They’ve recently started a homework club at the cafe for kids after school, where they can come and be helped with their exercises. The government recognizes that there is a gigantic void in progressing past basic levels of education for kids on the Shankill versus kids in middle-class or wealthy areas (check out this Belfast Telegraph Article). The homework club aims to aid kids in learning, to encourage them, to pray for them, and give them a safe place to hang out. Please pray for this new venture and for general opportunities within the community for the cafe ministry.

We recently announced we’d be leading the October DTS in Belfast. Instead, we have combined the DTS with the one that was scheduled to start in January, and we’ll be staffing the school under Jonny Clark’s leadership, also starting in January.

During all of this, we had some good ideas cooking about DTS that we’re excited to develop, and we’re glad for this extra time to give it more thought, planning, and action. YWAM Belfast is smallish in staff numbers, and so we need to run the DTS in a way that it comes alongside everything that the staff are already doing. So we’re looking at how to do that… and we think it’ll be good.

Another idea that has come up is to develop a volunteer programme that runs before the DTS that some of the attendees can apply to come early for. We’re now in full swing of putting this together, hoping that the earliest of them could arrive in mid-November. We want them to get some input on reconciliation and Irish history, but primarily to link them with our ministries and our contacts based on needs. We’ve launched this under the name of Mission Belfast, and it has generated good interest.

The next few weeks will get us a solid foundation for putting structure to the coming year.