“Unofficial” house churches in China, like this one in Beijing, mainly operate underground, but experts estimate that they are responsible for the fastest-growing segment of Christians in China.
Christianity Booming in China
More people go to church on Sunday in China than in the whole of Europe.
The government says there are 25 million Christians in the country—18 million Protestants and six million Catholics. Independent estimates all agree this is a vast underestimate. A conservative figure is 60 million.
New converts range in status from peasants in the remote rural villages to the sophisticated, young middle class in the booming cities.
Throughout the 20th century, Christianity was associated with Western imperialism. After the Communist victory in 1948, the missionaries were expelled, but Christianity was permitted in state-sanctioned churches, so long as they gave their primary allegiance to the Communist Party.
However, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s attempted to eradicate it. Driven underground, Christianity not only survived, but with its own Chinese martyrs, it grew in strength.
Since the 1980s, when religious belief was again permitted, the official churches have gradually created more space for themselves, reporting to the State Administration for Religious Affairs. However, they are forbidden to take part in any religious activity outside their places of worship and sign up to the slogan, “Love the country—love your religion.”
The official Protestant Church is growing faster than Catholicism, and the unofficial “house churches” are growing faster still.
The so-called “spiritual crisis” in China, a phrase that has even been used by the Premier Wen Jiao Bao, is what some feel is driving the growth of the church.
As one of China’s philosophers of religion, Professor He Guanghu, at Renmin University in Beijing told the BBC: “The worship of Mammon… has become many people’s life purpose.
“I think it is very natural that many other people will not be satisfied… will seek some meaning for their lives so that when Christianity falls into their lives, they will seize it very tightly.” ¦ —BBC
U.S. Presbyterians Launch New Denomination
Conservative Presbyterians in the U.S. launched a new denomination in January, saying that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is too consumed by internal conflicts and bureaucracy to nurture healthy congregations.
“This ‘new Reformed body’ is intended to foster a new way of being the church, just as traditional, mainline denominations rose to serve in their day,” wrote leaders of the new Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians (ECO), Religion News Service reports.
More than 2,000 people attended the ECO’s meeting in January, but a straw poll indicated that most have not yet decided whether to leave the PC(USA), according to the Presbyterian Outlook, an independent magazine.
The creation of the ECO follows the PC(USA)’s church-wide vote last year to lift its longtime ban on gay clergy. Though homosexuality is not mentioned in the ECO’s founding documents, its stated commitment to conservative theology and the inerrancy of the Bible indicates that gay clergy will not be tolerated.
The ECO also hopes to distinguish itself by creating peer review systems for churches, promoting leadership training, and instituting a less hierarchical form of government than the PC(USA), according to a statement.
Several dozen congregations have already started to leave the PC(USA) to join another conservative denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Unlike that denomination, the ECO says it is “fully committed” to allowing female clergy.
Though still the largest Presbyterian denomination in the U.S., the PC(USA) lost more than 500,000 members between 1998 and 2009, and now has about two million members. ¦ —ENI
Women’s Attire Sparks Protests in Malawi
It’s been 18 years since the late dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s “indecency in dress” laws were repealed in Malawi, but mobs of men and boys in the largely conservative African country have recently been publicly stripping women of their miniskirts and pants.
In January, hundreds of outraged girls and women, among them prominent politicians, protested the attacks while wearing pants or miniskirts and T-shirts emblazoned with such slogans as: “Real men don’t harass women.”
“Some of us have spent our entire life fighting for the freedom of women,” Vice-President Joyce Banda told the protesters. “It’s shocking some men want to take us back to bondage.”
During Banda’s 1963-1994 dictatorship, women in Malawi were banned from wearing pants and short skirts. Banda lost power in the country’s first multiparty election in 1994 and died three years later.
While Banda is gone, strains of conservatism remain. Some of the street vendors who recently attacked women claimed it was un-Malawian to dress in miniskirts and pants, and that it was a sign of loose morals or prostitution.
The attacks took on such importance, President Bingu wa Mutharika went on state television and radio on the eve of the protest to assure women they were free to wear what they want.
¦ —Associated Press
Japanese Award-Winner Says He Was Inspired by a Psalm
The Japanese environmentalist who said a psalm inspired his campaign received one of the United Nations’ inaugural Forest Hero awards.
Shigeatsu Hatakeyama, an oyster fisherman who saw his livelihood destroyed when the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami hit the coastal city of Kesennuma, was named the Forest Hero winner for Asia in February.
Hatakeyama, a member of Japan’s Baptist Union, said that Psalm 42 was the source of his campaign’s name: “The Forest is Longing for the Sea, the Sea is Longing for the Forest.”
“He is known as ‘Grandpa Oyster,’ after spending more than 20 years developing the forest environment that keeps the Okawa River clean and his oysters healthy,” said the UN.
Hatakeyama explained that iron being supplied from the forest through the river into the sea is playing a key role in the recovery of sea life. ¦ —ENI
Prayer for Christian Unity
Despite divides and divisions, churches and congregations observed the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity from January 18-25. This year’s theme was taken from 1 Corinthians: “We will all be changed by the victory of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Across the U.S. and Canada, local Christian communities marked the annual event with special worship services and community gatherings.
According to Rev. Victor Kim from Grace Presbyterian Church in Calgary, “It’s a week that is ecumenical in nature. So it’s not about one particular denomination, one particular strand. It’s a week that joins together the Roman Catholic and Protestant and other traditions, including Orthodox, and it’s celebrated all over the world.”
The Week is sponsored jointly by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Presbyterian-supported World Council of Churches Commission on Faith and Order. This year, the materials were prepared by churches in Poland, reflecting and sharing from their own history of partition and victory over oppression.
Churches together in Britain and Ireland stressed the significance of “change,” as an integral part of theology and unity among the churches.
“Change is also at the heart of the ecumenical movement. When we pray for the unity of the church we are praying that the churches that we know, and which are so familiar to us will change as they conform more closely to Christ,” they emphasized. ¦ —WCC
