The Gospel In China

Although the church in China has been doing great in evangelism, I suspect that whether that 'revival' will translate into meaningful social change in the future direction of this emerging superpower depends on whether the Third-Wave Chinese Christians would be equipped to comprehensively engage the world with the power of the gospel.

A scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Science, the top think-tank of the Bejing government is reported to have said this:

One of the things we wee asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective.

At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful.

The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubts about this.


The quotation comes from David Aikman's book, "Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power", (Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, 2003) page 5.

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