The Guardian has a fascinating report on the incredible progress of the Chinese Church, and calvinism in particular:
Although Calvinism is shrinking in western Europe and North America, it is experiencing an extraordinary success . . .as an elite religion in China . . .There may be some parallels with the growth of Calvinism in South Korea, where the biggest presbyterian churches in the world are to be found, but it’s absolutely unlike the pattern in Africa and Latin America. There, the fastest growing forms ofChristianity are pentecostal, and they are spreading among the poor.
But in China neither of those things are to be true . . .
Calvinism isn’t a religion of subservience to any government. The great national myths of Calvinist cultures are all of wars against imperialist oppressors . . .
“The youngsters think it is very cool to be Christian. Communism has removed all the obstacles for them to come to Christianity.”
The most conservative estimates of the new converts to Christianity is 500,000; there is a new church built every month . . . “Very soon”, said Dr Tan, “Christians will become the majority of university students … that could happen.”
It would be astonishing if China were to become a great power in the Christian world, as well as in the economic one. But things just as strange have happened in the past. Who could have foreseen, when Augustine was writing those huge books now translated into Chinese, that barbarous Europe would become the centre of Christian civilisation, and his homeland in North Africa would become entirely Muslim?
READ MORE AT Chinese Calvinism flourishes | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In