Despite
the increasing persecution of Christians in China, the Communist
country is on track to have the largest Christian population in the
world by 2030, according to Rodney Pennington who studies religious
trends for OMF International.
"We are overjoyed with what the Lord has already done in China," said
Pennington, vice president for mobilization of OMF, a missions
organization, in an interview with The Christian Post on Tuesday. "But
that doesn't mean the task is finished."
By 2030 "China will almost certainly have the most evangelical
Christians," he said, "and that will greatly shape the global
evangelical Church in the coming years.
That said, Pennington emphasized that there are still many needs in
China, especially in areas like discipleship, cross-cultural outreach
and ministering to children and youth."
"While 200 million Chinese believers by the year 2030 may seem
ambitious, it certainly gives us a strong goal to pray toward," he
added.
Yu Jie, a Chinese Christian and democracy activist, said in an essay
published in the August edition of First Things that Chinese Christians
are known to say "the greater the persecution, the greater the revival."
If recent reports are correct, the persecution has indeed been great
but the revival has been, in Yu's words, a "gushing well or geyser."
The exponential growth of the Christian faith in China can be traced
back to two moments in modern Chinese history, according to Yu.
Those two moments were the launch of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution in
1966 and the Tienanmen Square massacre in 1989. Millions of innocent
people lost their lives in those events, and as a result many people
have stopped believing in Marxism-Leninism and Maoist ideology, Yu said.
The director of the Center of Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue
University, Fenggyang Yang, noted in an essay published in Slate
magazine that Protestantism has been growing in China by more than 10
percent every year. In 1980 there were approximately 3 million
Christians in China. By 2010 that number had risen to 58 million. He
suggests that by 2025, there could be 255 million Christians.
Even with the impressive growth of Christianity, China is still officially an atheist country.
In April, CP reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping told his
Communist Party members that they must be "unyielding Marxist atheists"
who will command Christians and other religious groups in the country.
Since 2014, the Communist regime has been targeting Christians and
demolishing churches, deeming the buildings "illegal." The government
has demolished more than 200 churches and removed over 2,000 crosses in
China's Zhejiang province in an effort to limit Christianity's influence
in the region.
Human rights attorneys who provide legal support to churches in China
have also been subjected to gruesome torture and forced to confess on
television that they have disturbed the peace, and jeopardized national
security.
While some churches have been allowed to operate under strict state
surveillance, many others, especially house churches and ministry
organizations not registered with the government, are heavily oppressed.
Yu noted that there are three times as many illegal house churches as
state-sponsored ones, and that repression is particularly bad in
Wenzhou, "China's Jerusalem" in Zhejiang province, where an estimated 15
percent of the population is Christian.
Despite the crackdown on Christianity in his native country, Yu said he is not unsettled.
"Neither the dead hand of Communism, nor the cynical imitation of
Confucianism, nor capitalism, nor democracy, nor any earthly thing will
determine the fate of my land," he said.
Read more: China on Track to Have World's Largest Christian Population by 2030
