This book by a former Time correspondent struck me at two levels. First, I was inspired and humbled by the stories of Christian men and women holding up under prolonged persecution. In addition, I was challenged to pray for God’s people in China as they pursue what they believe is their unique mission mandate: They want to bring the gospel full circle Westward into Jerusalem, and that requires evangelizing in the Muslim-dominated lands between China and Jerusalem.
In the 90s, Chinese Christian leaders often stated the goal of raising 100,000 Christian missionaries to send out to the world by 2007. Since Aikman’s book was written in 2003, I don’t know if that goal has been reached. But what an aggressive goal! One Chinese Christian leader said:
“Even in 1994, when we sent out the first to 70 evangelists, we had a vision to take the gospel to the whole world. We have a vision today to send out missionaries to all countries. We have the same vision as the others to take the revival back to Jerusalem.”This vision of China having a key role in bringing the Gospel through the Muslim countries to their West until they finally reach Jerusalem has been the heartbeat of many Chinese house church Christians for decades, at least as far back as May 1942:
A British woman missionary in Chongqing in 1949 wrote in one of her missionary reports that she knew at least five different Chinese Christian groups that wished to check the gospel out of China in a westerly direction. “The thing that has impressed me most,” she reported, “has been a strange, unaccountable urge of a number of different Chinese groups, quite unconnected with each other, who have left their homes in east China and gone forth, leaving practically everything behind them, to the west” (page 199).This drive to take the gospel Westward comes from their conviction that they have received the gospel because missionaries headed west, and now the baton has been passed to them. From page 203:
As one Christian leader put it, “It was the apostle Paul who took the gospel to Europe and now, after 2000 years, it has come to China. When the disciples left Jerusalem to go toward East Asia and Europe, they were only a few people. They went barefoot. Now the gospel has reached China and we have several Christian networks. We believe that now that the gospel has reached China it will follow the old Silk Road back to Jerusalem. Once the gospel comes back to Jerusalem, it will mean that the gospel has been preached to the whole world. We have the view that Chinese missionaries will be part of the mainstream on the highway back to Jerusalem.”And he added, “The Muslim religion is the biggest obstacle on the road back to Jerusalem.”
Chinese Christians are addressing this obstacle, according to Aikman:
To this end, there are several small missionary-training seminaries in different parts of China that are training Chinese Christians as missionaries to the Muslim world. Some Chinese have enrolled in Arabic-language programs in major Chinese universities. Some of the smaller, underground missionary seminaries have brought in Arabic-speaking Christians to train a new generation of Chinese missionaries to work in the Islamic world. Some Americans who encourage the Back to Jerusalem effort in China estimate that there may already be several hundred Chinese house church Christians operating as missionaries--perhaps filling professional positions like engineers, interpreters, or ordinary laborers--throughout the Middle East.Many Chinese Christian leaders consider that the Chinese have an advantage in Muslim countries. As one put it: “Muslims prefer Chinese to Americans. They don’t like Americans very much.”
Why? First, he said, “The Chinese government supports [Middle Eastern] terrorism so the Muslim nations support China.’ By “supports terrorism,” he didn’t mean the government promoted the use of terrorism, but that the government supported the anti-American objectives of some political groups in the Middle East. He continued:
“Besides, we have a lot of experience of persecution. As Chinese missionaries, wherever we go, when we arrive in a place we always see what the escape route will be.”Aikman explains that the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square caused an explosion in Chinese students examining Christianity for the first time. (Jesus said something about the evangelistic growth that comes from sacrifice, too). He said that after “hundreds, perhaps thousands of Beijing citizens, including many students, were killed the soldiers and trucks and tanks fought their way toward Tiananmen Square,” Chinese Christians began to notice something. In the 1990s, “hundreds of students, previously uninterested in religion, were coming to church or wanting to discuss the Christian faith. . . . Hitherto, the ‘Christianity fever’ that was changing China’s countryside seemed to a bypass China’s emerging new intelligentsia. Now this important component of China’s life and future was beginning to pay attention to the Christian faith. What was the attraction of Christianity to intellectuals and the post-Tiananmen era? One suggestion was that China’s traditional Confucian view of man as inherently good was shattered under the tanks that rolled into the center of Beijing in early June 1989” (page 171).
Aikman concludes his book with these comments (from page 285):
China is in the process of becoming Christianized. That does not mean that all Chinese will become Christian, or even a majority will. But at the present rate of growth in the number of Christians in the countryside, in the cities, and especially within China’s social and cultural establishment, it is possible that Christians will constitute 20 to 30 percent of China’s population within three decades. If that should happen, it is almost certain that a Christian view of the world will be the dominant worldview within China’s political and cultural establishment, and possibly also within senior military circles.Put this one on your reading list.
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