latest take on china
LED BY A booming Pentecostal population, the number of Christians in China has mushroomed in the last half century to make it the third largest Christian nation in the world, behind only the United States and Brazil. About 900,000 Protestants lived in the country at the time of the Communist takeover in 1949. Today China has about 111 million Christians, about 90 percent Protestant and mostly Pentecostal, according to the World Christian Database, published by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity.
Religious data is notoriously imprecise in an officially atheistic state, and other estimates go as low as 70 million and 40 million, in line with the CIA World Factbook. Even those conservative estimates, however, translate into Protestantism in China growing roughly 4,300 percent over the last half-century, most of it since the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and 1970s.
By 2050, there will be 218 million Christians in China, 16 percent of the population, enough to make China the world’s second-largest Christian nation, according to the center, which estimates 10,000 conversions in China every day.
This growth, however, has largely bypassed the Roman Catholic Church. Current estimates put the number of Chinese Catholics at 12 million, compared to 3.3 million in 1949, which means Catholicism has just kept pace with overall population growth.
I will post the reasons, as vieed by a Roman Catholic, in the next blog…
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i think a lot of this has to do with the RC not emphasizing sending missionaries. of course, the RC has been the greatest mission organization in the world.
peter
Although historically Catholic missionaries have made a huge impact on the world, in this case neither Catholics nor Protestants have been able to send missionaries into China… I think it’s more likely to do with the Protestant idea of the priesthood of all believers… if an ordained priest is pivotal to the religious of life of a community there is no capacity for rapid, exponential growth. Whereas in China tiny “house churches” have multiplied like mad.
Actually guys, I talked to a RC missiologist about this. He said it is because the RC is by nature more institutional and does not allow for the organic growth os self-contained communities. In th terms of my book, it lacks the organic system to be able to foster rapid, spontaneous, growth.
Would it be true to say the more institutional approach “worked” better when all you needed to do to convert a people to Christianity (at least supercially!) was to convert the king of the kingdom (or the chief of the tribe)?
I mean… superficially.
At the Forge National Conference earlier this year Wolfgang Simpson said that the Pope is considering promoting small group / at home worship around a particular liturgical form… if this takes off it may have more “exponential” potential than the default “we need a 7 year trained ordained priest to participate in the sacraments”. We live in interesting times.
“He said it is because the RC is by nature more institutional and does not allow for the organic growth of self-contained communities. In th terms of my book, it lacks the organic system to be able to foster rapid, spontaneous, growth.”
Which is now increasingly hampered by the power of communication. While in the past there was the hierarchy the weeks and months it might take to communicate resulted in more of a self-contained environment. Now, the hierarchy remains and expects regular contact.
If we look at the historic mission sending movement in the Western church (much of which predate the Great Schism and thus the establishment of the Roman Church)we see that missionaries had wide latitude in their organization. Patrick established Christianity in the model of the desert monks, according to abbas and monasteries, rather than by the parish model found in Italy. Jesuits went native and took up local cultures.
So while Catholics were very mission minded it has over the centuries become so much more rigid that we can’t really talk about the present Catholic church as representative of the historical movements.
Everything now needs the Bishop’s impremater, and then the Bishop the Cardinal, and so on. Pretty clunky!
And the Spirit hates clunky!
clunky…bad!
Alan,
Could the growth in Pentecostal faith stem from the repressive political and religious system of the nation? The free worship expression could draw folks who desire to breath some sense of freedom.
RCism could be seems as just more oppressive control of individual lives. AT this time, they cannot see the beauty in symbol an ritual, since much of the social and political culture is set up for control of individuals by ritual and symbol.
Jimmy, you might well be right here. I d know that the aesthetics of the high church tends to leave the poorer, and uneducated, classes a bit baffled. It is more bourgeoisie. Also, it is much harder to reproduce.
What about the possibility of charasmatic catholics? You know, ponticostals. Can such a thing exist?
sure, actually, I am going post a comment by a RC guy, and he suggests exactly that. That the RC in China should take their cue from the Penties