China Reflections



My wife and I have returned from China. We got back at 2 a.m. December 6. I always find international travel intriguing. We left Guangzhou at 10 p.m. December 5, and got to LA December 5 at 6 p.m. So we landed four hours before we left. I remember hearing about a basketball player who refused to get on a team flight. It left Cincinnati and landed in St. Louis twenty minutes for it left. The player demurred saying, “I ain’t gettin’ in no time machine.” I know how he feels.

This was a hard trip for me in a number of ways mostly because I’m old. At 78 I probably shouldn’t be moving across the world for two and half months. Then there was the work my daughter engaged me in. For seven weeks I taught three classes of middle school and high school students, four days a week. I thought I put all that behind me but here I was getting up and going to work every day. It was a bit tiring. But it was also one of the most rewarding trips of my life. I taught Bible and Western Civ(Bible in a different form) every day and I relish watching the power of the Word of God as it enters young minds. At the end of my time many of my young students thanked me with tears in their eyes for coming across the world to teach them biblical truth.

In addition to the regular teaching I met with several other groups in educational co-ops around the city. I spoke on the general theme I have been on for the past several years—how Jesus Christ has changed the world and continues to change it.

Now that the trip is over and I am back in my recliner in America let me make a few observations about China.

This is one of the most crowded places on earth and you have to be here to feel it. Guangzhou is a city of about 20 million people with a population density of 5,000 people per square mile. By comparison the U.S. has a population density of around 100 people per square mile. I grew up in Wyoming with a density of 6 per square mile. I noticed the difference. China is about the same size as the U.S. with four times the population and Jesus Christ cares about every single one of them.

This is an aging society. When I was out and about I saw children and young adults but what I saw mostly was the elderly. I felt quite at home. China’s median age is 40. The world average is 31. What makes it important in China is they have no social security system. The elderly depend on their children to care for them and it’s a crisis in Chinese society. Many of the younger generation are not doing their job. The problem is only going to get worse with the plunging Chinese birth rate.

It's very common to see grandparents taking care of children while both parents work. A huge percentage of families have only one child and that’s by choice. China abandoned their horrific and idiotic one-child policy a number of years ago. They bought into it in 1981 because a bunch of American population Nazis said they needed to in order to have a prosperous future. It was one of the many lies told by American Greens and it has cost China tens of millions of lives it badly needs now.

There are millions of cars on the road and they are all new. I asked my daughter about this and she said it’s because only in the past few years have the Chinese been rich enough to buy cars. So all the cars are recently purchased. At least in Guangzhou the numbers of cars are matched by the number of motos. These are the electric motor scooters owned by millions and they dart in and out and across traffic with little thought for life ending collisions. Driving in China is like being a live participant in a video game.

The Christian community in China is large and dynamic. When I talked to my students about the definition of a nominal Christian—a person who calls himself a Christian but really isn’t one—they had trouble grasping the concept. In China there is no advantage to calling yourself a Christian if you aren’t serious about it. There is no social advantage to being thought a Christian when you have no real faith.

There is a legal church in China—one that is registered and controlled by the Marxist government—but the unregistered church is by all accounts much, much larger. I asked numerous Chinese Christians the statistical difference and no one knew. They simply said the difference is great. In other words, the vast majority of Christians in China choose to worship in churches that are technically illegal. One of my students had been attending a church that was recently closed by local authorities.

The Christian youth I encountered were like Christian youth everywhere—some pressured by parents to attend church, some with a low level of commitment. But many were dynamic and aggressive young Christians determined to further the Kingdom. I met a lot of adults who had been recently baptized. There are lots of young Chinese who have grown up in Christian homes but there are a lot who haven’t. They are adult converts to the faith and first generation Christians. That creates unique pastoral challenges.

Speaking of pastors they are quite a group. As you know one of my jobs in America is to minister to pastors so I know quite a bit about them. Chinese pastors are a normal group in ways with the usual infighting and squabbling I expect from pastors. But they are a courageous lot. A number of prominent house church pastors have recently been arrested. I asked one pastor how this made him feel. He said, “It’s what you sign up for.” You know that at any time you could be sent to jail and separated from your family. I asked this pastor’s wife what she thought. She said, “It’s what you sign up for.” She did not want one iota of compromise in her husband.

My pastors in America face a lot of problems, many of them serious, but none face the danger of arrest for simply being a pastor.

One final thought, the Christians in China seem to be overwhelmingly Protestant. When lecturing about the Reformation I was going to talk at length about the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism but not one of my students knew any Catholics. Not one. They simply are not here. Neither are the cults so far as I could tell. To be sure there are a tiny number of Mormons but they never do well in persecuted areas. Nobody I encountered knew any. Same with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There are large homegrown cults but I heard little about them.

If you were able to travel in time back to first century Christianity in the Roman empire I think the current situation in China is a lot like what you would experience. A persecuted but powerful church that the government would like to destroy but simply can’t. They are a reminder that the presence and power of the Holy Spirit is real and at work in our world. The Christians in China are an encouragement to Christians everywhere. May God increase their numbers. I’m sure He will.

Thanks for listening. May the Lord bless you this day in a mighty way.

More: China Update; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7xvz1BRaXQ

“I am in China”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlLGje66aaU