Christianity Is Thriving In China While Dying In the West: Suffering Is a Major Difference
He leads me …
Wayne Cordeiro, is the pastor of New Hope Christian Fellowship in Honolulu, Hawaii, and had an interesting experience when his team went to China, to train church leaders.
Wayne shared how 22 Christians from the Hunan Province in China took a 13-hour train ride to attend the leadership training. Of these, 18 had been imprisoned for their faith and knew the risks of being caught during the training. They would go to prison for three years.
Wayne started the training by passing out Bibles, but he only had 15 for the 22 folk attending. As he asked for those present to open their Bibles to 2 Peter 1, Wayne noticed that one lady passed her Bible to the person next to her, and that when they all read the passage out loud, she recited it from memory.
When there was a break, Wayne spoke to the lady and said, ‘You recited the whole chapter.’ The woman replied, ‘You have much time in prison.’ ‘But don’t they confiscate the Bibles?’ Wayne asked. The lady responded that while Christian material was confiscated, scripture written on paper was still smuggled in and hidden from the prison guards.
‘That’s why we memorize it as fast as we can, because even though they can take the paper away, they can’t take what’s hidden in our heart’ she explained.
At the end of the training, one Chinese Christian asked Wayne, ‘Could you pray that one day we could just be like you?’ Wayne responded, ‘I will not do that. You guys rode a train 13 hours to get here. In my country, if you have to drive more than an hour, people won’t come.’
‘You sat here for three days on a hard wooden floor. In my country if it’s not padded pews and air conditioning, people will not come back. In my country, we have an average of two Bibles per family, and we don’t read either of them. You hardly have any Bibles and you memorize them from pieces of paper. I will not pray that you become like us, but I will pray that we become just like you.’[1]
It seems that all we memorise these days are the passwords for the various programmes on our computer, our telephone number and maybe our credit card number. This is what is important – right? After all people’s addresses and phone numbers are already stored on our various electronic devices, and anything that we are not sure about (including Bible verses) can be found on Google, so why memorise anything else?
Francis Chan abandoned his thriving 5000 member megachurch and started a much more humble and low key house church movement. Why? This is what he said.
‘I got frustrated at a point, just biblically. I’m going, wait a second. According to the Bible, every single one of these people has a supernatural gift that’s meant to be used for the body. And I’m like 5,000 people show up every week to hear my gift, see my gift. That’s a lot of waste. Then I started thinking how much does it cost to run this thing? Millions of dollars! So I’m wasting the human resource of these people that according to Scripture have a miraculous gift that they could contribute to the body, but they’re just sitting there quietly. … They just sit there and listen to me.’
Francis Chan also said, ‘Moreover, the church wasn’t following God’s command to love one another — attendees would simply greet each other for 30 seconds and mainly hang out in cliques once a week. “I was like, ‘God, you wanted a church that was known for their love. You wanted a group of people where everyone was expressing their gifts. … We’re a body. I’m one member, maybe I’m the mouth. But if the mouth is the only thing that’s working and … I’m trying to drag the rest of the body along, but…’
His decision in 2010 to leave Cornerstone — which he started in his living room — came as a shock to many, including fellow evangelical pastors. In his announcement to the congregation, he said he had been feeling a restlessness and stirring to let go of the megachurch and take on a new adventure. He also indicated that he was wary of being ‘comfortable.’
When asked what he does with all the money he earns through his bestselling books, Chan said he gives it all away. He had prayed to God years ago, saying he was frustrated with the rich people in church who only give 5 to 10 percent of their money to church while living off millions.
Chan then decided to give it all away to show that God is better than what the western church was doing. When he surprisingly made a million dollars the next year through his book and continued to make more over the following years, he signed it all over to a charitable gift fund, ‘So that I can’t even touch it. I can’t even buy lunch with the money … I can only give to charity. It’s been the best thing. Now I spend my days going and looking where there are needs around the world, and how can I contribute to them’.[2]
Surely this looks like genuine Christian discipleship? No clichés and empty words, but clear evidence of a person committed to God and His purposes.
Is this all about the money? No, but we all should look at our lifestyles and assess what really is a priority for us. Spending time seeking what Almighty God really wants us to do might be the best thing any believer could do.
Each Christian should prayerfully and carefully consider what God would have them to do when it comes to the life of the church. Gliding through life without contributing in some way is not what Jesus taught. For a lot of us, the initial love and passion that we had for the Lord as a new Christian disappeared long ago. Remember in Revelation 2:4-5 (NLT) Jesus said, ‘You don’t love me or each other as you did at first! Look how far you have fallen! Turn back to me and do the works you did at first.’
Do we seriously think about our relationship with the Lord? Is church really all about its entertainment culture, complete with rock concerts, strobe lights and smoke machines? Is church all about what the church leadership feed us?
As Chan has said, ‘Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.’[3]
[1] Chinese Christians Memorize Bible in Prison: Gov't 'Can’t Take What’s Hidden in Your Heart', Leah MarieAnn Klett, Christian Post Editor, The Christian Post; www.christianpost.com/news/chinese-christians-memorize-bible-prison-cant-take-whats-hidden-in-your-heart.html
[2] Christianity Is Thriving In China While Dying In the West: Suffering Is A Major Difference, Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch; https://billmuehlenberg.com/2019/06/12/christianity-is-thriving-in-china-while-dying-in-the-west-suffering-is-a-major-difference/
[3] Francis Chan, Christian Discipleship, and House Churches, Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch; http://billmuehlenberg.com/2017/07/04/francis-chan-christian-discipleship-house-churches/
