Although today is the dawn of the Chinese New Year, most people are unaware that Chinese Christians are gearing up to be the world's most potent missionary force.China? Christians? Sure enough. For decades now they've had plans to evangelize the Muslim world that lies along the old Silk Road route. This could be one of the most ambitious missionary enterprises in 2,000 years of Christianity. No national church has amazed the world as much as that of the Chinese. From 1 million at the time of the Communist takeover in 1949, it's grown to 100 million followers, a breathtaking growth in 60 years.
Evangelical Chinese Christians have come up with a way to evangelize a large portion of the world that will never see a western missionary. These are countries with large Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu populations, most of them located somewhere along a 7,000-mile route stretching from Xian in central China to the cities of Jerusalem, Antioch and Istanbul in the Middle East. Those were the ancient terminuses of the famous Silk Road.
| Oboy -- this is going to be interesting. In 2007 Muslim religious figures were complaining that in sub-Saharan Africa alone, Islam was losing six million believers a year to Christianity (see Al Jazeera interview on the subject here), and evangelical and "former Muslim" organizations were claiming significant gains in the Arab world, Iran, and Afghanistan as well (and perhaps beyond, but this is not something I have followed closely). |