The Church and the world

From Guatemalan hilltop towns to China’s social revolution, the Church is going strong.

(*Note on terminology* sometimes I talk about 'Protestants'. This is a denomination of Christianity and is within that religion, rather than being separate.)

Guatemala



Almolonga

The Economist recently published a special report on Almolonga, a town of 14,000 in Guatemala’s highlands.

Guatemala is not a prospering, peaceful country. In 2014, it was 31st of 33 Latin American/Caribbean countries on the Human Development Index. A former leader has been convicted on charges of genocide.

 

But in the 1970s there was a revival of the Christian faith in Almolonga. And that revival has changed the town. In 2003, they opened a secondary school which sends graduates to national universities; the school board talk seriously about students working at NASA.


Guatemala's in Central America

Three-quarters of the town are now members of the Church, and farmers in Almolonga earn two times more than farmers in a neighbouring town (where religion hasn’t taken off).

Down in Guatemala City, the capital, almost all of the 200 drug rehab centres are run by Christians; having a faith has been linked to a rise in earnings among male workers; the Church has had a prominent role in anti-corruption campaigns and gang ceasefires.

The Church is on the rise in Guatemala.
 It’s easy enough to shrug this off as a an accident; a small country changing amidst a struggling world. It's not all success; the Church there has been politically clumsy at times (e.g. allowing the state more power over its affairs).
But I don't buy the 'accident' story. Because it's not the only place where change is happening so fast, and with such great effects.

 

China

One of the more tightly controlled states in the world has one of the most rapidly expanding Christian populations. As people become richer, they want their modernisation to have a moral framework.



Pastor Wu Weiqing of the state church.
He believes that Jesus 'would be a member of
the Communist Party'.

An bloody attempt at suppression and destruction of Christianity in the 1960s failed, and there are now more than 80 million Christians in China.

There could be as many as 160m by 2025, which will make it the world’s most Christian country, and the number of Protestant Christians will outstrip Europe's significantly (currently standing at 100 million). 
True Christianity seems to have no problem with the fact that the state dislikes (read: 'hates') it and tries to dilute it by running a false, 'state-before-God' Church. Which is good.



One large cathedral in Wenzhou (a coastal city) being demolished

Because this persistent growth worries China’s leadership. They see Christianity as an organisation outside their all-knowing control. Its different ethics and codes could make it a problem (there's sure to be conflict in the future).

So they’ve started to clamp down on open Churches, investing into their own brand of Christianity while demolishing buildings linked with the original faith.

But the Church thrives under persecution. People are simply going 'underground'. If this new round of repression goes anything like the last one, I’m not sure it will be very successful.

The developing world...throughout history

Okay...It's a generalisation. But there's so many different examples, and data is rather hard to come by so I've thrown them all in. What is clear though, is that a Church based on Christian love remains constant in the past, present, and probably the future.

In our more science-based, ‘rational’, Western identities, religion is certainly on the decline. Yet that trend runs opposite to the worldwide shift.


The spread of people who at least identify as Christian


As Mike Davies (an activist and writer) puts it, ‘Marx has yielded the stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost’.

Instead of embracing Karl Marx (the founder of communism) and launching revolutions or insurgencies, people are turning to Christianity and Islam for support.

In Colombia, scene of a Church revival, where a man would spend 40% of his earnings in a bar or brothel, he now invests it into his family. This has been linked to a rise in living standards and democracy, because women are more able to speak up.

William Wilberforce, an activist, successfully lobbied the government of the biggest slave trading nation in the world (Great Britain and its Dominions) to be the first to ban the practice in 1807. He then met the King of Russia and persuaded him to pass a similar law. All this was done with other notable Christians such as John Newton and Thomas Clarkson - the Church coming together.


And my favourite example: in East Germany in 1989, a Leipzig prayer movement sparked mass protests against an oppressive and ruthless regime. 

The police let the 70,000 people who'd gone to the prayer meeting campaign for change in East Germany's first ever mass protest.
The protests snowballed, and next month the country collapsed under pressure, leading to a united Germany and the end of the Cold War.

The Church is ridiculed in the UK. It's seen as backwards, comical, and stubborn. And it's gotten things wrong in the past. Badly wrong. But if people were to see the amazing things that it does, around the world and for all people, I think we'd be amazed.