What Wonders God Performs

From 1949 to 1950, Christian missionaries were unceremoniously chased out of China as the Communist government of Mao Zedong clamped a Bamboo Curtain around the most populous nation in the world.

Christian missionaries had worked in China for about 100 years, and the bragging number of Chinese Christians was reported to be about 700,000. Some historians say 500,000 is a more reliable number.

For the next 30 years, Christians around the world prayed for the Chinese people and the opportunity to spread the gospel among them. But little reliable information ever made its way out from behind the Bamboo Curtain. What information did get out told of seized church buildings, jailed pastors and disbanded fellowships.

To the outside world, it appeared a dark time for the gospel and the Chinese people. What Mao and his followers called the Cultural Revolution seemed aimed at stamping out every vestige of Christianity.

In the early 1980s, I coordinated a three-year missions partnership between the Missouri Baptist Convention and the Chinese Baptist Convention of Taiwan (a Chinese island). Many nights in Taiwan, I participated in prayer groups praying long into the night for the church in mainland China and Baptist leaders trapped there when the Bamboo Curtain fell.

Then almost as suddenly as the curtain fell, it began to lift.

In 1979, when Deng Xiaoping became the first vice premier of that communist country to visit the United States, President Jimmy Carter asked him to reopen the Christian churches in China. The next day, Deng agreed.

The world watched in astonishment as in quick order The China Christian Council (CCC) was formed in 1980 and churches began to reopen, primarily in Shanghai and then in other parts of the country. A national seminary in Nanjing was opened in 1981. The Amity Foundation was established in 1985 to provide an avenue for Christians from around the world to partner with CCC churches. Soon reports of a miracle of biblical proportions began to emerge. The Christian faith had not been stamped out by the Cultural Revolution. It had mushroomed.

Through networks of family and friends, the gospel had been shared person to person. The number of Christians had grown astronomically. By the mid-1980s, estimates of the number of Christians in China topped 10 million, though every number was heatedly debated.

What could not be debated was the fact that the gospel of Jesus Christ had changed from a Western religion when the missionaries left to a Chinese religion when the government began reopening the churches 30 years later. Stories abound about churches being overrun by believers when they were reopened even though there had been no publicity about the first services. Believer told believer and the worshipers came.

Another 30-year period has passed since the first churches were reopened and the miracle continues. According to statistics provided by the International Mission Board (IMB), there are an estimated 75 million evangelical believers in China today. That is almost 15 million more evangelicals than in the United States — 60.4 million.
The total number of Christians may be more than 100 million, but numbers from China are still hotly debated. This is not to say that Christians do not have problems in China. They certainly do. Observers like to say that because the nation is so large, whatever one hears about the treatment of Christians in China is probably true somewhere.

Still that the number of Christians in China has grown more than a hundredfold, by conservative estimates, in the last 60 years is phenomenal. The IMB reports evangelical believers now make up 5.4 percent of the nation’s population. That is the same percentage that Southern Baptists constitute of the U.S. population.

For perspective, evangelicals in the United Kingdom make up a little more than 3 percent of the population and in Canada, evangelicals account for about 8 percent of the population.

God has performed a marvelous wonder in China, and He is working elsewhere, too.

It is reported that the number of evangelical Christians in India is nearing the 19 million mark, making it the nation with the third largest number of evangelicals in the world. India is also a place of intense persecution of Christian believers, especially by radical Hindus.

Brazil has the fourth largest number of evangelicals in the world with 12.5 million, according to the IMB.

“Evangelical” is a more inclusive term than “Baptist.” Baptists are one of several groups considered evangelicals. At most, there are about 75 million Baptists in the world. Those same sources place the number of evangelicals at 686 million, or about 10 percent of the world’s population. Baptists make up a similar percentage of evangelicals — 11 percent.

That means God is using Baptists, as well as others, to make His glory known in China, India, Brazil, the United States and other countries around the world. Sometimes we Baptists believe the whole world depends on us. Sometimes we become prideful in the scope of our missions enterprise and the way God blesses it. Sometimes we conclude that the world is on fire and God has given us the only bucket with which to put it out.

I talked with missionaries who were forced out of China in 1949 and 1950, and they said sometimes they questioned how the churches would survive after the Bamboo Curtain fell. Those able to return in the 1980s rejoiced to see what wonders God had performed.

It makes us a little humble when we realize we are but a small part of the family of God. This family of God spreads across every nation and covers practically every tongue. We are grateful when God allows us to be a part of the wonders He performs. We are obedient when opportunities are presented.

Most of all, we rejoice at the wonders God performs no matter who He chooses to do them or what way He chooses to make His wonders known.