"China's Protestant community, which had just one million members in 1949, has already overtaken those of countries more commonly associated with an evangelical boom. In 2010 there were more than 58 million Protestants in China compared to 40 million in Brazil and 36 million in South Africa, according to the Pew Research Centre's Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Prof Yang, a leading expert on religion in China, believes that number will swell to around 160 million by 2025. That would likely put China ahead even of the United States, which had around 159 million Protestants in 2010 but whose congregations are in decline."
"A recent study found that online searches for the words "Christian Congregation" and "Jesus" far outnumbered those for "The Communist Party" and "Xi Jinping", China's president."
The new spread of Christianity has the Communist Party scratching its head.
"The child suddenly grew up and the parents don't know how to deal with the adult," the
preacher, who is from China's illegal house-church movement, said.
This is good news indeed for an Easter Sunday.
Do you only include Protestants as Christians? What about Roman, Eastern Orthodox, Etc. Catholics?
ReplyDeleteOf course not. The part of the article I quoted happened to be talking about Protestants, but of course the rest of the article also mentioned Catholics. In fact, my latest post on Easter has a post with a photo of St. Peter's Square in Rome, an Armenian Orthodox church, and a nondenominational table of Easter fare. How's that for Christian diversity?
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