The Spreading Message--by Linden Malki

In the story of God's movements in the history of humanity, we find His moving in at least two major ways in the lives of people. We need to realize and remember that He created us, but also that He gave us the choice, beginning with the earliest records of our history, of listening and obeying His Word, or insisting on our own independence and free will. There have always been those who have listened and accepted a relationship with Him, and those who have rejected and ignored Him. He also told those who did know Him to pass on what they had learned to others outside of their immediate culture--which didn't happen effectively until the followers of Jesus were scattered throughout the Roman Empire. Our ancestors are largely descendants of those early converts and refugees.

The spread of the Good News also happened in the other direction--to the East. The earliest known records of the Christian message spreading toward Asia is a movement known as the Nestorians, followers of a Christian bishop who broke away from the main church about 500AD and who spread across Asia as far as China around 800-1000AD, and then faded away. There were Catholic missionaries by the 1500's. The first Protestant missions followed through the 1800's and 1900's until World War II.  They were just beginning to come back in the late 1940's when the Communist takeover drove them out. My father's brother and sister-in-law were among the missionaries who had gone to China in the 1920's and helped establish churches and schools. My uncle had spent part of the war as a translator for US Army intelligence, as he read and wrote Mandarin Chinese. They went back to western China in 1946, and when the Communists moved into the area and found a former US Army intelligence officer there, they imprisoned him for almost five years. A few years later they went back to Taiwan where he was the Dean of a Christian college for another five years. There were those who looked at the story of China missions and saw it as a failure, with the Communists trying to elimnate the churches of China. However, the amazing thing is that the church didn't die out; in fact, despite the church buildings being seized by the government and used for warehouses and factories, the churches went underground and met in homes and wherever they could, and grew. After Mao was gone, many of the churches were allowed to reopen and got their buildings back, and although it is still not totally approved, there are churches which have government permits to meet, and others which are still meeting without permission..  Estimates of the number of Christians in China today range from about 30 million known church members and possibly up to 67 million total, and there are predictions that China could become one of the world's largest churches in another 20-30 years--totally self-supporting.  Yes, it was worth it!