This article appeared in the The Presbyterian Outlook on September 8, 2008, and was re-printed in the Presbyterian Cross-Cultural Mission Newsletter Email Group Posting #23 – October 2008 with the permission of the author and The Presbyterian Outlook. www.pres-outlook.org  There are footnote references in the article indicated by parentheses ( ).

You may be surprised that missionary could be in need of rehabilitating, but some readers will have a visceral aversion to hearing this word. It is time to reconsider what we call those who represent the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in international cross-cultural mission.  The recent General Assembly unanimously approved the Dallas Invitation (Expanding Partnership in God’s Mission) and affirmed the General Assembly Council’s proposal to reverse the half-century decline (from 2,000 to 200) in the number of mission co-workers serving internationally.  These are very significant defining moments for the PC(USA) and they provide us an important opportunity to review our beliefs and actions regarding mission.

Many readers will be surprised that using “missionary” is a no-no for some in the PC(USA).(1)  Officially we have preferred “fraternal worker” (1960’s – 1970’s) and “mission co-worker” since then. Presbyterians are far more influenced in their thinking about missionaries by James Michener’s Hawaii and Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible than they are by mission education provided by the PC(USA). In addition to popular literature this bias is also deeply influenced by western scholars.(2)  It seems that some in the PC(USA) defer to popular literature and academic writers for a critical understanding of missionaries. Maybe we should listen to international partners such as world-renowned missiologist Lamin Sanneh who twenty years ago labeled this lack of nerve “the western missionary guilt complex.”(3)

Have missionaries been paternalistic? Have they cooperated with imperialism and economic colonialism? Have they imposed western theological and Biblical understandings as normative Christian expression? Yes (with emphasis) to all of the above! However, missionaries are no better at sinning than the rest of us. They just get to do it cross-culturally in a foreign language more carefully scrutinized than most of us have had to endure.  Robert D. Woodberry (among many other serious mission historians) reminds us that the knee-jerk, emotional, negative reaction to “missionary” is ill-founded. Woodberry writes:

… religious freedom and missionary activity are usually synergistic;  historically, places where they have advanced in tandem have seen a reduction in abuses of power and an expansion of civil society … they have also been central to the abolition of slavery, the development of mass education, and the flourishing of organizations outside state control … the effects of the 19th and early 20th century missionaries are still measurable in the educational enrollments, infant mortalities, and levels of political democracy in societies around the world … there were many problematic missionary methodologies in the colonial era. … But, we should not lose sight of the positive legacy of missions in the areas of racial attitudes, education, civil society, and colonial reform.”(4)

The fact of our incredible power and wealth has been particularly problematic for North Americans. Jonathan Bonk’s Missions and Money should be required reading for any Christian obtaining a passport for a short-term mission trip. It is indeed frightening to think of how little we have learned from missionaries’ mistakes of the past now that any one of us can “be a missionary” simply by buying an airline ticket.  Does that excuse us from Jesus’ command to … be my witnesses … to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8)? Of course not! But it should put the fear of God into us. David Bosch (5) has helpfully suggested that we should engage in mission with “bold humility.”  Unless we are going to give away all that we have to the poor, we will have to come to grips with participating in God’s mission as part of the wealthy of the world.

The Dallas Consultation this past January gives us an opportunity to reconsider some of the missiological biases into which we have drifted. Future historians will probably consider this meeting as the most important defining moment in mission for Presbyterians since a meeting in Lake Mohonk, N.Y., in 1956. Those at that gathering fifty years ago addressed important issues including what name we would use for “missionaries.” However, fifty years have passed and some of the paradigms to which we cling from that era have not worn well.  They have become parochial and paternalistic.(6)  If you were to search the Internet for “mission co-worker” you would find that virtually all results are PC(USA)-specific. Outside of our denomination the term is practically unknown. We live in a very small PC(USA) world. This term is not known in other North American denominations or in the Majority World (Asia, Africa, Latin America) Church. Koreans, Ethiopians, Sri Lankans, Filipinos, Chinese, Brazilians, and countless others send “missionaries” and they do it in increasingly greater numbers.  These churches want us to be partners, not overlords, but they honor the missionary legacy and they have embraced the calling for themselves in staggering numbers.

Our global partners know that there is good reason to use the word “missionary.”  It reminds us of our roots because it is derived from the Latin missio (mittere), which means “to send.” It parallels the Greek New Testament “apostolic” apo- (out) plus stellein (to send). The wide interest today in the “missional church” suggests that we have lost our basic understanding of the “church” as a “sent people.” We now need an adjective (missional) to remind us that we are not a chapel for the members but a community of believers gathered around Word and sacrament for the purpose of “being sent” into the world God loves, announcing the Kingdom of God. It is time to move beyond our allergic reactions to the term “missionary.” We Presbyterians have been among the leading world mission thinkers and doers in America for more than 350 years.(7) But in the last fifty years we have increasingly become marginalized and irrelevant. We have not kept up with missiological developments. Our official fixation on “mission co-worker” as the “correct” term is evidence of this. The Dallas Consultation and the General Assembly action on reversing the decline in the number of missionaries give us an opportunity to correct this limitation.(8)

We have ahead of us a huge task of “mission education” in discovering what God has in mind for the PC(USA)’s role in the world Christian movement. We have had our “glory days” but those definitely have passed with the emergence and re-emergence of the church in the Global South. We still have an important (although it surely will be more humble) missionary responsibility. However, the stirrings of the Spirit are quite evident in the Dallas Invitation and the re-commitment to the value of long-term missionaries.  We must not miss this kairos moment.

A good place to begin would be to listen deeply to the Biblical witness, especially as it is interpreted to us by the Majority World church. This practice does not come easy to us. But it would be wise to learn it. One place to start would be in this matter of rehabilitating “missionary.” An important voice that could help us would be Yale mission historian Lamin Sanneh, who was mentioned earlier. In his recently acclaimed book Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (9) he says, 

Missions were organized, funded, and directed from the West, a fact that made it easy to construe them as colonialism at prayer, and to see colonialism as the West’s moral mandate. Suitably chastened, missionary organizations have since beat a retreat by speaking modestly of ‘missioner,’ ‘fraternal worker,’ ‘cross-cultural consultant,’ ‘ecumenical partner,’ and anything else as long as it was not the offending word ‘missionary’… I am urging a revisionist history without claiming that missions and colonialism were not in cahoots. (10) 

With bold humility let us reclaim our missionary vocation and our privilege to recognize the particular persons who represent us as cross-cultural missionaries.  There will be some in the North American mission field who will deride us for this witness, but let us humbly engage them without apology for the sake of Christ.

Footnotes:

1. In spite of some recent insistence on using “mission co-worker” Stated Clerk and former director of the Worldwide Ministries Division, Clifton Kirkpatrick, seems quite comfortable using the term “missionary” in his article “Is There a Future for the Presbyterian Church (USA)?” published in the Price H. Gwynn III Church Leadership Series. Not one author in the recently published A History of Presbyterian Missions 1944 – 2007, Scott W. Sunquist and Caroline N. Becker, eds., uses the term “mission co-worker.”  “Missionary” and “missionaries” are used almost 1500 times.

2. See also the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, July, 2008. Any doubt about the widely pejorative assumptions common to the popular definition of “missionary” will be dispelled in an internet search.

3. Lamin Sanneh, “Christian Mission and the Western Guilt Complex,” The Christian Century, April 7, 1987, pp. 330 – 334. Sanneh was then teaching at Harvard.  Soon after that date he moved to Yale where he is today.

4. “Reclaiming the M-Word: The Legacy of Missions in Non-Western Societies,”International Journal of Frontier Missiology, Spring 2008, p17-18

5. Transforming Mission, 1991; see also Mission in Bold Humility, Willem Saaymand and Klippies Kritzinger, eds., Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 1996

6. Lake Mohonk was an important defining moment.  For a fuller understanding see A History of Presbyterian Missions 1944 – 2007, pp. 17 – 18, 65 – 81, 181, 241.

7. What is today the Southampton Presbyterian Church (Long Island, NY) was founded in 1640. Its first pastor was a missionary to the Shinnecock Indians.

8. We now have, for the first time in decades, two World Mission staff members with a Ph.D. in mission-related fields: Hunter Farrell in anthropology and Michael Parker in mission history.

9. Published by Oxford University Press, 2008, and named one of the top five books on world Christianity by Martin Marty and mission book of the year (Christianity Today, April, 2008).

10. Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 131 – 132.

[*David Dawson is executive presbyter of Shenango Presbytery, and is from New Wilmington, Pa.]

2 June 2008

Dear colleagues in mission,

I want to share with you an historic decision by our Church’s General Assembly Council (GAC). Last month, the Council voted unanimously to reverse a 50 year downward trend in the number of PCUSA mission coworkers by approving a budget for the approval of the 2008 General Assembly that will increase the number of long-term, fully compensated mission personnel. Due to attrition, by this year’s General Assembly in June, we will have just under 200 mission coworkers (this does not include our nearly 70 long-term mission volunteers). The GAC voted to increase the number of our mission coworkers to 210 in 2009, and to 215 in 2010. We are thanking God for this remarkable decision.

But you know how U.S. audiences are tempted to focus on the 7 second sound-byte. Let me go a bit deeper about this important decision and the on-going conversation from which it emerges.

First, let me say what the decision does not mean:

• It doesn’t mean that the hundreds of faithful Presbyterian missionaries who preceded you and me in international mission were wrong when they “worked themselves out of a job”. A couple who gave most of their life to mission work in the Philippines called to ask if an increased number of mission workers means a change in our Church’s historic commitment to partnership and to empowering the church in every place to do ministry on their own. Absolutely not, I assured them. Our Church honors the work they did and notes the multiplier effect that their work has had for the cause of Christ by empowering the partner church to continue in ministry long after the mission worker leaves the country. Our mission workers pioneered “equipping ministry” long before it became a buzzword in U.S. pastoral theology.
• It doesn’t mean that the face of PC(USA) mission has suddenly, curiously, become an American face. We continue to work in partnership around the world. While many of our congregations continue to equate “mission” with “PC(USA) mission worker” (or “missionary”), integrity requires us to acknowledge that most of what God is doing in the many places we work is done primarily through our global partners. Whatever our own sense of call, whatever the financial resources we may have in our pocket, we still owe to our partners the major “say” in the direction of mission in the communities where God has placed them. While Mission Challenge ’07 effectively highlighted the work that our mission personnel are doing, the WM staff team working on World Mission Challenge ’09 is looking at innovative ways to present to the Church a more accurate vision of our work—one that includes our global partners.
• It doesn’t mean that our long-term national or international mission volunteers are not part of our mission personnel. The historical records do not follow the numbers of our long-term mission volunteers with any consistency, thus the GAC had to rely on the number of mission co-workers to provide the base-line. Nor does it mean that international mission personnel are any better or more “worth counting” than national or local mission personnel. Many faithful Presbyterians follow Christ’s call across the street or across the nation and these are equally valid callings, as our Church recognizes. Nor does it mean that Presbyterian mission workers sent by the GAC are better than faithful Presbyterians sent by other Christian, or even non-Christian, organizations. But Presbyterian mission workers sent by the GAC are sent by the whole Church and are responsible to live and minister according to the commitments of our Church as expressed in the decisions of our General Assembly.
• It doesn’t mean that our Church’s faithfulness can be measured by the numbers of mission coworkers we send out (nor by the number of PCUSA members, nor by the total amount of money given by PC(USA) members annually, etc.). The new realm that Jesus inaugurated is more than a “numbers game” and is not, in the final analysis, about budgets and numbers projections. It is found in the quality and integrity of relationships and each of you is giving testimony to these redeemed relationships as you teach, heal, plant churches, educate our Church for mission, work for justice and reconciliation, and help people through difficult times.

But let me share briefly what I believe the decision does represent:

• It clearly represents a major shift in denominational mission policy to dedicate more resources to the sending of international mission personnel. Note that, in order to fulfill the objectives, $4 million must be raised in both 2009 and 2010. This will require much more than the committed leadership of our colleagues in the Communications & Funds Development (CFD) area– it will require CFD and World Mission staff, mission personnel, global partners and mission leaders throughout the denomination to use mission stories to build a bridge between our congregations and the high quality mission work you and our global partners are doing together. This will be one of our greatest challenges in 2009 and 2010 and we cannot achieve it without your help.
• It represents an earnest attempt to recognize that faithfulness requires that we respond to the call of global partners around the world to share mission personnel with them. We currently have more than 40 prioritized, but unfilled, positions where our partners and we agree we should send mission workers. In addition, our Church is called to consider new areas, new partners and new ways of working that will challenge old models of partnership.
• It expresses that our Church highly values the role our mission personnel play in international mission. This is primarily because of the work all of you and your WM staff colleagues do each day.

The rest of the letter contains information mainly for mission co-workers, but Hunter closes like this:

The Bottom Line…

I sometimes think I have the easiest job in the Presbyterian Center because our global partners, mission personnel and World Mission staff in Louisville are highly dedicated, skilled and called to this work. I’m the guy who gets thanked—sometimes, a gazillion times a month—for the good work all of you do every day…which only makes me more grateful for God’s way of working through “wounded healers” like you and me. Your faithfulness helps me to see God’s faithfulness more clearly.

Pray for a continued spirit of expectant anticipation for the changes that God is birthing among us!

With you in Christ,

Hunter Farrell, Director
World Mission
Presbyterian Church (USA)
hunter.farrell@pcusa.org

Posted on Aug 2, 2007 15:45pm CST.
Print Friendly Version

All Things Catholic – John L. Allen, Jr.

If there were any lingering question about whether there’s a spiritual boom in China today, it now has a two word answer: Yu Dan.

A 42-year-old female talk show host and pop culture icon, Yu Dan is the author of Notes on Reading the Analects — a sort of Confucian Chicken Soup for the Soul — which has sold somewhere between 3 and 4 million copies, making it one of the biggest best-sellers in China since Mao’s “Little Red Book.” Dan’s success illustrates that China has become, according to writer Zha Jianying, the “largest soul market” in the world. With a population of 1.3 billion, China is trying to fill an ideological void left by the collapse of Communism as anything more than a system of political control, and the dislocations of astonishing but uneven levels of economic growth.

There are so many wounded, helpless souls that are desperate to find something to believe in and to hold onto after these drastic changes — Jianying told Reuters in May.

Dan’s post-modern Confucianism is not the only spiritual option riding this wave. In northwestern China, an estimated 20 to 30 million Muslims are also in the grip of a revival. According to a 2006 report in Asia Times, new Muslim schools are opening with a strong accent on Islamic orthodoxy, young Chinese Muslims are studying across the Middle East and bringing new missionary energies home, and rising numbers of Chinese Muslims are making the annual hajj to Mecca. China’s post- Deng Xiaoping economic opening has expanded opportunities for Muslim nations, especially Saudi Arabia, to fund Islamic enterprises in China.

Perhaps the most remarkable burst of religious energy is in China’s Pentecostal Christian population. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1949, there were roughly 900,000 Protestants. Today, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, which puts out the much-consulted World Christian Database, says there are 111 million Christians in China, roughly 90 percent Protestant and mostly Pentecostal. That would make China the third-largest Christian country on earth, following only the United States and Brazil.

The Center projects that by 2050, there will be 218 million Christians in China, 16 percent of the population, enough to make China the world’s second-largest Christian nation. According to the Center, there are 10,000 conversions in China every day.

Religious data is notoriously imprecise in an officially atheistic state, and not everyone accepts these eye-popping estimates. In the 2006 update of his book Jesus in Beijing, former Time Beijing bureau chief David Aikman put the number of Protestants at 70 million. Richard Madsen, a former Maryknoll missionary and author of China’s Catholics, told me he would put the number still lower, at 40 million. That’s in line with the CIA World Factbook, another widely consulted resource.

Even those conservative estimates, however, would mean that Protestantism in China experienced roughly 4,300 percent growth over the last half-century, most of it since the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and 1970s. A four-part video series issued in 2003, called “The Cross: Jesus in China,” and produced by Chinese documentarian Yuan Zhiming, interviews many of the leaders of this revival, whose evangelical drive is palpable. Notably, Protestantism took off after the expulsion of foreign missionaries, meaning most of the expansion has been home-grown.

Curiously, this booming “soul market” seems largely to have bypassed the Catholic church. In 1949, there were 3.3 million Catholics. The most common estimate today is 12 million. Over that time, China’s population increased by a factor of four, which means that Catholicism has done little more than keep pace. A half-century ago, Chinese Protestantism was three and a half times smaller than Catholicism; today, it is at least three and a half times larger.

In a 2003 interview, then-Bishop Joseph Zen of Hong Kong (now a cardinal) said that Protestants are “winning” the contest for the souls of the Chinese.

Of course, given the harsh persecution of Chinese Catholics, the fact that the faith survived at all is in some ways a miracle. Those persecutions continue into the present; just last week, three Catholic priests were arrested in Inner Mongolia for refusing to submit to China’s state-sponsored Catholic association. The heroism of Chinese clergy and laity is without a doubt one of the most inspirational chapters in church history.

Yet persecution has not fallen on Catholics alone. Protestants, Buddhists, Daoists, Muslims, the Falungong, and others have similar stories of martyrdom to tell. One Protestant pastor told Aikman, “Chinese prison is my seminary. Police handcuffs and the electric nightstick are our equipment. That is God’s special training for the Gospel.” Despite similar experiences, Catholicism seemingly has not experienced the same recent surge.

Why not? Veteran China-watchers generally offer four explanations.

(1) Lack of Ecclesial Infrastructure

According to a 2005 analysis by Maryknoll Sr. Betty Ann Maheu, there are 6,000 Catholic churches in China but 3,000 priests, which would mean that roughly half the Catholic churches in the country lack a resident priest. Overall, the priest-to-Catholic ratio in China is about 4,000-to-one, better than Latin America (where it’s 7,000-to-one) or the Caribbean (more than 8,300-to-one,) but considerably worse than in Europe (1,100-to-one) or the United States (1,300-to-one). A significant number of Chinese priests are also in jail or placed under other forms of supervision.

Maheu says that in the short term, the priest shortage in China is likely to deepen. There was a vocations boom in the early 1980s, she said, but today numbers are dropping, as expanding economic opportunities makes recruitment and retention more difficult. Madsen says that even in Shanghai, normally held up as the most dynamic urban Catholic community in the country, most seminarians come from rural Catholic villages whose populations are in decline.

China has 110 dioceses and 114 active bishops, which in theory means that most dioceses should have a bishop. At least a dozen bishops, however, are in jail, under house arrest or subjected to severe surveillance. Because of doubts over the legitimacy of bishops who have registered with the government, their leadership is often contested. Given chronic tensions between China and the Vatican, dioceses sometimes remain vacant for extended periods. Some of the youngest bishops in the world today are in China, many appointed in their early 30s, in part out of fear that the opportunity to name another one might not roll around again soon.

Maheu notes that there are more than 5,000 religious women in China, saying the growth of religious life has “great potential” for the church.

(2) The Sociology of Chinese Catholicism

Historically, Catholicism in China was almost entirely a rural phenomenon. Madsen says that despite run-away urbanization, 70-75 percent of Catholics are probably still concentrated in largely homogenous Catholic villages, especially in Hebei and Shanxi provinces in the northeastern area around Beijing. Even the urban footprint of Catholicism, he said, is largely composed of villagers who have relocated to the city, and experience suggests it’s sometimes difficult for them to maintain the faith in this new environment.

The tenacity of these Catholic villagers is the stuff of legend. China’s Catholics tells the story of a village in Shanxi Province where a family planning team arrived in 1985 to try to distribute contraception in accord with the state’s “one-child” policy. Villagers surrounded their car, and when the team retreated to their living quarters, the villagers hurled rocks through the windows. Eventually the team had to be rescued by the police, and fled the area.

Yet the rural character of the church also means that it is handicapped in terms of missionary expansion, since preserving Catholic communities is often a higher priority than making new converts. Catholics are under-represented in urban areas, which are creating the most vibrant “growth markets” for new spiritual movements.

The insularity of some rural communities, Madsen says, also means that many reforms triggered by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) never really arrived. Even in cosmopolitan Shanghai, the first Chinese-language Mass wasn’t celebrated until 1989. (Ironically, this is one point upon which Chinese Communists and Catholic traditionalists agree. Both prefer Mass in Latin, in the case of the Communists because it means that most people won’t understand it.)

(3) Internal Division

Chinese Catholicism is deeply lacerated over the question of cooperation with the Communist regime. For the most part, China-watchers say, Catholics who tolerate state oversight do so not out of enthusiasm for the official project of a “self-governed, self-funded, self-propagated” church, but rather because it seems the best survival strategy. Nonetheless, Catholics who reject this option out of unwavering loyalty to the pope, and who often endure prison, harassment, and discrimination, frequently regard “open” Catholics as compromised.

In their most extreme form, the divisions can turn violent. In 1992, an “open church” priest in Henan was murdered by a disgruntled seminarian who claimed that he had been denied ordination because of his ties to the unofficial church. The priest collapsed and died after drinking from what was literally a poisoned chalice at Mass.

Recent years have seen significant efforts to heal this breach. Conventional estimates are that as many as 90 percent of bishops ordained without the authority of the pope now have received Vatican recognition. Catholics from both the open and the unregistered church often worship together and receive the sacraments from the same clergy; it has become a mantra that “there is only one Catholic church in China.”

Yet the bitterness is hardly a museum piece. Pope Benedict XVI released a “Letter to Chinese Catholics” in May, which called for unity and pledged that Catholicism is not an enemy of the state, but also insisted that the church cannot accept interference in its internal life. Notably, Benedict revoked faculties given in 1978 for “underground” bishops to appoint successors and to ordain priests without contact with Rome.

Fierce debates broke out over how to interpret the letter. One testy exchange has been between Belgian missionary Fr. Jeroom Heyndrickx, a frequent Vatican advisor on China, and Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong, an outspoken critic of the Communist regime.

In early July, Heyndrickx published a commentary on the pope’s letter with the Union of Catholic Asian News, stressing that it called for dialogue and unity. Among other things, Heyndrickx suggested it would be desirable for unregistered bishops to come out into the open.

Zen published a tough response on July 18, which began by saying that Heyndrickx has lost the “vast consensus and positive regard” he once enjoyed among Chinese Catholics.

“Fr. Heyndrickx’s every initiative needs the approval of Mr. Liu Bainian, of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, and has to be carried out according to conditions imposed by him. Mr. Liu’s prestige has thus been steadily built up,” Zen wrote, referring to the official state regulatory body for Catholic affairs.

Zen went on to argue that there is still a need for the clandestine church in China, and that in many, if not most, cases, bishops should not apply for registration. Those who act without the authority of the pope, he said, should be subject to canonical sanctions.

Heyndrickx shot back on July 20: “I have learned that it does not take much courage to use the media to prove one’s own views and criticize others, while it takes a lot of guts to sit down with those who disagree with you and have long personal dialogues to overcome differences and seek the common ground.”

Whatever one makes of this exchange, it illustrates the tensions that course through Chinese Catholicism, making it difficult to exploit new missionary opportunities.

(4) Missionary Strategy

Much Catholic conversation about evangelization in China is usually phrased in the subjunctive: “If China were to open up on religious freedom …” or “If the Holy See and China were to establish diplomatic relations …” The implicit assumption is sometimes that structural change is required before Catholicism can truly move into an expansion phase.

Pentecostal talk about mission, on the other hand, is very much phrased in the simple present. Most Pentecostals would obviously welcome being arrested less frequently, but in general they are not waiting for legal or political reform before carrying out aggressive evangelization programs. The most audacious even dream of carrying the gospel beyond the borders of China, along the old Silk Road into the Muslim world, in a campaign known as “Back to Jerusalem.” As Aikman explains in Jesus in Beijing, some Chinese Evangelicals and Pentecostals believe that the basic movement of the gospel for the last 2,000 years has been westward: from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Europe, from Europe to America, and from America to China. Now, they believe, it’s their turn to complete the loop by carrying the gospel to Muslim lands, eventually arriving in Jerusalem. Once that happens, they believe, the gospel will have been preached to the entire world.

Most experts regard that prospect as deeply improbable; Madsen said he doubts more than a handful of Protestants in China take the “Back to Jerusalem” vision seriously. Aikman is more sanguine, reporting that as of 2005 two underground Protestant seminaries in China were training believers for work in Islamic nations. In any event, it’s revealing as an indication of missionary ferment.

One exception to the general Catholic hesitancy is Bishop Jin Luxian of Shanghai, a controversial figure because of his willingness to register with the government, but someone who enjoys the respect of many senior Catholic leaders internationally. Luxian, the subject of a flattering profile in the current issue of The Atlantic, is revamping his cathedral to draw upon traditional Chinese aesthetics, part of a larger program of forging an authentically Chinese expression of the Catholic faith.

“The old church appealed to 3 million Catholics,” he said. “I want to appeal to 100 million Catholics.”

The Future

By universal consensus, China is an emerging global superpower. Its economy grew at an average annual rate of 9.4 percent over the last 25 years, and today has a GDP of $11 trillion, making it the second-largest economy in the world after the United States. Foreign companies have poured more than $600 billion into China since 1978, far eclipsing what the United States spent rebuilding post-war Europe in the Marshall Plan. China now has a middle class of 200 million people, 80 million of whom are quite well-off. The country exports more in a single day than it did in all of 1978.

How things shake out religiously, therefore, is of tremendous strategic importance, even for people who don’t feel any particular spiritual stake in the result. If Christianity ends up at around 20 percent of the population, for example, China could become an exponentially larger version of South Korea (where Christians are between 25-50 percent of the population, depending upon which count one accepts) — a more democratic, rule-oriented, basically pro-Western society. On the other hand, if dynamic Muslim movements create an Islamic enclave in the western half of the country, with financial and ideological ties to fundamentalist Wahhabi forms of Islam in Saudi Arabia, at least that part of China could become a wealthier and more influential Afghanistan. If growing religious pluralism in China becomes fractious, it could mean that a well-armed and wealthy superpower is destabilized by internal conflict, posing risks to global peace and security.

Catholicism could potentially offer a positive ingredient in China’s new spiritual stew. In part, the church could realize significant numbers of new members, even if mere statistical growth is not an end in itself — as Benedict XVI said recently, “statistics are not our divinity.” Perhaps more importantly, Madsen believes, a dynamic and growing Catholicism could be an important force in building a healthy civil society in China.

For that to happen, however, the four liabilities outlined above would somehow have to be addressed. At present, it’s difficult to see that happening. As Maheu said in 2005, “Short of a series of miracles, the journey of Catholicism in China will continue, in my opinion, to be uphill in the foreseeable and even distant future.”

One key to Pentecostalism’s worldwide expansion, however, is that Pentecostals live in constant expectation of just such a series of miracles. Perhaps rather than waiting for the “one step forward, two steps back” ballet between Rome and Beijing to reach conclusion, Chinese Catholics will steal a page from the Pentecostal playbook, and embrace a vision of “the future is now.” It would be fascinating to watch them try.