FP: Jesus Loves China, Too

Why I’m working to save my homeland, one soul at a time.
Foreign Policy  BY BOB FU | MAY 14, 2012

Like most Chinese, I was educated as an atheist. All textbooks, philosophy classes, and conferences taught us that the Christian faith is an “opiate of the people’s spirit” that Westerners use to numb and neutralize the creativity of the Chinese mind.

But as a student of English literature at Liaocheng University in Shandong province in 1987, my American teachers after class would sometimes pull out what we Chinese students called a “Little Red Book.” It was a pocket Bible. And from it they shared what they called “the Good News.”

They were a peculiar group of people — laughing loudly with big smiles, always looking us in the eye when speaking to us. One day I went to the apartment of a teacher who had been in China for more than three years, and I saw him playing the guitar, crying as he sang. He told me he was homesick for his family in California, and I was touched by his openness — such a contrast to the stern, cold teachers I had had before. The kindness and love he and his fellow Christian teachers showed was not to change China, but to offer life-giving truth in an authentic manner. Today’s would-be missionaries to China could learn a lot from them.

Americans like to see things get done instantly: fast food, Twitter, and even “shock and awe” military campaigns. In the 1990s, one ministry organization put an ad in a major Christian magazine calling for donations with the slogan “one dollar, one soul,” the idea being one dollar will purchase one Bible in China, which will help convert one Chinese soul. This instant-noodle approach to the life-and-death decision to accept Christ as one’s only Savior and Lord is counterproductive. Chinese souls cannot be harvested like stalks of corn in a field, or iPads on an assembly line.

Missionaries should study China and it’s people, culture, and history, which is almost 20 times longer than U.S. history. Especially after 60 years of communism and wave after wave of class struggle, Chinese are desperate for trust. Many of my classmates were more willing to share their personal secrets with our American teachers than with fellow Chinese students because they found the teachers trustworthy and caring. The American teachers I know said it took years living and interacting with the Chinese before their mission bore spiritual fruit.

Americans have much more experience with Christian theology than the Chinese. Many times I find Americans eager to sell China a certain brand of theology, rather than to live out and present the true Gospel of grace and truth. When I enrolled at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1997, I found I needed to fill out a form declaring my Protestant denomination — with 200 choices! That was one of my first experiences of culture shock. Americans representing a certain denomination visit China for a few months on what they call a “short-term mission,” trying to spread their church’s version of the faith. They often leave behind an Americanized Chinese Christianity — with believers who can pray only in English.

In the early 1990s, I met with a famous American evangelist in a five-star hotel in Beijing. The first question he asked was, “How many Chinese Christians have the spiritual gift of speaking in other tongues?” While I don’t disapprove of this practice (and have even had this experience), it seemed that this secondary issue was his main concern.

After I left China in 1996, I learned that tens of thousands of copies of that minister’s book, translated into Chinese as How to Speak in Tongues, had been distributed in China by underground printing networks. Now the tongues issue has become one of the most divisive issues among Chinese churches (those who can speak in tongues look down on those who don’t, while those who don’t speak in tongues think that those who do are possessed by demons). This man’s “ministry” deeply hurt the cause of the Gospel in China.

Contrast this with the two Americans who showed up at the doorstep of my in-laws in a remote village in Shandong, near where legal activist Chen Guangcheng used to live. They rode bikes together with the villagers on the dusty roads. They prayed for my wife’s family members and other villagers. Those American teachers even learned how to share an outhouse with pigs! As a result, both of my in-laws came to Christ after my American teachers left.

In the spring of 1989, I was deeply involved in China’s student democracy movement both at my own university and in Tiananmen Square. In the aftermath of the crackdown on our college campus, amid the forced self-criticisms and students turning in one another to save their own skin, my eyes were opened to the futility of the human experience. Man, I discovered painfully, has no power to change his own nature. No amount of slogans, science, democratic reforms, or self-determination can pull us out of our pit of immoral self-centeredness. The Chinese have a saying, “Man’s original character is about as easy to change as the position of the mountains and rivers.” I found myself a slave to its reality.

It was at that moment, in that strange, empty autumn of 1989, that I experienced a revolution in my own life. After reading Pastor Hsi: Confucian Scholar and Christian, a book about how a Chinese intellectual in Shaanxi came to accept the Christian faith while struggling with an opium addiction, I finally came to embrace the Gospel of Christ.
In the days and months that followed I received a tremendous amount of help from my American teachers on how to grow as a Christian. The Chinese mind needs logical, intellectually compelling truth that speaks to our culture. The Gospel answers the questions of my culture like nothing else. Missionaries to China should help Chinese ask difficult questions of the purpose of life and how man is going to find it in a materialistic, trustless society.

ChinaAid, the organization I run, attempts to advance religious freedom and rule of law in China, softening the soil for the Gospel. We provide money and training for legal activists and sponsor the only nationwide house-church magazine, of which 80,000 copies are distributed nationwide.

We aid non-Christians as well; through our network of supporters, we helped Chen — who by  God’s common grace advanced the rule of law and protection of life in China– take his case to the American people.

Those unable to work and help directly in China should reach out to the 150,000 top Chinese students and scholars on U.S. campuses. Demonstrate a healthy marriage, build real trust in a friendship, and invite them to investigate the life and teachings of Christ for themselves. This will influence them significantly, and they in turn will influence their compatriots once God has transformed their lives. Many of these students will serve key roles in Chinese society.

In the Bible, the book of Romans says, “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil and cling to what is good and always serve each other in love.” With this kind of message, Christianity will blossom. This is the only way freedom — both individually and nationally — will spread in China.

Bob Fu, the founder and president of ChinaAid, has been active in the case of dissident Chen


China Aid Contacts
Rachel Ritchie, English Media Director
Cell: (432) 553-1080 | Office: 1+ (888) 889-7757 | Other: (432) 689-6985
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.chinaaid.org Guangcheng.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/05/14/jesus_loves_china_too

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