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Good news for the peoples of Asia AsiaLink
Projects Christian mission organisation For the unreached people of Asia
Christian Mission

China Ministries:

a) Bibles

What: The simple goal here is to help equip China 's Christians with God's Word. With the Christian community numbering between 60 and 90 million and given the tremendous growth rate of the church in China (some say 30,000 new believers each day), there is serious shortage of he Scriptures. AsiaLink has for many years been serving Christians inside China who are printing Bibles. Hundreds of thousands have been distributed at great personal risk to believers who have put their skills to use in private printing presses, often working through the night in secrecy.

Why: A limited number of Bibles are now legally printed inside China but nowhere near enough to meet demand. It remains almost impossible for rural Christians to get hold of a copy of the Bible. Millions of Christians are still without God's Word.

Cost: £1.50 covers the cost of printing and distributing one Bible. £150 provides enough for 150 Bibles. 100% of funds designated for printing goes to this Bible production.

b) Training

What: The majority of China's one million Pastors and church workers will never have the opportunity to attend a Bible School. A Bible School on tape, taught by house church leaders, provides workers with the Biblical teaching they need.

Work is well underway now to transfer much of this training material onto CD.

Cost: £50 provides a Chinese worker with a tape recorder and study curriculum for one year.

c) Sunday School Curriculum

What: China has over 500 million children under 15 years of age and it is illegal to tell them about Jesus. The house churches have produced the first inside China Sunday school curriculum to be printed in more than 50 years of communist rule. This material is geared to sharing the Gospel with children who have never heard of Jesus.

Cost: £ 1.50 provides Sunday school material for one child for a year. For just 16p we can print a copy of The Wonderful Story, a 48-page full colour storybook on the life of Jesus.

d) China Church Planters

What: An exciting new project to help support Chinese evangelists ministering across this huge nation. Many have struggled with persecution but all feel the passion and burden to preach the Good News to the remaining multitudes still unreached, including among China's almost 500 minority groups.

Cost: £ 25 per month per evangelist.

e) Living Martyrs

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What you can do:

China profile:

A republic, China is the third largest state in the world with close to 500 different languages and Mandarin as the main language. China now has a population of around 1.3 billion, including 100 million from ethnic minority people groups. The Han are the main people group with over 780 million Mandarin speakers and 600 different dialects. An estimated 20-30% unemployment depending on the region. That's around 200 million people without an adequate income. It is estimated that by 2010, half of China's population will live in urban areas as people move in search of better work.

Church/Mission activity

The Marxist aim has always been the elimination of all religious groups and so tight restrictions are in place on all Christian and Muslim activity. The Chinese government acknowledges five main religions present in the country, (Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism). The majority of the Han Chinese people in China today could be accurately portrayed as nonreligious. After half a century of strict Communist rule, millions of people have forsaken all outward religious beliefs. While over half of China 's believers belong to unregistered and house churches, they suffer from acute shortages of Bibles, teaching materials and trained leaders. Persecution is intense, especially among recognised church leaders. There is also a need for the movement to spread more from rural areas to effect change among urban intellectuals as also for the Chinese church to begin to seriously impact the rest of the world through Chinese missionaries. This is already taking place. Migration from rural to urban areas is a dramatic current social reality through which the government anticipates half of China's 1.3 billion population to be living in the megacities by 2015. Many young believers have been a part of this migration as they head to cities in search of work. Chinese believers are also making a serious impact on world mission through their own 'Back to Jerusalem' movement.

Main unreached groups

There are over 250 people groups without any known believers and about another 100 groups which are less than 1% Christian. There are 25 million Muslims scattered among smaller tribes, 60 million communist party members who are, by definition, atheists. There are 70 million adherents to the Falun Gong sect and, while Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism lack many followers among young people, they do still have many adherents among the older generations. There are over 500 million under the age of 18. It is illegal to hold Sunday School or youth groups in the official and controlled Three Three Self patriotic Movement churches or to teach them Christian doctrine.

Reaching the 800 official Chinese cities is another important challenge as has been mentioned. The phenomenal church growth to date has largely been restricted to the coastal areas of the East and Southeast where the Gospel was first introduced.

Persecution Index

Every six months, Open Doors World Watch publishes an index which grades countries according to the levels of persecution religious believers, and of Christians especially.

2006 Grading for China: 10th

Read further resources on China

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