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
text to follow
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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.
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.
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.