Bibles Rolling Off Presses : China Enjoying Spurt in Christian Growth

With help from the West, Bibles are now rolling off the presses in China, where Christianity is regarded as having perhaps the fastest growth in the world.

Church life there, which emerged in surprising dimensions after years of suppression and seeming extinction, has a new, steady source of Scriptures, hymnals and other religious literature.

The Amity Foundation printing plant, built in Nanjing with $7.1 million from Bible societies around the world and dedicated in December, has a capacity of about 750,000 volumes annually.

They are being distributed to churches whose modern resurgence “has been a marvelous, completely unexpected gift of the Holy Spirit,” said the Rev. John D. Erickson, general secretary of the American Bible Society.

“It’s just a modern miracle,” he said in an interview. “There’s no other explanation for it. It’s evidence of God’s promise to be with his people whatever the circumstances.”

Erickson, who has made half a dozen recent trips to China, including dedication of the new printing facilities, said the vastly expanded church life began appearing about a decade ago, after having seemed obliterated.

That was during the so-called “Cultural Revolution” of 1966-76, a reign of terror when Bibles were burned, clergy imprisoned or put in labor camps, and the last vestiges of churches converted to warehouses or factories.

While there were about 4 million Christians in China when the Communists took over in 1949--about 3.3 million Catholics and 750,000 Protestants--estimates of the total now range up to 75 million.

The church’s survival “gives us ground to think that Christianity is not likely to be displaced by forces hostile to it,” said Bishop K. H. Ting, head of the China Christian Council.

It includes all Chinese Protestants in what is called a postdenominational church, uniting various traditions and styles. Ting estimates that Protestants now number about 4 million, a fivefold increase under Communist rule.

Government Policy

His figures likely reflect government policy. Others put the total much higher.

During the suppression, Ting told a recent Lutheran meeting in Denmark, church organizations disappeared and “we didn’t know what was going on. . . . Later I came to learn that Christians were meeting in homes all over China.”

An international church statistician, the Rev. David Barrett, said his studies indicate that China now has 21.5 million baptized adults and a total Christian community of 52 million, counting children--a more moderate figure than some estimates.

Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia who now serves as a consultant to the Southern Baptist Foreign Missions Board, said that China has had the “fastest-expanding church growth ever.”

Ting said that 5,000 Protestant churches have been reopened for public worship, with new ones opening at a rate of one a day, plus “tens of thousands of groups meeting in homes.”

Vatican Ties Shunned

Additionally, about 2,000 Catholic churches have reopened, coordinated through the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Assn. It shuns ties with the Vatican, emphasizing--like Protestants--indigenous Christianity.

Ting said that Chinese churches have managed to get 2 million Bibles printed since 1980, but that the new plant will provide a continuing, growing supply of Scriptures and other needed materials.

The plant was established through the Amity Foundation social service, established as a channel for Western assistance, since Chinese churches are keenly wary of any hint of foreign financing or control.

Ting credits growth of Chinese Christianity to its “three-self movement”--self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating.

At the time of the Communist takeover, China’s Protestants were divided among 130 denominations under the tutelage of 8,000 missionaries, while Catholics were under guidance of 2,090 foreign and 2,968 Chinese priests.

All foreign missionaries were expelled or imprisoned.

But the once ousted native pastors now are mostly back at church duties, with new ones being turned out by seven Catholic and 10 Protestant seminaries, a main one in Nanjing and nine satellite seminaries.