The church’s explosive growth in China is truly a phenomenon worth beholding. The price some Christians are paying for their faith is also remarkable – a persecution that should make some who use the word to describe events in the UK blush. The BBC have a piece on their website this week about the Chinese church that is well worth reading.

European comparison
One sentence in the piece that does need to be put into some kind of context, however, is this: ‘More people go to church on Sunday in China than in the whole of Europe’. And with the number of Christians in China currently at the 60 million mark (a conservative estimate, apparently) that statement may well be a statistical fact. But with the country’s population at 1.3 billion, that still only means 4.5% are believers. According to this Tearfund report the weekly attendance rate of Christians in the UK stands at 10%.


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