The next Christian Crusades

Last week Sharron and I hosted a meeting at our home to hear a report from a covert missionary.  This person shared about their ministry in a communist country, where being a missionary from the United States is banned.   

This person is in ministry in a location within the 10/40 window:

They spoke of the Christian house movement and of the Back to Jerusalem Movement.

Here is an article that spoke to my heart:

Let’s play fill-in-the-blanks. In general, Americans and Europeans are Christians. Arabs are Muslims. Indians are Hindus. Chinese are _________?

If you have trouble filling in the last blank, it’s because the answer is blank. From time immemorial, the Chinese have been the least religious of any of history’s major civilizations. Daoism, Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism are rationalistic quasi-religions lacking any personal relationship with a transcendent deity or deities. The ancestor- and spirit-worship of Chinese folk religion is individualized to families only.

This is one reason why China has periodically endured spasms of murderous cultural insanity. In the middle of the 19th century, a fellow from Guangdong Province named Hong Xiuquang read a Christian missionary tract and decided he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, called upon by Jehovah to establish a Taiping Kingdom (taiping means “heavenly peace”) by cleansing China of Ching Dynasty corruption through divine slaughter.

From 1850 to 1864, Hong’s “Society of God Worshippers” killed over 20 million people before the Taiping Rebellion was finally suppressed.

Often, these spasms become homicidally xenophobic. The Yihequan, or “Society of Righteous Fists” – known in the West as the Boxers – initiated a terrorist movement in 1899 dedicated to beating up or killing “foreign devils” and their perceived sympathizers. The Boxers laid siege to the diplomatic quarter of Peking (as it was called then), requiring a force of 20,000 British, American and Japanese soldiers to rescue their citizens and take the entire city in August of 1900.

The most lethally insane spasm in all Chinese history, of course, was that launched by Mao Tse-Tung, who is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest mass murderer in the annals of mankind. Mao’s secular religion of Chinese Communism caused the deaths of over 60 million human beings.

The causal connection here is that the lack of spiritual fulfillment builds up a frustration in the Chinese soul until it bursts out in a psychic explosion of deadly irrational fervor.

Could there be, then, a source of spiritual fulfillment that would satisfy the souls of hundreds of millions of Chinese, dissolving the frustration and enabling them to create a China that is truly free, truly democratic, truly peaceful, and in harmony with America and the world?

It’s too soon to say yes, but not too early to say possibly. That possibility is called Christianity.

To grasp just how possible, I suggest you read David Aikman’s  book, "Jesus in Beijing" (Regnery, 2003). As a journalist who speaks Chinese and has covered China for over 30 years, Aikman estimates there are currently over 80 million practicing Christian believers in China, and predicts that within three decades this number will quintuple to embrace fully one-third of China’s population. This in spite of incredible persecution by the Chinese Communist government.

In other words, the underground “Christian house church” movement is about to reach critical mass. By 2033, China will have the largest Christian population in the world, with 400 million Christian Chinese.

“China is in the process of becoming Christianized,” Aikman maintains. This means that “a Christian view of the world will be the dominant worldview within China’s political and cultural establishment.” Such a view entails for Aikman an “Augustinian sense of restraint, justice, and order in the wielding of state power.” He sees the Christianization of China as happening concurrently with China’s becoming a global power, such that it will exercise that power as responsibly and benevolently as has the United States.

Given China’s spasm-ridden past, however, there remains the grave danger that an economic collapse or military adventure over, say, Taiwan, could trigger “a dangerous and vengeful nationalism.”

I’d like to focus, however, on one particular geopolitical ramification of the Christian movement in China, and that is the role it will play in extinguishing Muslim terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism throughout the world.

Wrap this one around yourselves, folks: The next Christian Crusades will be conducted by the Chinese.

This even has a formal name: The Back to Jerusalem Movement. It is being organized by the leaders of the Protestant evangelical Chinese Christian churches with the stated intention of sending out a minimum of 100,000 Chinese Christian missionaries over the next 10-20 years to the “10/40” window: the latitudinal band around the world between 40º north and 10º south that encompasses the majority of Muslim populations.

That’s right: Chinese Christians intend to evangelize the world’s Moslems. Zhang Rongliang, leader of the Fangcheng Christian Fellowship and the single most influential Christian leader in all China, states it very clearly: “The Muslim religion is the biggest obstacle on the road back to Jerusalem.”

Further, the Chinese Christian Crusade has already started. Missionary-training seminaries all over China are training missionaries specifically for the Islamic world, many of whom are learning Arabic and Farsi. There are thousands of Chinese workers already in the Middle East as engineers, technicians, ordinary laborers – and many of them are missionaries on the side.

The “Vision Statement” of the movement notes that Muslim countries “are paranoid and on guard against Christianity coming from America. They have sealed their front doors as tightly shut as they can against Christianity, and they closely monitor every activity of Westerners who come to their country. While they spend all their energy guarding their front doors, maybe the Chinese Christians will quietly slip in the back door with the Gospel!”

You can find this statement on their Web site: www.backtojerusalem.com. Yes, the Chinese Christian Crusade has its own Web site – and an office in Jerusalem. Yet that is for symbolic purposes, for “back to Jerusalem” means for the Gospel to travel from China through the lands of the Silk Road to its land of origin. It emphatically does not mean any attempt to evangelize Jews. In fact, Aikman has found “an overwhelming pro-Israel feeling among China’s Christians ... [many of whom] prayed strongly for a U.S. victory in the war against Iraq.”

The Chinese Christian intention to evangelize Moslems is the greatest threat the religion of Islam has ever faced. The first Christian Crusades of the 11th and 12th centuries were attempts to reconquer Christian and Jewish lands that had been conquered by Arab armies. The Arabs claim to be eternally traumatized by the Crusades, never asking themselves by what right did they have to swarm out of Arabian deserts and militarily subjugate nations and peoples that had been Christians and Jews for centuries?

It was the Arabs who conducted the original Crusades in the Middle East, just as they continue to do so today. After all, “Crusade” in Arabic is “Jihad.”

Now, finally, the tables are being turned. There has never been a concerted and massive spiritual assault on Islam in its 1,400-year history. A tidal wave of Christian missionaries is about to wash over Islam. The sheer force and size of it will stop the growth of Islam in its tracks (that is, it can forget about claiming to be “the fastest-growing religion on Earth”) and cause countless Muslims to abandon their faith

Jack Wheeler is Editor of ToThePoint™, a geopolitical analysis service at www.tothepointnews.com.