ݮƵAbout 60 of us are gathered in the Majesty Plaza ballroom, a chandeliered hall in a downtown Shanghai hotel. I’m writing this column from that room, after eagerly taking notes as I listened to Christian leaders from China and the United States talk about the gospel at work transforming lives.
About 40 years ago when I was in elementary school, I didn’t know a lot about China. “Don’t dig that hole too deep in the yard,” parents would admonish my friends and me,“you might hit China.” I guess I did know a few things. China was on the other side of the world, Americanized Chinese food tasted wonderful, and President Richard Nixon was breaking ground traveling to Peking to meet with Mao Zedong.
I also knew China was “closed.” Around that time I recall reading the nail-biting stories in Christian comic books of Brother Andrew and others smuggling Bibles behind the “Bamboo Curtain,” Bibles banned by the sponsors of the Cultural Revolution. The missionaries who’d been at work in the early part of the 20th century had long been evicted. Bibles discovered were destroyed. Those found talking about Jesus or covertly sneaking in Christian literature risked what I understood then as tortuous imprisonment for years on end.
If someone told me, as an 11-year-old boy, that one day I’d be in Shanghai with Chinese Christian leaders talking openly about the Bible and the love of Christ, I would have thought they were from the moon, or at least the other side of the world.
But God is on the move in ways that defy our imaginations. I began to see the thaw through the eyes of my wife, Paula, who taught for a year in China during the early 1990s. Returning several times since, the changes are startling. What I witnessed in November underscored the change.
For a few days, a group of about 30 Christian leaders from the United States and about the same number from China listened to each other in a John 17 kind of way, the way that we are called to be one in Christ. We talked honestly about the struggles and perceptions of the past. We broke bread together, prayed together, listened to Scriptures and talked about the best days still before us if we can work in partnership with each other.
We’ve come a long way since I was in elementary school.
One evening I sat beside Pastor Li, the leader of a church of thousands in Nanjing. Translated to English, it’s called “Don’t Worry Church.” I found that name an unintended play on what had been years of worry-inducing pres