Christian "Hot Spots"
Christian "hot spots". The ten countries where Christianity is growing most remarkably or fastest. (Note: in all these countries, Christianity is still a minority. Sometime a tiny minority. We have to jettison our big battalion mindset to grasp the significance of these relatively small numbers. They all represent the growing edge of Christendom.) I like the fact that the author often includes specific figures for Catholics.
According to Justin Long, a missionary researcher, they are:
1. Nepal
2. China
3. Burkino Faso
4. Singapore
5. India
6. Vietnam
7. Benin
8. Russia
9. Bangladesh
10. South Korea
Notice 7 of the 10 are in Asia. Where Christians are about to outnumber Buddhists for the first time.
The whole article is relatively short and worth a read.
posted by Sherry W @ 5:49 AM
6 Comments
6 Comments:
I was in Singapore two years ago, and when I went to Sunday Mass there were many Filipino 'maids' there. Many of these maids work for perhaps two years in Singapore, then return home with some savings. Perhaps some of the apparent 'growth' in Catholics in Singapore is due to their presence.
Researchers like Long are acutely aware of the phenomena of "guest workers" millions of which are in various parts of Asia and the Muslim world.
When they mean "growth", they don't mean already Christian guest workers, they mean non-Christian nationals becoming Christians.
Sherry W
Any of this growth due to missionary efforts by Catholics? I suspect it's mainly evangelicals or "Great Commission" Christians ...
I lament this fact (if true), not because the "others" are getting the "sheep" but because it reflects a serious crisis in the Catholic mindset about mission and evangelization and a lot of fuzzy thinking about dialogue (as in "dialogue now replaces proclamation").
I recall a conversation last year where someone said that they were glad that Vietnam had strict regulations on conversion, because this way "at least the Communists were keeping the evangelicals in check." Do what? We'd rather have the help of a Communist state in preventing evangelization, than actually being witnesses ourselves?
Yes - in South Korea, there is a good deal of conversion growth among Catholics as there is in Vietnam. But the lion's share is evangelical of course in all the "hot spots".
Especially any systemic outreach to Muslims.
Sherry W
I also know there is a tiff between the Rome and the Orthodox Patriarch of Russia because the Catholics keep opening churches in Russia. I would like to know more about this, but haven't found any info anywhere...are non-practicing Orthodox becoming practicing Catholics? That seems like good news.
I was reading Pius XI's encyclical, 'Corpus Mysticum Christi' with a group of students, and said that it was great except for that, because it literally identifies the 'Body' with the institution, it practically denies membership of the 'Body' to Orthodox and Protestants. A Protestant student, who wants to be a missionary, asked, 'what was their theology of mission at the time?' I realized that, *just because* of that literal-minded identification of the Body with the institution, the theology of mission was to go out and get people into the Body - otherwise they were going to hell! When I reported that conversation to our chaplain, he said, 'yes, and you can see the fruits at Sunday Mass every week' (dozens of Nigerian students).
What we have gained by overcoming our various narrownesses, we have lost in motivating missionary activity. I'm not saying we should go back to where it was before, but we sure need something to replace that, and we don't have it.
Nearly all of my Protestant students think Christianity is exclusively true. It's fairly common for them to want to be missionaries. I've never met a Catholic student who was an exclusivist or wanted to be a missionary.
Again, I don't think RCs should develop an exclusively exclusivist theology, but nor am I among the critics of, for instance, Dominus Iesus.
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