Walk into a beauty salon and customers would be forgiven for thinking they just came for a manicure. But Xun Jinzhen’s beauty salon near the Beijing Zoo is different. In this salon customers are also given the Word of God.

Mr Xun’s evangelical salon converted 40 people to the church last year, he claimed, a small yet significant addition to the already millions who have converted to Protestantism and Catholicism, the two approved faiths alongside Buddhism and Taoism.

In a country with a tortured and tumultuous past, this upsurge of Christian converts throughout China is not surprising. The Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao saw extremes of poverty and suffering as Chinese killed Chinese in their thousands.

Although Buddhism and Taoism remain the country’s largest religions, attendance figures to the state-sanctioned churches log up to 35 million worshippers.

Neither has the heavy-handed response to Christianity from the Politburo stemmed the spread of the religion throughout China’s towns and rural communities, with 80 to 100 million estimated worshippers attending underground or “house” churches.

This turbulent past combined with the problems of modern living has led to millions of Chinese searching for spiritual fulfilment in Christianity.

“City people have real problems, and mental pain, that they can’t resolve on their own,” said Mr Xun. “So it’s easy for us to convert these people to Christianity. In the countryside, people are richer than before, but they still have problems with their health and in family relationships. Then it’s also very easy to bring them to Christianity.”

The appeal in Christianity has another dimension which makes it slightly different from the West, however, with the healing powers of prayer and worship one of conversion’s driving forces in China, particularly in rural areas where many are often without health services.

One woman told the congregation at Kuanjie official protestant church in Beijing last Saturday of how she won her brother’s whole family to Christianity after praying for his sick daughter: “She was on a ventilator and everyone had lost hope. But I prayed for her, and she recovered. Now her family follow Christ too.”

The woman, 33, who came from Anhui, a poor province of central China, said in her village the local house church had grown from around five or six people to 100 in five years.

Christianity has doubtless benefited from the failure of Communism to take hold as an all-encompassing lifestyle and ideology: “We have very few people who believe in communism as a faith, so there’s an emptiness in their hearts,” said Mr Xun, 37, whose mother is also Christian.

The response of China’s rulers to the spread of Christianity has been mixed with the authorities oppressing those churches which reject official state control over their practices and doctrine, while ignoring those churches that accept the authority and theology of the official organisations.

Persecution has stepped up against Christians in China, however, indicating the general regard of Christianity as more of a threat than a stabilising force. If the estimates for the number in attendance at “house” churches are correct, there would be now more Christians in China than Communists.

A crackdown on Christian churches has seen the likes of Zhang Rongliang, head of the China for Christ Church, one of the largest in China with 10 million members, remains in prison after his arrest last December.

Lawyers claim the only reason why no Christians have been charged for religious offences is for fear of foreign criticism.

Furthermore, there is rising scepticism throughout the country that the 70 million members of the Communist Party even have absolute faith in their own ideology anymore.

Mr Xun himself remains suspicious of the circumstances within which he lost his evangelical salon. He claims a week after firing an anti-Christian employee his business was raided and fined for not holding a proper acupuncture license which Mr Xun could not pay, leaving him no other option than to hand his salon over to others. He suspects it was not the acupuncture that got the authorities so upset but the Word of God.


(Source: The Telegraph)