Bicentennial Conference

I seriously doubt there will ever be a bicentennial conference on Christianity in China and even if there were, which there will not be, the Mormons would not be invited as they also likely did not attend the first two-week event held at Shanghai in 1907. It just would not make a lot of sense to invite them to participate when they are not willing to play by the few rules that are agreed upon by all of Christendom for centuries upon centuries. Sure, Pentecostals of China also were not invited but arguably the Pentecostal movement did not yet exist in China in 1907, the first reports from there appearing only in 1908. And the commemoration of 1807 as the introduction of Protestant Christianity would not mean very much to Catholics who had already been operating in China hundreds of years earlier than Protestants. And, anyway, Protestants and Catholics do things separately. The Protestants would almost certainly not want to be required to discuss with the Vatican their issues with the government in China. So it is safe to assume that the 1907 conference was composed of mostly the mainline denominations of Protestantism, the Methodists and Episcopals and Baptists who for a hundred years already had been winning converts to Christianity and building churches and schools and orphanages. The conference was reflective of Protestantism of Old China with all of its 19th century values and achievements. No one is minimizing their amazing achievements during that time. Sure, hostility later developed between the dry and dusty mainliners and the Holy Rollers who were seen as emphasizing personal experience at the expense of works. Pentecostals were greatly persecuted by both mainline Protestants and Catholics and to avoid censorship by short-sighted old fogies they developed independent systems to emphasize their priorities of preaching the gospel and supernatural phenomena as the empowerment for works. But now, a hundred years after that, the mainline denominations do not have much to boast of in the way of China at least publicly. The old fundraising systems so valued as illustrative of the national glories of France and England and which required a huge influx of missionary manpower were mostly dismantled and the church of China operates mostly under national leadership. The argument between mainliners and Holy Rollers is in some senses a moot point. About 40 years after the conference all foreign missionaries were expelled from mainland China and the government was taken over by a Marxist regime that remains in power to the present. Whatever happened to all of the churches and schools and believers left behind by the Protestants? Who is watching out for them now? Well, there still might be some remnants left behind in China but, really, it is not my place to say who they are or what they should be doing next. Sometimes things are just outside of our control. Sometimes no one can say which nations and powers will be raised up and cast down in the course of history. It would be exceedingly vain and futile to even try. God knows all of these things and He will work these things out for good according to His purpose which may or may not have anything to do with us and our personal glory. In fact, we might be better off without the burden of having tried and failed and being made to look foolish. We have our own fences to mend and bombed out ruins to rebuild. Would we not just end up looking foolish trying to predict things that we cannot understand? Would we not end up as stooges of some evil dictator we had not foreseen which would only mean that maybe we should reread the Apocalypse? Just because my peers nominate me as loser of the century, that does not mean that I am required to accept that position or act out all their stupid fantasies. Jesus says that the end will come and that when we see these signs of the end times that we should rejoice to know that our salvation is at hand. The only ones who might have reason to be afraid would be those persons such as for example Mormons who are definitely not Christians. It is the Mormons who should be cleaning up their act because until they just don't past muster. Sorry but I just cannot say something that is not true just because it is what you want to hear. Hopefully the Mormons will not be running the national archives because it is not their story. It is our story.