China Today

At Hilton, we have been thinking about the remarkable growth of the church in China over the past 50 years. Alan Hirsch's blog contained the following information today:

LED BY A booming Pentecostal population, the number of Christians in China has mushroomed in the last half century to make it the third largest Christian nation in the world, behind only the United States and Brazil. About 900,000 Protestants lived in the country at the time of the Communist takeover in 1949. Today China has about 111 million Christians, about 90 percent Protestant and mostly Pentecostal, according to the World Christian Database, published by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity.

Religious data is notoriously imprecise in an officially atheistic state, and other estimates go as low as 70 million and 40 million, in line with the CIA World Factbook. Even those conservative estimates, however, translate into Protestantism in China growing roughly 4,300 percent over the last half-century, most of it since the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and 1970s.
By 2050, there will be 218 million Christians in China, 16 percent of the population, enough to make China the world's second-largest Christian nation, according to the center, which estimates 10,000 conversions in China every day.

This growth, however, has largely bypassed the Roman Catholic Church. Current estimates put the number of Chinese Catholics at 12 million, compared to 3.3 million in 1949, which means Catholicism has just kept pace with overall population growth.