ITEMS OF INTEREST March 5, 2007 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

with contributions from Tim Johnson, George Barna

SOME 140 YEARS AGO, a Methodist missionary with a flowing beard stepped aboard a sampan in coastal China and held on firmly as boatmen steered up the Min River, poling and rowing past rapids that almost splintered the vessel.

On arrival at this outpost [Nanping], the missionary set up a chapel, effectively bringing Christianity to a lawless and disease-ridden corner of southern China....

By the time communists came to power in China in 1949 ... Christians in the area numbered in the many thousands. Christianity appeared to have taken root, despite chaotic conditions. It almost perished in the tumultuous first decades under Mao Zedong, who established atheism as the national norm and expelled the foreign clergy....

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