Do They Know it’s Christmas? Not in Burma or Eritrea.
The Weekly Standard
by Paul Marshall
For Christians–and many Muslims–the main reason to celebrate this Christmas is, of course, Jesus’ birth.
But there are also trends in the church worldwide that make this Advent season at once a time of especial hope and a time of great suffering and darkness.
In China, despite ongoing repression (in early December, 270 house-church pastors were arrested in the city of Linyi alone), Christianity is expanding at a rate that has few parallels in history. Estimates placing the total number at over 80 million are no longer considered outlandish.
Similar growth has taken place in Africa, which is now majority Christian and is likely soon to have more Christians than any other continent.
In purely numerical terms, Christianity is the world’s fastest growing religion.
Two-thirds of Christians and four-fifths of active Christians live outside the West, so Christianity now may well be the world’s largest non-Western religion.
But for probably hundreds of millions, Christmas is shadowed by pain and fear, since this is usually the peak season for anti-Christian attacks in Pakistan, India, Sudan, Nigeria, and beyond. It is also a time when the Chinese and Vietnamese governments are prone to arrest their unregistered believers.
Read more here.
