Counting Christians in China: A Cautionary Report

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Recently I was attending a meeting in Europe at which a house church evangelist from China was speaking. The literature being distributed to raise funds stated that he represented more than 75 million house church believers. When this figure was queried, the Western sponsor retorted, "Well, this figure is not gospel truth-give or take a few million either way, it doesn't matter!" The publicity of a Hong Kong Christian ministry claims that "every year 8 million people come to Christ and are baptised in Mainland China." These statistics are impressive, but they simply cannot stand up under closer analysis, for they are backed by no reliable, documented evidence.

This problem is not …