The Big Picture

Felicity Dale recently shared a post entitled What in the world is God up to? on her blog Simply Church. With the media political viewpoint on events in today's world we often do not see or hear about what God is doing in the midst of the nations. With Felicity's permission I reprint her encouraging post below.

• There are probably more Christians in China now than members of the Communist Party.

• In Asia, the T4T training has resulted in more than 1.7 million baptisms over the past 10 years.

• In India, a Hindu nation, one house church network with which I am familiar, is seeing around one million baptisms per year.

• Now seems to be God’s time for the Muslim world. In one nation we know, there are thousands of house churches. In another area of the Middle East, there is a movement that has more than 12,000 house churches.

• A Buddhist nation has seen more than 110,000 new believers in the past 10 years.

• In 1991, when the Communists lost control of Mongolia, there were maybe 4 or 5 known Christians. Estimates are that now, just over 20 years later, there are around 100,000.

• In Africa, Rolland and Heidi Baker have seen more than 10,000 new churches formed in Mozambique and the surrounding nations.

A few years ago, all of this would have seemed impossible. We may not be seeing huge numbers here in the West, but God is on the move in much of the rest of the world. Most (not all) the examples I’ve given here have occurred with disciple making movements/church planting movements. In these movements, the emphasis is on what is going on outside of the traditional church building. Ordinary believers are making disciples and leading small groups that eventually meet as churches.

I know that numbers are not everything, but they are an indication of what God is up to. Several years ago, Wolfgang Simson did a survey of the largest churches in the world. If you include networks of churches that meet in homes, then numbers one through 19 are networks of house churches and number 20, at the time of his survey, was Paul Yonggi Cho’s church in Seoul, Korea.

Throughout the world, God is using ordinary people—just like you—to start churches. What is there to stop you doing the same?