With Islam on a Jihad, Liberals in charge and Hollywood philosophers in vogue, it is getting difficult to find uplifting news. However, of all things, we bring you good tidings from China. It is a story with great potential impact. Yet, you will not read about it in the New York Times or see it on CNN. Why? Perhaps because it is a tale of faith!

China is experiencing a spiritual revival of sorts and out of the starting gate the 20 to 30 million Muslims have fallen way behind the 111 million Christians. Serious missionary work has resulted in 10,000 conversions to Christianity per day. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity projects 218 million Christians, 18% of the Chinese population, by 2050. How does this impact our future? John Allen explains:

By universal consensus, China is an emerging global superpower. Its economy grew at an average annual rate of 9.4 percent over the last 25 years, and today has a GDP of $11 trillion, making it the second-largest economy in the world after the United States. Foreign companies have poured more than $600 billion into China since 1978; far eclipsing what the United States spent rebuilding post-war Europe in the Marshall Plan. China now has a middle class of 200 million people, 80 million of whom are quite well-off. The country exports more in a single day than it did in all of 1978.

How things shake out religiously, therefore, is of tremendous strategic importance, even for people who don’t feel any particular spiritual stake in the result. If Christianity ends up at around 20 percent of the population, for example, China could become an exponentially larger version of South Korea (where Christians are between 25-50 percent of the population, depending upon which count one accepts) — a more democratic, rule-oriented, basically pro-Western society. On the other hand, if dynamic Muslim movements create an Islamic enclave in the western half of the country, with financial and ideological ties to fundamentalist Wahhabi forms of Islam in Saudi Arabia, at least that part of China could become a wealthier and more influential Afghanistan. If growing religious pluralism in China becomes fractious, it could mean that a well-armed and wealthy superpower is destabilized by internal conflict, posing risks to global peace and security.

The Catholic Church has been waiting for China to ‘open up’ before launching significant missionary efforts there. Rome has concluded that it would take a miracle to change its fortunes in China. Therefore, 90% of the Chinese Christians are Protestant, mostly Pentecostal. The Pentecostals have been working tirelessly since 1949 when the entire Christian population of China was 900,000. Pentecostals believe in miracles.

At current growth rates Pentecostals will account for more than 50% of all Christians in the world by 2025. Not bad for a movement that began in 1901 with a handful of students in a Bible School in Topeka, Kansas. With these kinds of numbers Pentecostals are going to be very influential in shaping the future, not only in China, but in the entire world. Since Islam is their most powerful rival, it is important to understand how they “plan” to combat the Jihad. Their position on Israel is encouraging.

In uncounted speeches before diverse audiences, Ehud Danoch, Israel’s consul general in Los Angeles, would never have expected such an enthusiastic reception.

Addressing 16,000 Pentecostal Christians in the jam-packed L.A. Sports Arena last week, Danoch pledged, as he has done time and again, that Israel would never give in to terrorism.

His listeners, a rainbow of races and ages, rose as one, raised their arms heavenward and shouted ‘Hallelujah,’ while two dozen large shofars joined in the joyful noise unto the Lord.

A few minutes later, the scene repeated, when Danoch mentioned Israel’s upcoming 58th Independence Day celebration. Cheers even rung out from beyond the building, with an overflow audience of 4,000 in the adjoining L.A. Memorial Coliseum joining in as they watched on giant video monitors.

For Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians, believed to number some 500 million to 600 million around the world, the exhilaration and exuberance of the reception was a trademark of their worship and faith, and a reaffirmation of their fervent support for Israel.

The all-day prayer service at the Sports Arena climaxed a weeklong celebration by 35,000 of the faithful from 113 countries, who had gathered for the Azusa Street Centennial and Revival in downtown Los Angeles.

The official ‘Israel track’ at the Centennial was organized by the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ), whose centerpiece consisted of the pageant ‘The Covenant,’ performed twice daily by a 50-person cast of Christians who live in Israel.

In a remarkable feat of chronological compression, the two-hour show, in English and Hebrew, spanned 4,000 years of Jewish history, from Abraham and Moses through the Babylonian exile, the Inquisition and Holocaust, the birth of Israel and the present.

It is unlikely that any current Jewish community center or Israeli high school would dare to present so idealized and chauvinistic a drama, but the audience of white, black, Latino and Asian Christians from around the world loved it.

The emotional highlight came at the end. As the cast sang the opening bars of ‘Hatikvah,’ the entire audience stood and sang the anthem, in Hebrew, with a fervor I haven’t experienced since the state’s struggle for independence in 1948.

The Chinese Pentecostals are more ambitious than their Western cousins. They evangelize aggressively from secret ‘house churches’ and when jailed by the Communist Government they befriend the other inmates. They dream of bringing the gospel westward to Muslim lands, marching steadily until they reach Jerusalem. John Allen writes in the National Catholic Reporter.

Pentecostal talk about mission, on the other hand, is very much phrased in the simple present. Most Pentecostals would obviously welcome being arrested less frequently, but in general they are not waiting for legal or political reform before carrying out aggressive evangelization programs. The most audacious even dream of carrying the gospel beyond the borders of China, along the old Silk Road into the Muslim world, in a campaign known as “Back to Jerusalem.” As Aikman explains in Jesus in Beijing, some Chinese Evangelicals and Pentecostals believe that the basic movement of the gospel for the last 2,000 years has been westward: from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Europe, from Europe to America, and from America to China. Now, they believe, it’s their turn to complete the loop by carrying the gospel to Muslim lands, eventually arriving in Jerusalem. Once that happens, they believe, the gospel will have been preached to the entire world.

In the Asia Times, Spengler puts the Chinese Pentecostals impact on the clash of civilizations into perspective.

China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past 200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelization. If this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it. Islam might defeat the western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East.

This is only a first tremor of the earthquake to come, as Chinese Christians turn their attention outward. Years ago I speculated that if Mecca ever is razed, it will be by an African army marching north; now the greatest danger to Islam is the prospect of a Chinese army marching west.

We can only hope that when the Pentecostals take over, China will stop poisoning our pet food.