June 2005

ARTICLE TOOLS

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A friend who runs an inner-city shelter for drug addicts and homeless people made this observation: "I love evangelicals. You can get them to do anything. The challenge is, you've also got to soften their judgmental attitudes before they can be effective."

I have seen the truth of both statements.

You can indeed get evangelicals to do anything. Last year in Cape Town, I met Joanna Flanders Thomas, a dynamic and attractive woman of mixed race. At the most violent prison in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela spent several years of confinement, Joanna started visiting prisoners daily, bringing them a simple gospel message of forgiveness and reconciliation.

She earned their trust, got them to talk about their abusive childhoods, and pointed them to a better way of solving conflicts. The year before her visits began, the prison recorded 279 acts of violence; the next year there were two.

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From Nepal I went to Beijing, China, where I attended an international church, 2,000-strong, comprising members from 60 nations. An African dance troupe led the music that morning, and the rented hotel meeting room rocked. I met diplomats, business executives, an Oxford philosophy professor, and platoons of young evangelicals who had moved to China in order to teach English and in the process communicate their faith to the Chinese.

Later I met representatives from the Chinese underground church. In the last 30 years, despite periodic government crackdowns, the house-church movement has burgeoned into perhaps the largest Christian awakening in history. Some experts estimate that 70 million Chinese now worship in house churches.

One of the leaders met with me even though authorities had explicitly forbidden it. "I'm 89 years old and I've already ...