Alan Hirsch's Contributions To Obliterate Christianity In China

Alan Hirsch asks the question, how did the church grow from as few as 25,000 Christians in AD100 to nearly 20 million only two centuries later? This was despite Christianity being an “illegal religion,” and not having “any church buildings as we know them,” nor the Scriptures in their finalised form and without the institutions and methods that are present in the church today. [3] To counter a claim that this may have been an historical aberration, Hirsch further illustrates the point by drawing parallels with the present day church in China. Despite the efforts of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution with the explicit aim “to obliterate Christianity (and all religion) from China,” Christianity actually “flourished beyond all imagination,” growing from an estimated two million believers at the start of the purges to over 60 million and counting when the “Bamboo Curtain” was raised in the eighties.[4]
The Rutba House, a missional community in the USA, describe how throughout church history, new monastic movements have risen up to form community in “the abandoned places of society.”[6] It is in these abandoned places that numerous expressions of missional community have been established over the last few