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Asia Jan 4th 2018 edition

Escalators to heaven

Evangelicalism is spreading among the

Chinese of South-East Asia
Devotees are “too blessed to be stressed”

BANDUNG AND SINGAPORE

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WHEN
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Church in Bandung, on the island of Java, ve years ago, around 180 people came to
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shopping complex—is packed with around 450 each Sunday. “People keep
coming,” Mr Parade shrugs.

Some 1,000 miles away, up several sets of escalators at a shopping mall in

Singapore, thousands of people take part in a two-hour service on a Saturday
evening at the City Harvest Church, which has a weekly attendance of just under
16,000. The service involves a rock group leading the congregation in devotional
songs, several instances of speaking in tongues, and testimony from Emily, a
young Singaporean who converted her father to Christianity. “My Dad has become
a much happier man,” she declares, to huge applause.

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Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is growing more quickly in Asia than most
parts of the world, with over 200m adherents in 2015, up from 17m in 1970. The
largest congregations are in South Korea and the Philippines, where dazzlingly
large mega-churches hold tens of thousands of people. But Christian zeal is also
increasing in other parts of the continent, including Indonesia and Malaysia,
where proselytising among the Muslim majority is well nigh impossible, but
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In Singapore,
Allow which is sandwiched between Indonesia and Malaysia but is mainly
Chinese, evangelicalism rst took o in the 1980s, recalls Terence Chong of the
ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, a think-tank. Mega-churches began springing up in
the early 1990s. These grew quickly, despite the fact that the Singaporean
government is wary of proselytisers potentially stirring up religious tensions.
Evangelicals, including many Pentecostals, made up 8% of the population in 2015,
up from 2% in 1970.

Evangelical churches are ourishing in Malaysia and Indonesia in even less

promising circumstances. Roughly a tenth of the population of both countries is
Christian, but bureaucrats make life di cult for churches, largely for fear that they
will attempt to convert members of the Muslim majority. Over 1,000 churches were
closed in Indonesia between 2006 and 2014, says Andreas Harsono of Human
Rights Watch, a pressure group.

Mr Parade’s church is in an outdoor shopping complex because it doesn’t need a

licence to operate there, and getting one elsewhere is di cult. In Malaysia,
meanwhile, it is illegal for a Muslim to convert to Christianity, even though the
constitution theoretically enshrines freedom of religion. Malaysia also has Islamic
police to make sure Muslims do not marry adherents of other religions or deviate
in other ways. Yet even in this forbidding setting, the proportion of the population
that is evangelical has grown rapidly (see chart).

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The growth of evangelical churches in the three countries also shows how they are
“increasingly connected”, says Max Jeganathan of the Zacharias Trust, a Christian
organisation based in Britain. Christians across the region support each other
nancially, he says; several churches in Singapore have helped “plant” others in
Malaysia or elsewhere. City Harvest declares that it provides training and “spiritual
oversight” to locals keen to start their own churches. It now has over three dozen
a liated churches abroad.

Most evangelicals see the growth of their churches as God’s work. But it also seems
to have an aspirational element to it. “It is the de facto middle-class religion right
now,” says Mr Chong. According to a study he conducted in 2013, over 50% of
mega-church-goers had a university degree, a higher proportion than Christians of
other sorts. That was in spite of the fact that mega-church Christians were more
likely to have lived in public housing and to come from working-class
backgrounds. They were also more likely to speak Chinese and to come from
families which were not previously Christian.

Many of South-East Asia’s megachurches preach an American-style “prosperity

gospel”: although there is lots of talk of charity and good works, wealth is
celebrated as a gift from God. At City Harvest one preacher tells the story of a

businessman who attended the church—and donated generously to it—whose

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rst-time visitors are given a pop-up book telling the story of the venue. The
30,000 worshippers there have to book online on a Wednesday to reserve a seat for
Allow
the Sunday service.

Friendly ushers and peppy slogans (“too blessed to be stressed”) make the
churches appealingly accessible. They are also good spots for making business
connections. Churches in Singapore are places where people network with those
they trust, says Thomas Harvey of the Oxford Centre of Mission Studies, a British
charity. The feeling is that “these are people we know, these are people of integrity,
character, education,” he says.

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Integrity, alas, is sometimes lacking. In 2015 Kong Hee, the founder of City Harvest
Church, and ve other church leaders were found guilty of misappropriating
S$50m ($37m) in church funds, partly to fund the music career of Mr Kong’s wife,
Ho Yeow Sun. (The devotional element of the song “China Wine”, in the video for
which a scantily clad Ms Ho “grinds it up” with assorted rappers, is hard to
fathom.) In 2009 a well-publicised spat broke out at the Calvary Church in Kuala
Lumpur, with congregants demanding more transparency over church funds. At
other churches pastors have been accused of accumulating unseemly riches.

This has hurt some churches. At City Harvest the congregation is around a third
smaller than it used to be, estimates Sam, a 36-year-old interior designer who has
been going to the church for 15 years. But on the whole churches have been able to
“isolate incidents”, says Mr Chong, putting the blame on the individual rather than
the whole church or community. “With enough prayer,” the argument goes, he
says, “the Church will be able to right itself.” And if not, there are plenty of
competitors to take in disenchanted members of another ock.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Evangelicalism is spreading

among the Chinese of South-East Asia"

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Malaysia’s reformist government has
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ASIA

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