China! Few names are so laden with associations. Few lands draw so much American cultural attention. Few civilizations have captivated the dreams of the church so deeply. China is so old, so big, so complex, dynamic, powerful and subtle, that a fool can be easily detected in the person who claims to have discovered a simple easy truth about her.

The story of the Gospel in China is a tale of hope; a comedy that wrings joy out of the tragedy of her past and present. The Word of the Lord is intellectual satisfaction to the believer who understands the Confucian tradition. More importantly, it is words of salvation to millions of desperate faithful. It is an old story: Christians have been active in the territory of the People's Republic longer than in northern Germany. It is a new story: the Chinese church today is several thousand times bigger than a century ago. Mere mention of the Chinese church triggers conflicting images in the minds of North American Christians. We see the crushed church of Smyrna, and the enduring church of Philadelphia. We hear stories of a downpour of oppression that fails to quench the wildfire of growth. Indeed, what has happened in China in the last century is one of the most marvelous stories in the history of the church.

In the middle of the story is the Three Self Church, the only denomination officially tolerated by the communist leadership. The Three Self Church emerged in the last half century, as a Chinese-Led denomination moving apart from the Western denominations. Its name comes from its commitment to wresting control from the Westerners: the three selves are self-support (financial), self-leadership and self-propagation. These founding principles were scandalous to the Western church, and controversial today. The three-self is a church born out of sin. The question is: whose sin? Since Christ told us to be one, every denomination represents some sin in the church, either in those who cut themselves away, or in those left behind. In any case, the Three Self Church had some very valid reasons for severing ties with the West, and some lousy ones.

Many Western Christians distrust the Three Self Church, calling it a puppet of the People's Republic government's designs to control the Gospel. Many Chinese Christians hate the Three Self church, because ambitious and self-serving pastors have used it to save their own hides in the worst times of oppression, to the point of betraying other Christians. The story of the Three Self Church, formerly called the Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), is in part a microcosm of the history of the church in China in general. Since the TSPM is essentially a Chinese national church, its official historians like to minimize outside influences: that might suggest Christianity is less than purely Chinese.

However, our God is more than just a Chinese God. To tell the story of the TSPM, one necessarily has to cast one's glance beyond the limits of the People's Republic of China. At the same time, one cannot tell the story of the church in China without recourse to the tumultuous century of her emergence. The history of the TSPM is important because the problems in this story are indicative of both the Chinese soul, and the nature of cross-cultural encounters. This story shows the tension between the intrinsic global reach of the gospel, and the immediate locality of the body of believers.

To understand the history of the Chinese church, one must have an at least cursory understanding of the particularities of Chinese nationalism. In the old European sense of the word, nationalism refers to the doctrine that the basic units of the world are nations, or people groups: either lingual or ethnic groups. In the European dream world, there are clean boundaries between people groups: on one side of the river is one nation, and on the other side is an entirely different culture, language, ethnicity and religion. Nationalism as a cultural force teaches that one must preserve one's culture, even at the cost of neighboring cultures. Political nationalism teaches that the physical boundaries of the "Nation-State" should be co-extensive with the ethnic boundaries. Political nationalism assumes that the states on a world map are all painted in primary colors, with little black lines printed in between. In China, everything is different. Surprise!

China Awakens

China had always been the dominant political power in East Asia, the standard for civilization, philosophy, and medicine. China has been a giant world united by a single script. The Chinese were by so many degrees the whale in a pond with a few other fish, that a system of governance was able to emerge which presupposed the universal reign of the Chinese emperor. Chinese philosophers developed a holistic vision of physics unified with culture and politics. The emperor sat at the nexus of heaven and earth (although he was never worshipped as God). A disruption in the orderly structure of law was analogous to a natural disaster. This system did not acknowledge foreign powers as sovereign equals, but as renegade barbarians.

Indeed, until the middle of the nineteenth century, there was no ministry of foreign affairs because, to the Chinese leadership, there were no foreign affairs. When contact with Europeans made such a department necessary, it was named the Bureau of Barbarian Affairs.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, European contact grew from a trickle to a torrent. While the British never dreamt of colonizing China, they never shirked back from a fight. The British were a naval power, and the Chinese a land power. The encounters always took place at sea, and the Chinese lost every single skirmish in the 1800s. The winner gets more bargaining power, and in the case of the British, usually dictated better terms for their merchants. What were those merchants selling? Among other things, they sold opium. The British had developed a deadly triangle trade route, where they bought opium in India, sold it in China, and bought tea destined for home. (A Victorian Gentleman could ponder giving the savages the gift of civilization, while entertaining his guests with drug-money tea sweetened with slave-trade sugar.)

How to brew a cup of tea

1. Send guns, fabric and jewelry to Africa; buy slaves.
2. Sell slaves in Caribbean; buy sugar and rum.
3. Sell sugar and rum in England; buy fabrics and jewelry.
4. Sell fabrics and jewelry in India; buy opium.
5. Smuggle opium into China; sell on black market. With profits, buy tea and porcelain.
6. Sell tea and porcelain for enormous profit. Enjoy!

At the same time, God was stirring in the hearts of many Western Christians to take the Gospel to China. That is a different story. However, the Nineteenth century mission had, for our purposes, two outstanding features: First, a profound humility, love for China and desire to communicate with the Chinese. Second, missionaries operated with a profound ignorance of Chinese civilization that cost them dearly. In the long run, God honored the first quality, but not for 150 years. And in the end, it had to be Chinese leaders who would lead the church.

The Missionaries failed to adequately distinguish themselves from other Europeans. Some missionaries actually rode Opium-laden gunboats up the rivers to get to their mission-stations. The mission stations sat on land ceded to the missions in peace treaties with the Europeans. As a result, the local aristocrats always viewed the missionaries with scorn. They saw them as the advance guard for an all-out invasion. The missionaries did not understand the anger, because they felt they were resident aliens - citizens of one sovereign nation living in the domain of another sovereign nation. Only toward the end of the nineteenth century did the Chinese even acknowledge the existence of another sovereign nation. Until that point, the missionaries were in effect waging war with the Emperor.

The tensions increased, and more and more missionaries met their deaths in spontaneous anti-western riots. At the same time, unbeknownst to the aristocrats, the missionaries were learning, and were becoming more sensitive. When they finally understood, it was too late for themselves, but not too late for the Gospel.

China awakened in the late nineteenth century, and developed a sense of Chinese-ness. They realized that their civilization was unique, and started planning for its survival. The leaders of this nationalism believed that to ensure the survival of China, she had to throw away her entire history. China thus became willing to sacrifice her past for the sake of her future. China was not open to more European imperialism. However, there were by this point many thousands of Chinese Christians. These young believers were honing their spirits to become wholehearted Christians. At the same time, they felt a great love for China. They wanted to penetrate the land of their ancestors with the gospel, without forsaking their heritage.

Thus, and this is crucial to note, the Chinese Christians and the Chinese Intelligentsia had the same vision for the future - a great China. At the same time, they had a radically different understanding of their history. The Intelligentsia were prepared to cast it all aside for the sake of the great tomorrow. The Christians, motivated by a Biblical understanding of the validity of cultures, combined with a decidedly un-Chinese paradigm of History, wanted to preserve something of the past.

The long existence of a "Chinese" Christianity prior to the European incursion satisfied Chinese Christians during a violent anti-Christian movement of the early 1920s. It allowed them to convince themselves that as Christians, they were not necessarily pro-Westerners. They felt they were recovering a "pure" Chinese Christian past, untainted by Europe. At the same time, in the early twentieth century the British missionaries began to distinguish themselves from their homeland. When they went home, they found Industrialization, outrageous immorality in the inner cities of their Homelands, Communism and a Science that was increasingly hostile to faith. As they started to think of England as a lost place, they started asking questions that in their cultural arrogance, they had previously never asked. This new open-mindedness was made possible by two developments within Christendom: The Ecumenical movement in Europe and America, with its Asian manifestations, the Salvation Army, and the YMCA; and the catastrophe of India, to which I will turn in section three.

A Catastrophe of Indic Proportions

The Missionary effort in Colonial India was far broader than in China, because of the British occupation. Missionaries were actively encouraged by the Colonial regime. It was felt that the purpose of the Colony was to offer the savage Indians the "finest fruits" the West had to offer: Science, Progress, Democracy, and Morality. To the colonialists, the first three were dependent on the latter, which in turn was dependent on Christianization. Since it would be "inconsiderate" for the British to withhold all these gifts from India, Westernization and Christianization were very often, but not everywhere, conceived as one and the same. It was impossible for an Indian to produce a valuable contribution to the colony, as long as the rationality of the bureaucracy was monopolized by the West. Much more significantly, the transnational and transcendental claims of Christianity had tremendous ontological power. There was no equivalent in India, yet the Indians could not accept Christianity without accepting Western ways. Thus a lot of the Indian submission to the colonialists was based in a conviction of the cultural superiority of the West. Guns could only keep Indians quiet, but real submission depended on a resignation to their own inferiority. As Malcolm X put it, self-loathing keeps a caged man from becoming a majestic man. To quote Partha Chatterjee in The Nation and its Fragments,

Far more than the strength of British arms, it was this alien moral force which British rule had brought with it which was holding India in subjection ... And it was the very alienness of this moral power, its lack of conformity with the beliefs and practices of the people of India, that made it inadequate for its [imperialistic] purpose. (pp. 40-41) Thus emerged in India in the 1860s and 70s the familiar inner world of colonialized peoples: a pre-nationalistic cultural sphere that demarcated the native from the foreigners.

At the same time, as the Indians grew in western education, and saw the decay of the West from the inside, there emerged surprisingly self-conscious justifications for the rejection of Christianity. Keshadchandra, co-leader of the Hindu revivals with Ramakrishna, said in 1875 that "England has sent unto us, after all, a Western Christ." The result was that "thousands upon thousands. . . stand back in moral recoil from this picture of a foreign Christianity trying to invade and subvert Hindu society; and this repugnance unquestionably hinders the progress of the true spirit of Christianity in this country." He went as far as to lay down the conditions under which he, one of the great Hindu revivalists, would accept Christianity: "When you bring Christ to us, bring him to us, not as a civilized European, but as an Asiatic ascetic, whose wealth is communion, and whose riches prayers." (Chatterjee 41)

The year was 1875, and this plea fell on deaf ears. The next year, Ramakrishna received his calling in a trance, and initiated the revival of that ancient body of folk religions into modem Hinduism. The strength of Hinduism expelled any hopes for a Christian India under the current state of affairs, and provided the moral strength which Gandhi drew upon. Indeed, and it may be an exaggeration to say this, much of Indian Anti-Colonialism and Hindu Nationalism today can be traced back to the revivals led by Ramakrishna. In turn, Ramakrishna himself was moved to action by bad missions.

The Change of the tide in Europe

Historians typically locate the breaking of European confidence regarding their natural superiority at World War One. This is for most purposes a correct statement, especially in regards to Africa and India. However, two qualifications need to be made with regards to Christianity: First, Christians had never had a total alliance with Modernity, and second, the widespread Christian rejection of modernity started before WWI. There had been Christian admonitions throughout the nineteenth century against particular aspects of modernity, particularly against the excesses of Capitalism.

Abolitionism was a religious movement in the 1830s in England (led by a Slave-Trader/ Pirate who converted to Christianity, John Newton, the author of "Amazing Grace"). Believers, who were not at all convinced of Victorian progress, led inner city social work. It was in the context of fighting the common enemy that Ecumenicalism emerged in capitalist lands. Amidst the alienation of urban life, traditional Christian denominations no longer made sense. People started seeing themselves first as "Christians" and later as Presbyterians or Methodists. William Booth founded the Salvation Army to reach the urban poor for Jesus. The Young Men's Christian Association, the YMCA, was founded at the same time in the 1860s. The YMCA played an important role in China, by helping the missionaries cooperate with each other.

Furthermore, Darwinism emerged in the 1870s. This was accompanied with an aggressive antagonism to Christianity, as seen in newsmagazines such as the Spectator of London. Thus by 1880 Christians, especially of the missionary breed, manifested two important qualities: a spirit of Ecumenicalism, and a loss of confidence in modernism as one and the same with "the Truth". These two trends merged among missionaries to create a third quality, which in this period was extremely embryonic: A conviction of the possibility of the contextualization of the gospel to non-western cultures.

The Revival of Hinduism in the 1880s had the effect of an earthquake among missions leadership. Several Global missions conferences were called, in India, in Europe, and in South Africa. These conferences assumed the necessity of cross-denominational cooperation in the face of the catastrophe in India. Some, especially those of more Pietistic and Evangelical backgrounds, talked of the need to reform the mission paradigm from the ground up. They also started talk of the need for Jesus to be presented as he really was: as an Asian. Most of this talk fell on deaf ears, because most of the missionaries in India in this period represented mainline denominations that were getting heavily modernist in their theology. They tended to view the recent events as setbacks, which would surely not be able to halt Progress. The Ecumenicals thought otherwise. They knew the work needed reform from the ground up. Since India was getting too far gone to save the Enterprise without needing to start anew, they turned their attention to a large nation farther East.

The Three Self Church Emerges

It is necessary to retreat a little in time, to fill in a narrative gap in China. In contrast to Japan and Korea, who closed their doors to Christianity (among several reasons) out of fear, the Chinese Literati viewed Imperialistic missionaries with utter contempt. Missionaries were seen as the cultural wing of colonialism. 1877 saw a conference in Shanghai, during which much of the mission strategy turned out to be entirely culturally imperialistic. Regular anti-Christian rioting, and pamphleteering by the Literati against these particularly mischievous foreign devils marked the 1880s. Tensions increased until the explosion of the Boxer rebellion in 1900, which served notice to the world. In this year, a rather disorganized nationwide rioting broke out, which was focused on the missionaries and Chinese Christians. Over three hundred missionaries were killed, and almost all put to flight. By far the worst brunt was borne by the Chinese Christians: Neill places a conservative estimate at 20,000 dead. However, the Boxer movement did not catch the missionaries entirely off guard.

Ecumenicalism had developed in Chinese missions contemporaneously as in India. The largest missionary force was a missions agency, rather than a denomination: China Inland Mission (CIM). These missionaries represented several European nations and North America, and dozens of denominations. Their leaders had been aware of the goings-on in India, and were slowly trying to find a new approach. In response to the continued riots, and the blindness of Europe to the root of the problem (cultural imperialism), Alexander Michie wrote an influential small book in 1891, called Missionaries in China. In this firebrand, he belligerently attacked the attitude of the European Church toward China, and attacked the Missionaries who went entirely contrary to Chinese culture, and who perpetuated denominational differences that made no historical sense in China. A young anti-Christian Chinese man named Yen Fu came across this book, and translated it into Chinese in 1892, with the hope of helping the Literati fight the Christians (Schwartz 38). Taken at face value, the book appears to be the voice of a loner. Some Historians have even suggested Michie was "unorthodox" in his faith. However, such a designation demonstrates a misunderstanding of the larger trends within missiology at this time. Michie lay right in the mainstream of thought among the ecumenically minded majority of missionaries, especially as the Indian situation began to increasingly inform the missionaries' actions.

In 1892 another conference was held in Shanghai, in response to the trouble in India. The outcome was radically different from the conference held in the same city in 1877: an almost unilateral agreement that the future of the Chinese church depended on the indigenization of the leadership, and the finding of sufficiently Chinese modes of worship. At Shanghai, the "Three-Self Principle" was drafted. This is a statement of the long-term goal. It consists of "Self-Support" (financially), "Self-Leadership," and "Self-Propagation."

From this point on, retreat was the plan. One should pass the torch to the Chinese in such a way that the church would survive or even thrive in the absence of missionaries.

The subsequent developments can more often than not be traced to this conference in Shanghai. The decision by CIM against seeking restitution for damages from the Boxer movement was made "so that no debt would be demanded of the future (Chinese) leaders of the churches" (Neill 299). The Methodist churches appointed almost exclusively Chinese pastors after 1911. Overall, by 1927, five eighths of the missionary force had left the country, yet the church was growing like never before.

Most importantly, from the perspective of future developments, the Shanghai convention started a new denomination, the "Chinese Christian Church." (H.R. Weber) This church was given no money, and no guidance, under the guidelines of the Three-Self Principle. After almost two decades of struggle for existence, a strong leader emerged in 1911, when the church commissioned a young Chinese Christian, C. Y. Cheng to be their pastor. Trained in London, Cheng was familiar with the West, and disliked it. He was convinced that Chinese Christianity was potentially far closer to the Truth than Western Christianity, and that Christianity was the key to the salvation of China.

He started out by coming up with an ingenious solution to the problem of ancestor veneration. He led his congregation in special prayer and commemoration rituals on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, for their Ancestors: Special prayer for the living ones, and prayers of thanksgiving for the dead ones. Additionally, by putting some of the cultural imagery of the traditional veneration into the service, Cheng was able to satisfy a centuries-old problem.

By the late 1920s, Cheng's ideas were crystallized. He seized upon the cultural significance of the relationship between the Chinese word Dao, and the Greek word Logos. He claimed that the meaning of the two words was closer to each other than to the English equivalents, and that the connecting Factor was Jesus. The Chinese Union translation of the Bible renders John 1:1 ("In the beginning was the Word [logos]") as "In the beginning was Dao, and Dao was with God, and Dao was God."

To Cheng, the symmetry of Dao and Logos showed that Chinese Christians could have a deeper understanding of God than rational/reductionist modern Westerners could.

The all-important verse came in John 1:14: "And Dao became flesh, and lived among humans." This pulled traditional Chinese and Hebrew thinking together:

1. The Dao was realized in history, and was lost (sin).

2. Human history had been a history of attempts to regain the Dao, but to no avail, until

3. The Dao became flesh in the form of Jesus.

In 1928, Cheng stated boldly, that Jesus was the fulfillment of Confucianism. This theory had great power in it, because it lent exactly that native moral force to Christianity that Ramakrishna had sought for in vain. Additionally, it empowered the Chinese Christians to entirely reject the West, and to join the Nationalist struggle. The location of Christian truth in the Chinese past was to become troublesome to the Chinese Anti-traditionalist camp, because the intelligentsia did not welcome a revival of Confucianism. An entirely new theology had to be put together that paid attention to the moral demands of Confucianism and anti-Western Patriotism, but the energy for such work lay within the system, in a confidence as to the possibility of being truly Chinese and truly Christian.

Meanwhile, the West lost a great deal of prestige after WWI. This development gave new impetus to the anti-imperialist movement within the mainstream of the Chinese intelligentsia, and also to the transfer of spiritual authority within the church towards indigenous leadership. The Church was growing dramatically by the 1920s. Michie noted in 1891 that after a century of Protestant missions, the number of Chinese Christians lay at 562,287 (Michie 106). During the Boxer movement at least 20 000 were killed. However, by 1920, the number of believers had reached 2,366,527 (Yip 16).

The reasons for this explosive growth were twofold. Probably most significant was the rise in attendance at Christian Universities, both in China and in Japan. Yip estimates the enrollment in 1920 at around 200,000 Chinese students. Secondly the Chinese Christian Church was much smaller, but growing in importance. It published its own Chinese language journal, the 'Wind of Heaven,' whose contributors included Hu Hsih. Despite its lack of influence and visibility, the Chinese Christian Church was growing. Its growth can partly be attributed to its anti-western approach, and its invisibility can partly be attributed to its small size, and to its location within the Confucian tradition, and outside of the vision of most Western Christians.

It was an external circumstance that tested the strength of this young church: the so-called Anti-Christian movement among students from 1922-25, and in 1929. Here I draw on Yip for most of my ideas. Whereas the Confucian Aristocracy viewed Christianity as subversive, the university students of the 1920s bore the same contempt, but for a different reason. They saw Christianity as anti-modern and anti-nationalistic. To a large extent, they were correct on both accounts, and the Chinese Christian Church was nearly torn apart by factions over the question of the correct response to the movement.

Cheng's strong guidance navigated the small but determined ship of the Chinese Christian Church through these dire straits. The solution was a movement in two directions at once: The language of the Church became increasingly patriotic, and more ecumenical Christian (while growing constantly less enamored of Euro-American Christianity). Cheng recognized the crux of the problem: the ambivalence of Christianity toward nation-states. No nation was more favored by Jesus than any others, so patriotism was a spiritually neutral value. The goal was to save China, and Cheng was convinced that Christianity was the key. At the same time, he said: "The Chinese Church must be Christocentric, and not missiocentric. It must be indigenous and global-minded." (Weber 161)

In the end, the troubles took care of themselves:

1. The students lost interest in anti-Christianity and turned to campaigning against Chinese folk religions.

2. The Japanese invasion accelerated the departure of Missionaries, which gave strength to the Chinese Christian Church. Many churches, deserted by their Western leaders, joined the fledgling indigenous denomination. This greatly assisted the move away from Western denominations that made no sense in China.

3. However, more significant was the encounter with Communism.

In April 1948, chief editor Y.T. Wu of the Wind of Heaven wrote an article entitled "The present-day tragedy of Christianity," which ran a shock through the church. In this article, he voiced an all-out attack on Capitalism as the root of all evils in China. He voiced the opinion that while the Church cannot replace God with Communism, Communism was the best available political system for bringing about justice in the world. He was aware of the atheistic nature of Communism, but he was far less concerned with that that with the "whorish" relationship western Christianity had with that great Satan, Capitalism.

This message aroused tremendous protest among the remaining missionaries, and their flock. However, Wu was on the winning side. In May 1950, he issued the Christian Manifesto, which was a declaration of independence from the Western Church, a call to Chinese Patriotism, to the Three-Self Principle, and to anti-capitalism. The group of leaders that drafted this manifesto then called for the creation of a new Chinese church that was as ecumenical as it was indigenous; a church that supported the People's Republic of China, but remained committed to the ultimate global lordship of Jesus.

They called themselves the Three-Self Movement (after the Cultural Revolution renamed the Three-Self Patriotic Movement). The Three-Self movement quickly absorbed the Chinese Christian Church, and a large portion of Chinese Christians. It was eventually signed by at least 400,000 Christians. The Three-Self Patriotic movement far more than absorbed the vacuum left by the expulsion of the missionaries, as the growth of the church under Chinese leadership demonstrates.

Today, the TSPM boasts a membership of over 70 million, with most of the remaining 50-70 million Christians being either non-member communicants, or worshipers in areas without a TSPM church. Western Christians, blinded by the idea of the irreconcilability of Christianity and Chinese Patriotism, overemphasize the distiction between the House Churches and the TSPM. When one listens to the Chinese themselves rather than the Western observers, it appears that the overriding sentiment is strong patriotism, a residual scent of anti-westernism, and a commitment to the TSPM as the true Chinese Church.

Conclusion

The Chinese Church today is arguably the most dynamic in the world. It has doubled in size in the last decade, which amounts to growth of about 35,000 daily. There is a strong focus on missions to the ethnic minorities in the People's republic, which is unofficially actively encouraged by the PRC. The Communist leadership believes that a Christian Uighur will be more integrated into the PRC, and less likely to get into nationalistic mischief than a Muslim Uighur. Additionally, Chinese Christians are easy to convince for the PRC's resettlement programs to the (predominantly Muslim) west of China. The Authorities have repeatedly praised the TSPM for producing incorruptible citizens, and almost all violence by the government against Christians is directed against those who refuse to join the TSPM, especially those who receive aid from the West.

My argument is that this state of affairs would be inconceivable without the movement toward indigenization of the Chinese church prior to liberation. The moral energy that motivated the church against the Anti-Christian movements, and enabled it to survive the Cultural Revolution, we is to be located in the thorough contextualization of the Gospel to China, which strengthened the Christians' Chinese identity, rather than weakened it.

The indigenization of the church would itself not have been possible, had the missionaries not become convinced of their need to withdraw and separate the mission from Westernization. This conviction in turn drew from the ecumenical movements in the Western Church, from the Cracks in modernity, and from the collapse of the mission in India in the face of a revitalized Hinduism.

In this light, it can easily be understood that the late twentieth century explosion of Christianity in East Asia, is to a large extent the result of successful contextualisation of Christianity to East Asian civilizations.

Coupled with the emergence of culturally appropriate modes of worship, the indigenization of the leadership broke Christianity from a large portion of its Western stigma. A few numbers can easily back up this claim. According to the Bureau of Religion, as noted in the German newsmagazine Aktuell in Feb. 97, there were in 1996 in the neighborhood of 140 million Christians in the People's Republic. An American missions journal, World Christian, noted in 1994 that there were thousands of Chinese and Korean missionaries in the Middle East, presenting a Jesus that had been sufficiently de-westernized and de-modernized to neutralize traditional Muslim antagonism towards Christians. In Indonesia, so many of the Chinese are Christians, Additionally, that Anti- Chinese riots tend to become anti-Christian riots, because the Javanese see Christians and Chinese as nearly one and the same.

What does the future hold for the Chinese Church? Only Jesus knows, but it is inevitably far greater than we can imagine. Praise be to Jesus, who always uses confusing circumstances and sinful and ridiculous people to advance his Kingdom!


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