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Brexit can be a platform for a Christian revival
By Julian Mann
http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/
July 3, 2016
Today the South Yorkshire town of Barnsley is probably a better place to bring up children than Kew Gardens was in the 1970s. Parts of it are certainly marred by gross spiritual, moral and social disorder but that is surely true of all communities in the de-Christianised United Kingdom. Overall, Barnsley is quite a socially conservative town.
However, down at the Barnsley Metrodome swimming complex, how many patrons of the Calypso Cove Waterpark would have heard of arguably the most spiritually influential human being the United Kingdom has ever produced? Even though there is a Hudson Taylor museum in Barnsley, probably not a lot - due to Christian Britain being airbrushed out of Millennial consciousness by our country's educational system since the 1960s.
Hudson Taylor was born in Barnsley in 1832, the son of a local chemist and part-time Methodist preacher. At the age of 18, he wrote to his sister: 'I have a stronger desire than ever to go to China. That land is ever in my thoughts. Think of it - 360 million souls, without God or without hope in the world! Think of more than twelve millions of our fellow creatures dying every day without any of the consolations of the Gospel. Barnsley including the Common has only 15,000 inhabitants.
Imagine what it would be if all these were to die in twelve months! Yet in China year by year hundreds are dying, for every man, woman and child in Barnsley. Poor neglected China! Scarcely anybody cares about it' (The Biography of James Hudson Taylor by Dr and Mrs Howard Taylor, Rickford Hills Publishing).
By the mid-1870s, the China Inland Mission Taylor established had reached parts of the Chinese interior where the name of Jesus Christ was even not known. Though conversions did not happen on a massive scale, small footholds for the Christian message of eternal salvation through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ were secured in a pagan land. In the late 1940s, the Communists expelled Taylor's missionaries and it looked from the outside as if Christianity had been stamped out during Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.
But that was not true. By the time China began to liberalise in the 1980s, it became clear that Chinese Christianity had continued to flourish underground through the Mao nightmare. Now there are probably more Chinese evangelical Christians than the entire population of the UK. This spiritual revolution affecting many millions of people was, under God, set in train by the evangelistic vision of an 18-year-old Barnsley boy.
What is the acid test of whether British independence from the European Union will lead to any substantive improvement to our national life? Is it not that the proportion of people at the Metrodome who are educated about the spiritual giants of our nation's Christian history has gone up in ten years' time?
Julian Mann is vicar of the Parish Church of the Ascension, Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire -www.oughtibridgechurch.org.uk
