Faith in the Wilderness : words of exhortation from the Chinese church
Hannah Nation and Simon Liu editors Kirkdale Press, 2022 ISBN 978 1 683 596 042
Also available digitally from Lexham Press
A collection of nine sermons by different Chinese pastors in a book of about 150 pages is nothing extraordinary, you might say. Yet there is something very special about Faith in the Wilderness because the sermons are written in the crucible of harassment being experienced by Christians in China in our own time.
The crucible is made up of two pervasive and unavoidable factors – the pandemic which began in Wuhan in China and the relentless persecution of Christians (as well as others) by the Chinese Communist Party.
Both pandemic and persecution bring suffering – the one to everyone, potentially, and the other to believers in particular.
Could it be that persecution is what makes the Chinese church the fastest growing church in the world and likely to be the largest church in the not-too-distant future ?
These 9 sermons give a vivid sense of the background against which they have been written or preached.
These pastors write from first hand experience. By force of circumstance they are driven to a commitment to the truths of the Bible and to tell it as it is.
At one level, one could treat these exhortations as simple but heartfelt statements of basic Biblical truths. There are split into 3 sections – meditations on ‘brokenness’; meditations on ‘redemption’ and meditations on ”hope’. All of the sermons show an awareness of historical and contemporary allusions.
For Chinese believers they bring reassurance as well as hope, and, to us in the west, a profound and moving insight into the life of believers who find their culture at serious odds with their Christian convictions.