How useful is the prosperity drivel in China and other places? Here’s a letter to “The Wittenburg Door Insider Newsletter” contributed by Gabriel Lemonds:
He’s got glasses as thick as coke bottles, and dusty as old coke bottles, but his hair is shining from hair cream and there’s hardly a wrinkle on his 75-year-old face. He’s a house church leader in the southern city of Kunming. Last year he began to develop a problem — he kept tripping as he went outside his door. “Last summer, visitors kept leaving Christian literature at my door step, bags and bags of it.”
If it were good literature, he would not mind so much. “It’s dreadful stuff, written by prosperity gospel preachers of America, which is so unhelpful in a Chinese context right now, where we need sensible teaching on healing, not extremist heresy.”
What bugs him even more is that none of the deliverers have the courage to ring his doorbell and ask him if he wants to receive the material. Perhaps they already know his answer.
Why his doorstep? He’s famous. But the ones who bring the literature find their contacts unwilling or unable to receive it and they don’t want to return home without offloading their cargo. Since everyone knows this man’s address, they dump it outside his home in the belief he will find a use for it.
This is what he really does with it. “If anyone is short on fuel for their fire, I give them the books. Otherwise I have to lug them onto a bus and go outside the city, and then burn them myself.”
He would love to receive good Christian literature. He sifts through each bag to see if there is anything salvageable. There is a great shortage of it, he explains sadly. If only once he could have found the new biography of Wang Ming Dao, which he is desperate to read.
How daft that so many would take risks to spirit books into the country that end up getting burned by the very people they think should enjoy them. Why don’t they ask beforehand what type of literature would be appreciated?
So, “It’s your season” doesn’t work for the church under persecution in China? If that’s the case then, it doesn’t take long for one to realize the emptiness of the prosperity message. Since he burns the books, he must be “touching God’s annointed” or something, right?
I pray that through him, Jesus will be lifted up in China, and that China doesn’t become contaminated with the parasites that have infected the Church in America.