The Chinese government requires government approval and control of any church that wants to worship. Churches that won’t submit to control can often meet privately if they stay small and do not attract attention. Even a few government approved and regulated churches are now facing closure.

  One bitterly cold winter night in 1867 Thomas Barnardo, then a young, medical missionary student, found a pitiful-looking boy curled up by the dying fire in the tiny London building1 in which he had been teaching other poor boys that evening. Barnardo told the boy to go home to his mother, but the boy, Jim Jarvis, replied that he did not have a mother, or a father, that he “Ain’t got no friends…and Oi—don’t—live—nowhere.”2 When Barnardo enquired further as to where he slept, Jim led him to some of the roofs and gutters in the East End of London […]

  In 1875, Mary Baker Patterson published the first edition of Science and Health, referring to it as her “textbook,” through which she reinterpreted the Christian faith. She taught that God is Love, Mind, the All-in-all. Most importantly, she argued that since God is good and all-encompassing, evil cannot exist. Those things that people perceive to be evil are merely powerful illusions. These novel views on God and healing attracted followers; one of them, Asa Eddy, became Mary’s husband in 1877.1