WHEN Pastor Jimmy Parade took over at the Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church in Bandung, on the island of Java, five years ago, around 180 people came to services each week. Now the church—in an ondescript building in an outdoor shopping complex—is packed with around 450 each Sunday. “People keep coming,” Mr Parade shrugs.
当万隆的
Jimmy Parade
牧师接手印度尼西亚改革福音教会的时候，每周大约有
180
人来做礼拜。经过
5
年的发展，每周日参加敬拜的人达到
450
。人们源源不断来参加。万隆位于印尼的爪哇岛，教会位于一个大型购物中心的门口空地。
Some 1,000 miles away, up several sets of escalators at a shopping mall in Singapore, thousands of people take part in a two-hour service on a Saturday evening at the City Harvest Church, which has a weekly attendance of just under 16,000. The service involves a rock group leading the congregation in devotional songs, several instances of speaking in tongues, and testimony from Emily, a young Singaporean who converted her father to Christianity. “My Dad has become a much happier man,” she declares, to huge applause.
1000
英里之外的新加坡，好几千人挤满购物中心的电梯，他们是参加城市丰收教会周六晚上的两个小时敬拜。教会每周出席的人次达到
16,000
。整个仪式包括摇滚乐队伴奏下的赞美歌曲，不同方言的敬拜和讲道和年轻女孩
Emily
的见证，她讲述如何将父亲接受基督。“”我爸爸越来越喜乐了。”话音刚落迎来一片掌声。
Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is growing more quickly in Asia than most parts of the world, with over 200 madherents in 2015, up from 17m in 1970. The largest congregations are in South Korea and the Philippines, where dazzlingly large mega-churches hold tens ofthousands of people. But Christian zeal is also increasing in other parts of the continent, including Indonesia and Malaysia, where prosely tising among the Muslim majority is well nigh impossible, but where Buddhists, Confucians and Christians of other denominations, almost all of them ethnically Chinese, are proving receptive.
福音和灵恩教会在亚洲飞速发展。基督徒从
1970
年的一千七百万发展到
2015
年的
2
亿多。其中韩国和菲律宾的最大。大型教会的人数动辄过万。宗教热情在其他地区，例如印度尼西亚和马来西亚也迅速发展，虽然穆斯林在大多数，但对于海外华人来说，佛教，孔教和不同教派的基督徒和平相处。
In Singapore, which is sandwiched between Indonesia and Malaysia but is mainly Chinese, evangelicalism first took off in the 1980s, recalls Terence Chong of the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, a think-tank. Mega-churches began springing up in the early 1990s. These grew quickly, despite the fact that the Singaporean government is wary of proselytisers potentially stirring up religious tensions. Evangelicals,including many Pentecostals, made up 8% of the population in 2015, up from 2%in 1970.
新加坡位于印度尼西亚和马来西亚之间，人口主要是华人。根据
ISEAS
智库
Terence Chong
的说法，新加坡福音的传播开始于
1980
年代。大型教会在
1990
年代早期出现。教会的发展非常迅猛，以至于新加坡政府担心由此会引发宗教冲突。福音教派人数占总人口从
1970
年的
2%
发展到
2015
年的
8%
。
Evangelical churches are flourishing in Malaysia and Indonesia in even less promising circumstances. Roughly a tenth of the population of both countries is Christian, but bureaucrats make life difficult for churches, largely for fear that they will attempt to convert members of the Muslim majority. Over 1,000 churches were closed in Indonesia between 2006 and 2014, says Andreas Harsono of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group.
马来西亚和印尼的环境就不太乐观。大约十分之一的人口是福音派基督徒。但政府限制教会的发展，他们害怕基督教从穆斯林中发展会员。根据人权组织
Andreas Harsono
的说法，
2006
年到
2014
年之间，政府关闭了
1000
多家教会。
Mr Parade’s church is in an outdoor shopping complex because it doesn’t need a licence to operate there, and getting one elsewhere is difficult. In Malaysia, meanwhile, it is illegal for a Muslim to convert to Christianity, even though the constitution theoretically enshrines freedom of religion. Malaysia also has Islamic police to make sure Muslims do not marry adherents of other religions or deviate in other ways. Yet even in this forbidding setting, the proportion of the population that is evangelical has grown rapidly.
Parades
牧师的教会位于购物中心的门外，因此不需要执照。在马来西亚，穆斯林转为基督徒是违法的。虽然政府宣扬宗教自由。马来西亚的穆斯林警察也不允许穆斯林和其他异教徒结婚。尽管如此多的限制，基督教还是迅速发展起来。
The growth of evangelical churches in the three countries also shows how they are “increasingly connected”, says Max Jeganathan of the Zacharias Trust, a Christian organisation based in Britain. Christians across the region support each other financially, he says; several churches in Singapore have helped “plant” others in Malaysia or elsewhere. City Harvest declares that it provides training and “spiritual oversight” to locals keen to start their own churches. It now has over three dozen affiliated churches abroad.
东南亚三国中的教会也是息息相关。不同地区的教会之间相互财政支持。一些新加坡的教会会帮助扶植马来西亚的弟兄教会。城市丰收教会宣布他们会提供如何建立教会的培训和属灵看护。目前已有超过三十多家的海外分支教会。
Most evangelicals see the growth of their churches as God’s work. But it also seems to have an aspirational element to it. “It is the de facto middle-class religion right now,” says Mr Chong. According to a study he conducted in 2013, over 50% of mega-church-goers had a university degree, a higher proportion than Christians of other sorts. That was in spite of the fact that mega-church Christians were more likely to have lived in public housing and to come from working-class backgrounds. They were also more likely to speak Chinese and to come from families which were not previously Christian.
大多数基督徒认为教会的发展是上帝在做工。但其中也有成功学因素在里面。目前中产阶级的地区基督徒很多，大型教会的
50%
的基督徒拥有大学学历。这打破了固有的观念认为大型教会一般都是劳工阶层为主的看法。教友大都会说中文，生长在基督家庭。
Many of South-East Asia’s megachurches preach an American-style “prosperity gospel”: although there is lots of talk of charity and good works, wealth is celebrated as a gift from God. At City Harvest one preacher tells the story of a businessman who attended the church—and donated generously to it—whose sales went up by 40% in a year and whose profits doubled. Presentation is often slick: at the New Creation Church, another mega-church in a mall in Singapore, first-time visitors are given a pop-up book telling the story of the venue. The 30,000 worshippers there have to book online on a Wednesday to reserve a seat for the Sunday service.
许多东南亚的大型教会都是美国教会的风格：虽然慈善和善行经常被提及，但财富的增加也被看做是上帝的恩赐。牧师会举例说，一个商人经常对教会捐款，自己的年销售就增加了
40%
，利润翻番。参加礼拜的人数也受限制。第一次来的人会收到教会地址的小册子，被告知要在周三网上预约周日的礼拜。因为会员已经达到
