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 a nondescript building in an outdoor shopping complex—is packed with around 450 each Sunday. “People keep coming,” Mr Parade shrugs.
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.
Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is growing more quickly in Asia than most parts of the world, with over 200m adherents in 2015,...Continue reading
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