Word: convert
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...officials. Generally, church-led development projects are permitted, as are teaching and health training, but overt proselytizing is not. If asked, foreign Christians can give a Bible to a friend but offering one unasked is frowned upon."If a teacher talks privately of Christianity, and a student decides to convert, that's the student's freedom," says Zhang Liwei, an official at Amity, which has published 23 million Bibles in the past 15 years. "But if a teacher distributes religious work and tries to convert students, that's something we guard against." Bible study is a step too far: holding...
...years, the U.S.-based Southern Baptists took a two-track approach. One group worked through the government to place Christian workers. A more secretive division burrowed underground, with missionaries posing as teachers, doctors or business executives. These covert missionaries?many were married couples?sometimes focused on acquiring a single convert. That convert would take communion in the couple's kitchen and receive baptism in the bathroom. At that point, the apartment could be considered a church and the couple could return to the U.S. and announce that they had established an underground church in communist China, a compelling story...
...ethnically Jewish nonbeliever, I find this fuss over conversion utterly baffling. Jewish leaders complain that conversion attempts imply that Judaism is an inferior religion. This seems unavoidably true. Any attempt to convert implies that the faith on offer is superior. "Theological arrogance" isn't a bad description...
...lousy and I attempt to spare you a couple of hours of boredom by talking you into a better flick, that is generally considered a friendly gesture. But if I think your spiritual beliefs are in error and I attempt to spare you an eternity of hellfire by converting you to a different set of beliefs, that is widely considered a terrible insult. The Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations denounce any efforts to convert Jews to Christianity. Mainstream Christian organizations avoid conversion campaigns and declare they are pleased for Jews to remain Jews. When the Southern Baptist Convention...
There is, of course, an unattractive history of Christian campaigns to convert the Jews. The sales techniques of the Spanish Inquisition would not pass muster with the Federal Trade Commission. The recent memory of the Holocaust and demographic trends (too much intermarriage, too few children) that are shrinking the American Jewish community make conversion a sensitive subject...