Transcript of Jimmy Carter's Opening Speech for the China Bible Ministry Exhibition in Atlanta
This is a transcript of former president Jimmy Carter’s speech for the opening ceremony of the second China Bible Ministry Exhibition on May 19, 2006 at Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta.
Well first of all I want to thank Dan Vestal for those nice remarks and second of all to express my pleasure to be back at Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church. I want to express my personal admiration for what has been done here in this church to initiate once again a vibrant commitment to the true worship of Jesus Christ with a lot of spirit and [inaudible] commitment to continue growth in His service in the future. I want to congratulate the pastor for that and thank the church for letting us have this remarkable exhibit of Bibles. The China Christian Council, the Amity Foundation, many others associated with these two major organizations are all very proud to be part of it.
I have a special affinity for China. I first visited China before most of you were born. I was there in 1949 as a young naval officer on a submarine and I traveled up and down the coast of China going to the different seaports at the time when the major political transformation was occurring and it was just a few months after that on Oct. 1, 1949 – which happens to be my birthday – that the People’s Republic of China was founded.
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I have retained my interest in China since then. And when I was a state senator, when I was governor, when I was elected president, I saw devastating affliction on the world political system and perhaps the economic system in the unresolved division between the people of China and the people of the United States of America. I was a governor when Richard Nixon made his historic trip to Shanghai. He announced that there was just one China, but he wouldn’t say which one. And so I inherited that situation a number of years later and my determination was to have normal diplomatic relations and to open up channels of communications and commerce and political cooperation between this great nation on the one hand and the nation I represented as president.
When I was a little boy, five or six years old, I would try to give five cents a month to the Lottie Moon offering to help build schools and hospitals in China. This was the epitome of success in life – to be honored in little churches by visitor missionaries to China and other countries.
When I began my political negotiations with Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, the unquestioned leader of China in 1978 [inaudible], I was very excited but not certain what was going to happen. When we did finally conclude this agreement on the first day of January in 1979, normal relations after 35 years, it was the high moment of my personal and political life. Immediately almost, that same month, Deng Xiaoping came to the United States of America to visit and I was able to spend many hours with him. In our more private moments, one of the things on my agenda – we had economics, military, political, commerce and trade – but on my private agenda there was always hope that there might be something we can do for the situation in China for Christian faith.
As many of you would know without being critical about past history, from the time I made my first visit 1949 until the time I met with Deng Xiaoping, the ability to worship was almost completely eliminated. In 1978 there was practically no open worship in China. But Deng Xiaoping was receptive to my comments and I only made three requests to him.
One was that he permits and guaranteed freedom of worship. The second one that he permits the distribution of Bible without restraint and the third one was that he permits American missionaries to go back to China. He said he wanted to think it over that night and the next day when we met he said “I’ve decided to agree to two of your requests but the foreign missionaries no.”
We think that the three-self commitment is very important to China. And so within just a few months in 1982 the constitution of China was changed to permit freedom of worship, and when I visited China in 1981, I went to a large church in Shanghai [that] had five ministers – most of them Anglican – [and the] Bible [was] already being distributed. In fact they told me they ran out of the special Bible paper to print the Bible [and] that Deng Xiaoping personally had ordered that the Bible paper be made available. That was what he did and the people of China did. It was a transforming event in the history of global Christianity from almost nonexistent recognizable Christian [to where there] are now 24 million and I’m very proud of what the Chinese people have done.
There has been extremely rapid growth in the Christian community in China. When I was there as early as 1981 they were having five or six worship service a day in Shanghai and they had limited space in which to worship. Now the growth is enormous but there is still a need of more training of pastors and more training of lay leaders in the Chinese church. I visited China several times since then. A few years ago I went to a small rural county west of Xiantao and Sunday morning I visited the church. And the pastor there was an old gentleman who had been a Christian all his life. He told me that in that county there has been in the three years before I arrived 14 new churches formed. This service had already been completed but he asked me to say a few words. So I spoke from the pulpit about the importance of breaking down all kinds of barriers – political barriers, cultural barriers, historical barriers, economic barriers; if we share one major facet of our life without any impediment between us […] that was our faith in Jesus Christ as Savior.
We still have a ways to go in China and in this country; there is too much intolerance, there is too much of an effort to dominate one another, there is too much of an inclination to be exclusive, and trying to define the relationship person and God for someone else. These things are affliction all over the world and not just confined to Christianity. And my own belief is based on what Christ said: ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar and to God the things that are God.’ That is an admonition that is being threatened in my country and is a problem still in China.
I know that it is required that Christians be registered. I understand the motivation behind it and I disagree with it. I don’t think there should be any impediments to a group of people who want to worship God in a community or congregation, and this is a challenge for the Chinese political leaders and for those who worship. Many Chinese Christians don’t have any problem with the requirements that congregations be registered. I understand that and I admire those who comply. There are the equally dedicated Christians who don’t accept the right of the government to require registration. I understand their position as well.
My hope is that in the United States of America and in China those impediments to an absolute freedom of an individual person to worship God through faith in Jesus Christ will be completely removed.
Let me close my remarks by saying that the things that divide us one from another – inside China, inside the United States, between China and the Untied States – are insignificant in relative terms compared to one overwhelming concept under which we can be true brothers and sisters with each other and that is by the grace of God. We are given the opportunity for salvation and eternal life through our faith in Jesus Christ and that is an one overwhelming concept that binds us together and which nothing of a cultural, or geographical, or political nature can cause a separation.
Thank you.
