2010 Belief at Pui Ching_學生習作
By Salina Cheang
Christianity is one of the most popular religions in the world. A form of Christianity first came to China in 435AD with Nestorian (景教) missionaries. Now, according to some sources, there are estimated 80 million Christians in the Mainland.
Today, the total number of Protestant Christians in Macau is estimated at less than 1% of the total population. If we include Catholics, some say the total is about 30,000 people. Christianity arrived in Macau first, according to Wikipedia, with Catholics in 1555. Robert Morrison (馬禮遜), who was the first Protestant missionary, arrived in 1807.
What about our own school? According to Wikipedia, the Pui Ching School in Guangzhou (which was the Macau section’s mother school) was the first Christian school in China which was established by Chinese.
We wanted to know if our students’ beliefs reflected the tradition of our school. So, we recently interviewed some students about their beliefs.
Here are the results of a few questions from our survey.
Our first interview question was “Do you have any personal beliefs?” As you can see from the graph below, of the students we interviewed, around 10% said they were Christians.5% said they were Catholics and the rest of students just said they had no belief.
The next question, which was suggested by the Christian Department, was “What’s your opinion of the Bible class?” Some students expressed their feelings about this topic during the interviews. “I think the Bible classes and Jesus are so boring and I don’t know how to get interested in them,” said Angel Wu of Form 4.
There seemed to be a strange phenomenon among those students who don’t have any real belief. Of the 17 students who said they had no belief, 50% said they were interested in the Bible and they wanted to have more Bible study courses and to have a discussion about the Bible. One student, who didn’t want to be named, said, “I do need more Bible study instead of only teaching about who did great things through Christ.”
Also, we found the same students used proverbs or teachings which are found in the Bible to encourage themselves and their friends.
One important question from the survey was “What’s your opinion about what you’ve learned from Christianity?” One student replied, “The Bible can change my life a lot.” So this is evidence that those students think the Bible can help people a lot.
Another question we asked was about Jesus. One interviewee, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that he couldn’t see Jesus so Jesus must not be real. Other students said that they felt bored whenever someone talks about Jesus.
Recently, the school held a Gospel Week to make students more interested in Jesus and understand more about Jesus. When we asked students about the Gospel Week, around 95% were excited about the Gospel Week, because they thought that it was very attractive, and the activities were very touching.
As we can see from the above, the school should hold more activities about the Gospel and the Bible because many students want to know more about the Bible and they liked Gospel Week.
On a personal note, although I have not been baptized, I have believed in Jesus, and I do try to pray to God and listen to him. When I do, I have a peaceful heart, so I also recommended our students to keep in touch with Jesus.