Terry Eastland, publisher

DAVID AIKMAN is back from three months in China, having taken more than 800 pages of notes, and he reports a religious awakening that could have enormous political implications.

For 23 years the senior foreign correspondent for Time, Aikman has reported all the big international stories of our time. He is an accomplished journalist, the author of a 1998 book containing compelling biographies of Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul, among others. He is also the unusual journalist, interested as he is in the role of religion in a given country.

Aikman went to China to discern the state of Christianity there and its impact upon that Communist, and officially atheist, nation. Aikman now will write a book that will not lack for remarkable stories.

At a recent luncheon held by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., Aikman related his bold conclusion: In a few decades China will be a Christian nation.

Aikman cites numbers: In 1949, when the People's Republic of China was established, not quite 4 million of 450 million Chinese were Christians. Today, the population is 1.3 billion; Christians are an estimated 80 million, most of them Protestants. At those rates of growth, he says, in a few decades 40 percent of the population will be Christian.

Aikman observes that there need not be a majority Christian population for Christian principles to affect China. Thirty percent or so, he says, would suffice. That is so, he explains, because Christianity has spread well beyond rural China

Aikman is persuaded on those points because of what he saw firsthand. Based in Hong Kong, he traveled on a visa that allowed him multiple entries. Working with contacts old and new, he says he reached "places I didn't know existed." Nor, he says, does the government.

He describes his visit to a large, gated compound in Beijing, the capital. Known to its neighbors as a school where English is taught, it is in fact a Christian music conservatory. Aikman met 50 students from 19 provinces, all of them worship leaders in "house churches."

House churches are ones not registered with the state. But most are known to authorities. They tend to be tolerated, says Aikman, so long as they don't develop their own cadre of evangelists, people who would spread their faith. The Beijing conservatory would obviously interest the authorities. "Amazingly," says Aikman, they haven't discovered it.

Aikman reports other "undiscovered" teaching institutions, including an urban seminary offering biblical studies, church history and theology. One school, located on the side of a bamboo-forested mountain, exists thanks to the beneficence of nearby villagers who pay the bills.

Such institutions contemplate evangelism within China but also abroad. Aikman reports the belief of many Chinese Christians that they have been called to spread their faith to Muslims. There is talk of sending as many as 100,000 missionaries to the Middle East.