A Burundi moment:

Merry Christmas from Burundi. I’ve been traveling in the East African country of about 11 million people, located just south of Rwanda. The country is full of rolling hills covered in tea and coffee trees, which are a brilliant green right now due to the rainy season. It’s stunning, but it’s also one of the poorest and hungriest countries in the world, and recovering from recent armed conflict.

Ian Johnson is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the persecution of Falun Gong adherents in China. His new book is The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon, 2017).

Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther changed the course of human history by attaching his 95 Theses to the door of a German church. Today, the church in China is undergoing its own reformation—of a kind.

VILVOORDE and ANTWERP, Belgium—The streets of Vilvoorde leading to the church are quiet on Sunday morning, the Belgian pastry shops shuttered. Churchgoers pass beneath a 16th-century bricked archway on an otherwise modern street of apartments, a cell phone store, and a corner grocery. Inside the courtyard is a sign marking the Arab Evangelical Church of Vilvoorde and another beneath it reading in Dutch, In Jezus geloven wij, or “In Jesus we believe.”

SHANGHAI—After graduating with a communications degree from Purdue University, Maggie Jiang prayed for God to show her where to go next—stay in the United States or return home to China. Jiang, who had professed faith her first year of college, felt the Lord calling her to go back to China to evangelize her unsaved parents and friends. So she packed her bags and headed to Shanghai, where she found a job as a video editor for a new media company.

TAIPEI, Taiwan—In a dark suit and clerical collar, pastor Peter Wu stood at the pulpit and motioned for 50 congregants gathered in a basement sanctuary to join him in prayer. He prayed for wisdom and boldness for anyone returning to their hometowns that weekend to celebrate Tomb Sweeping festival, a Chinese holiday venerating one’s ancestors.

PARIS—At Guy Moquet metro stop on line 13, no one is waiting for a train running in the direction of Seine-Saint-Denis. The platform is empty. Heading out to the suburbs, or the banlieues of Paris, on an otherwise busy Friday morning feels like a journey in the wrong direction.