HO CHI MINH CITY and HANOI, Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, is a mix of the past and present. Motorbikes whizz past a French-colonial-style post office; a red banner with a yellow hammer and sickle hangs from a lamppost next to a sleek skyscraper; slender women in flowing ao dai (a traditional silk tunic) snap selfies in front of a bronze statue of Ho Chi Minh.

This is the second story in a series about Christians born in the 1980s and ’90s in Chengdu, China, and how their faith influences their lives and livelihoods. I visited four of the millennials mentioned in “Taking the narrow path” (April 1, 2017) seven months after our original interview to see how they were doing now and added a new character, Zheng Xianghuang (the seminarian). The believers all attend Early Rain Reformed Church and represent the next generation of leaders in the Chinese urban church.

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.