Dispatch from China: Phenomenal Church Growth

By Kwok Pui Lan

China has enjoyed phenomenal church growth in the last few decades. For some this is quite unexpected, considering that China is a Communist country. When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, there were about 700,000 Protestant Christians. Today, the number is about 23 million. If we include members of the house churches (or underground churches), the number is somewhere between 50 to 80 million.

Members of our travel seminar to China have had first-hand experiences of this unprecedented growth when we visited three churches in three cities in the last few days. In Shanghai we attended church service in the Shanghai Community Church. The main sanctuary was filled half an hour earlier before the service started at 10 am. There were four additional rooms filled with people watching the service on closed circuit TV. We worshipped with about 2,000 people on Ascension Sunday on May 20.

In Hangzhou, we visited Chong Yi Church, the largest church in China, which can seat 7,000 people. The Church has 5 pastors, several elders, and a large team of lay leaders serving a congregation of 6,000 members and a Sunday school of 1,000 children. The service on Sunday with modern church music is always filled to capacity.

The pastor attributed this enormous growth of the church to the grace and blessings of God, the committed and collaborative leadership of the pastors and lay leaders, and the witness of church members in their families, workplaces, and society.

We had the opportunity to visit a very new church located in the Suzhou Industrial Park. This industrial park was built 18 years ago as a center for higher education and research. Some 20 colleges and universities are located in the vicinity. The Dushu Lake Church, with a magnificent Gothic architectural design featuring pointed arch, ribbed vault, and flying buttress, was completed in 2010. It has three pastors, including a female associate pastor, and a congregation of 700. We were all taken by the scale of the church, and especially by the beauty of stained-glass windows with both European and Chinese designs. It is a 39-million-yuan (US 6.3 million) project.

This new church is the only church in China with bilingual services. In additional to the Chinese congregation, an English-speaking congregation with members from over 20 nationalities shares the space. The English-speaking congregation is served by a priest from the United States, and the two congregations worshipped together last Easter.

I have visited churches on China in a number of occasions. My first visit dated back to the mid-1980s, when the churches had only been re-opened for several years. I can discern several changes in the Chinese churches in last few decades. When I first came to visit the churches, the majority of the Christians were middle-aged and elderly people, since the churches were closed for ten years during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and there were not many new members. The pastors were middle-aged or older in the 1980s as they had been ordained before the Cultural Revolution.

But in the Chinese churches today, there are many young people. In the intervening years, the seminaries in China have trained a new generation of church leaders and faculties of seminaries. There are currently 21 seminaries and Bible schools. We visited the regional East China Theological Seminary, which was established in 1985. The seminary has 17 full-time faculty and 50 part-time teachers, and about 200 students studying for a four-year bachelor diploma, a part-time two-year program, and a sacred music program. The school has graduated over 1,000 graduates serving in the churches.

Another significant development is the provision of social services by some of the churches. Back in the 1980s, the focus was on rebuilding the church. Now the churches are more established and they can provide services to help the poor and can provide relief during a natural disaster, especially during the 2008 earthquake. The Dushu Lake Church organized a church bazaar, and people could bring old and new items to be sold. The money raised went to support poor students. These kinds of activities aim to heighten environmental consciousness of members. Some churches offer evening worship services and other services for the migrant workers, who have come from the rural areas to work in the cities.

Since the three cities we have visited—Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Suzhou—are rich compared to other Chinese cities and have long cultural history, the churches we have seen have a middle-class outlook—classical and modern music, team of seminary-trained pastors, and bookstore selling Christian literature and artifacts in the churches. The churches serve a new generation of people born in the 1980s and 1990s, who have grown up during the rapid economic development of China in the last several decades. The Dushu Lake Church serves an intellectual and multinational community.

I wonder what kind of theological construction is being done to meet the challenges of this new China. A young man we met at Dushu Lake Church was a tourist from Shenzhen, who wore a Celtic T-shirt, and told us he loves Paul Pierce and watches the NBA on Chinese TV. I look forward to the conversation with theological educators to understand how they are preparing young women and men (most seminaries are young people pursuing their bachelor diplomas) to serve this increasingly diverse and globally–conscious Chinese society.

Kwok Pui Lan is the William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School and her most recent book is Globalization, Gender, and Peacebuilding: The Future of Interfaith Dialogue. 

Dispatch from China: A Chinese-(Ugly) American's Adventure in China

By Dr. Gale A. Yee

After we arrived in Shanghai, I developed a sore throat, which is always my warning sign for future bronchial problems. Touring the markets after our lunch, I searched in vain for a drug store for throat lozenges. When I returned to the hotel, I asked one of the attendants for the nearest drug store. I told him I had a sore throat. His English was minimal, but he told me that he only knew of a Chinese medicine store. He wrote something in Chinese, saying this is what you want for the throat, and wrote in English the name of the store: Tong Han Chun Tang. At least that's what I thought! For directions, he told me to go this way and that and then turn right at the McDonalds, which fortunately I knew.

So I turned right at the McDonalds and walked several blocks looking for Tong Han Chun Tang. Of course, there were no English store names, but I saw a sign with a green cross, and thought that it might be the equivalent of our Red Cross. There were women dressed in white uniforms and I thought, Nurses! I showed them my little piece of paper which I thought was my sore throat medicine. They sent me upstairs where there were more women in white. I showed them my little piece of paper, and they pointed me to another woman in white, who looked at me blankly when I gave her my little paper. I finally clued in that the Chinese writing was simply the name of the store and not the medicine.

So, to communicate what I needed I pointed to my throat and made some sort of gurgling sound. She pulled out two packages, wrote out a note and sent me to another woman in white to pay for the medicine. One contained a bottle of liquid and the other tablets, which I hoped were my throat lozenges.

I thought I'd better have Pui Lan check out these medicines. She didn't quite know what they were either, but she said I take 20 ml of the liquid 3x a day, and four of the tablets 4x a day with water. I'm sure glad I checked with Pui Lan first before I sucked on those tabs!

I am happy to say that the medicine seemed to work, or perhaps I am just glad that I wasn't given medicine for in-grown toenails.

Dr. Gale A. Yee is Nancy W. King Professor of Biblical Studies at Episcopal Divinity School. 

Dispatch from China: The Study Seminar Leaves for China

By Kwok Pui Lan

After months of anticipation, members of the China Study Seminar of the Episcopal Divinity School gathered at 6 a.m. on Friday at Logan airport in Boston to begin our very long trip to China. The group consists of twelve students, four faculty, and two staff. We have studied the history, culture, and religions of China as well the development of the Christianity in the turbulent years of Chinese modern history in preparation for the trip.

China Study Seminar Begins their Journey

The journey was long and taxing: a six-hour flight from Boston to San Francisco, and then another thirteen-hour flight from San Francisco to Shanghai. But as we proceeded to the gate at San Francisco, excitement was in the air. This was for real. We were flying to China—a dream for many in the seminar.

I had brought along a book to read for the long flight across the Pacific: Culture and Historyin Postrevolutionary China by Arif Dirlik. Turkish by background, Professor Dirlik is one of the most astute observers of modern Chinese history and its relation to the global world. He was for many years a professor at Duke University before accepting the assignment to become a distinguished professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The book was very appropriate for the trip because it consists of lectures he has delivered in the fall of 2010 at the Academy of National Learning (Guoxue yuan) of Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Using China as a case in point, the book discusses the complex relations between tradition and modernity, the role of culture in global capitalism, and the rise of China and its potential impact on global culture. Many scholars have pointed out we have to think beyond a notion modernity defined by Europe and North America and put forth the proposal of “multiple modernities” or “alternative modernities.” This raises the question of how modernity is defined and by whom? But the more important question is how to understand past traditions in China in the process of China’s modernization in the age of global capitalism.

Is there an East Asian way to modernization? What does it mean when the Chinese leaders say they want to pursue economic development with Chinese characteristics? Why is there a revival of interest in Confucianism, and a huge bronze statue of Confucius was placed at Tiananmen Square, albeit briefly? Confucianism was accused of holding China backward and “traditional” by the iconoclasts of the New Culture Movement in the 1920s and by the Maoists during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Yet what was once considered a cultural impediment is now considered a source of national pride, and a contributive force in the Chinese road to capitalism!

As someone who has studied postcolonialism for some time, I was struck to read Dirlik’s statement: “The Confucian revival since the 1980s is best viewed a manifestation of Eastern Asia of a global postcolonial discourse.” While the cultural past is revived and rehabitated, it has also been reconfigured under global capitalism, as Dirlik points out. Chinese intellectuals have been preoccupied with the complexities of reimaging Chinese culture and history in the global world since China adopted the open-door policy in the late 1970s.

There is no better place to observe the juxtaposition of the “traditional” and the “modern” than Shanghai—the most cosmopolitan city in China. It is also a city with deep ties to Episcopal mission. The famous St. John’s University in the outskirt of the city was established by Bishop Samuel Joseph Schereschewsky, who also translated the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into the Chinese language.

In Shanghai, we will have the opportunities of worshipping at Shanghai Community Church and meeting with the Rev. Cao Shengjie, former Chairperson of the China Christian Council. Rev. Cao is a proud graduate of St. John’s and has spoken at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church when Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori was elected.

We will also have conversations with scholars in religious studies to understand how religion is understood in a socialist country and the growth of religious studies in the past 30 years. On our last day in Shanghai, we will visit East China Theological Seminary to meet faculty and students and share a meal together.

We are very grateful to our Chinese colleagues for their generosity in hosting us and arranging for such wonderful learning opportunities for us. In April a delegation of theological educators and church representatives from China went to San Francisco, New York, and Toronto to visit seminaries and have dialogue with their American counterparts. I have helped hosting them when they were in New York. I am glad to have the opportunity of leading this seminar with Professor Patrick S. Cheng to visit our Chinese colleagues and to know how they are preparing women and men for ministry in their rapidly changing society.

Kwok Pui Lan is the William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School and her most recent book is Globalization, Gender, and Peacebuilding: The Future of Interfaith Dialogue.