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.
