Shaping Christianity in Greater China

Paul Woods

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781911372417
• eBook ISBN: 9781912343584
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This book is an integral collection of essays looking at the shaping of Christianity in China with a special emphasis on the contributions of Chinese believers. As well as its geographical scope of the China Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the material covers a span of time from the end of the Ming Dynasty until the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. Also, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Charismatics, and various kinds if independents rub shoulders within its pages. This is, of course, how it should be.

Part One

Locating the Faith

The Role of Indigenous Christians in the Global Church

David Killingray

The spread of the Christian Gospel and the growth of the church across the world over two thousand years have largely been due to the work of countless unnamed Christians who gossiped the good news in their own language and among peoples of their own culture. They are in the records of God, rarely noted in the register of man. The command to spread the gospel was implicit in Jesus’ incarnation and explicit in his ‘Great Commission’ in Matthew 28:19, given not just to a handful of apostles, but to all believers throughout the ages. Even before that we read how the Gerasene man, healed of his mental impairment, was sent by Jesus to tell his own people in the non-Jewish towns of the Decapolis of God’s grace and mercy (Mark 5:1-20). And that was the pattern for converts in the New Testament gospels and epistles. At Pentecost people heard in their own language the message of salvation and the church grew in number. When the early church in Jerusalem was persecuted and the Christians ‘scattered’, they ‘preached the word wherever they went’ (Acts 8:8). Church leader Philip was instrumental in the conversion and baptism of the proselyte ‘Ethiopian’ official on his long journey home from Jerusalem to Meroe astride the middle valley of the Nile (Acts 8:26-39). The Apostle Paul wrote of his approach to ‘win as many as possible’ to Christ: ‘To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law.’ (1 Cor 9:20). At the end of several epistles are listed names of people from across the Roman imperial world actively preaching the Christian message, often to their own people. It may have been that Paul, the archetypal missionary, ‘planted’ churches then ‘watered’ by Apollos, ‘but God made it grow’ (1 Cor 3:6).

This chapter is not specifically on China. Indeed, I am not a specialist on that vast country with its millions of people. What I set out to do here is to provide a brief global perspective on the processes of indigenisation of the church over the past 250 years whereby, as a result of missionary endeavour from the global ‘North’, a large part of the world was made aware of the Christian gospel. In this broad comparative approach it is possible to ask pertinent questions about the diffusion of the Christian message, whether policies differed from one region or denomination to another, and whether there were areas of the world marked by missionary exceptionalism. Did the ecclesiastical structures of the originating foreign denomination inhibit or help to promote transfer of control to indigenous leaders? For example, why did the Anglican Church in West Africa retreat from promoting African clergy in its hierarchy in the late nineteenth century? Given its great size and the many missions at work in China, did Christian work there have a different pattern from elsewhere, and if so why and how? To what extent did European perceptions of the target culture determine strategies and policies towards indigenous peoples? And did multiplicity and complexity of languages, and difficulty in understanding culture, or the date when foreign missionary work began, influence the shaping of policies on the roles of indigenous Christians in the church? Two intrinsic questions are what is meant by ‘Christianity’ and also what is meant by ‘conversion’?¹

Historiography

The vast literature on missionary work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced by the bureaucratised mission agencies, primarily acclaimed the work of white (occasionally black) missionaries from Europe and North America. Mission reports, magazines, and memoirs overwhelmingly promoted the image of European activity at home and in foreign parts of the world. However, indigenous workers did not go altogether unnoticed: they appear in the literature as occasional profiles, often identified by a single name and, from the 1890s onwards, occasionally with an accompanying photograph.² They are ‘faithful’ assistants, credited with translation work, registered as responsible for evangelism and the planting and running of churches. Even if not given great prominence, indigenous workers do appear in missionary magazines and journals, partly to encourage home readers to acknowledge the value and fruit of the ‘civilising’ and Christianising mission.³ As with all less-visible groups of people, at one time thought to be of little significance to history, or indeed ‘people without history’ – women, children, non-Europeans – their presence can be gleaned from the condescending pages of the past by modern eyes acute to their presence, role and significance in mission work. On rare occasions a biography written by a European applauds the work of a prominent indigenous convert, such as Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther or Pastor Hsi (Shengmo),⁴ or an individual missionary draws specific attention to the role of an indigenous agent.⁵ Another way of looking at the barely visible indigenous Christian workers is through missionary statistics, the data recorded at mission conferences held either on the field or the often much larger meetings in the metropole. For example, the statistics compiled for the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, 1910, show that there were 19,280 Protestant ‘foreign missionaries’ on the mission field, aided by 98,388 ‘native workers’.⁶ The role of indigenous Christians was increasingly recognised in the mission churches of the late 1940s-60s, the decades of decolonisation and the emergence of new independent states in Asia and Africa. This was accompanied by a new historiographical awareness by a small but growing number of scholars, both in the ‘northern’ world as well as in the new states, who were intent on researching and writing history which gave a primary place to Asians and Africans. In Europe and North America religious history by then was increasingly becoming a specialist interest among historians; indeed, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that materialistically minded historians often ignored or disdained religious belief. In Asia and Africa, where different shapes and expressions of indigenous and new forms of religious belief were so significant and widespread, historians could not ignore their role or the conflicting claims made by older belief systems such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. In Africa, for example, it was difficult to engage with the historical cultural landscape without immediately being aware of the power and influence of religious belief in inter-communal relationships. Many anthropologists had studied religious beliefs, and historians (particularly of Africa) often relied on such work as one starting point for their own research. If at times in the years of nationalism (late 1950s-early 1970s), religion was interpreted as too closely involved in primary or secondary resistance to colonial rule, it did provide an agenda for later researchers to deconstruct and to present a more sophisticated indigenous history.

The traditional mission-orientated history of global Christianity is provided by Latourette’s monumental seven volume work written in the 1930s-40s.⁷ For Africa the specific work is by Groves, written and published in the 1940s-50s.⁸ It is not unfair to say that these volumes deal primarily with ‘foreign’ missionary activity and that indigenous Christians, when occasionally mentioned, play only an incidental role in the work of mission. The handful of scholars who began to work in the 1950s-60s on the roles played by African Christians in the growth and development of the church needed skills somewhat different from those deployed in the comfortable settings of university libraries at Yale and Birmingham. In praising Latourette’s work, Andrew Walls comments: ‘Since his time, much fundamental research has been conducted on the primary sources, oral and written, and new perspectives have been taken up in which Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans figure as the principal agents of Christian expansion’.⁹ In this new endeavour what was required was knowledge of one or more African languages, a deep awareness of the African cultural context, and a willingness to seek out and read local church records along with official documents with eyes alert to the role of indigenous Christians, allied to solid field work which also engaged with oral evidence. A major and pioneering piece of research was Shepperson and Price’s study of John Chilembwe, Nyasaland church leader who led a forlorn rising against the British in 1915.¹⁰ Research on major West African church leaders began in the 1950s pioneered by scholars such as J.F.A. Ajayi and E.A. Ayendele, whose London doctoral theses soon became books.¹¹ Such studies rested on archival and secondary sources located in Europe and Africa.

In East Africa indigenous orientated studies were given a stimulus by the work of John V. Taylor, whose study of the Buganda church, subtitled ‘an attempt at understanding’, was based on his research as a missionary priest through the 1950s.¹² A further study, also published in the SCM ‘World Mission Studies’ series, by Welbourn of Makerere University College, looked at African independent churches in Uganda and Kenya.¹³ The creation of the University College in Dar es Salaam, and the arrival of Terry Ranger as professor of history in 1963, provided a further centre for a growing number of scholars who took seriously indigenous belief systems and the role of African Christians in the historic and contemporary churches.¹⁴ The white authorities in South Africa had viewed with concern the activities of ‘Ethiopian’ or independent African churches since the Bambatha ‘rising’ of 1906. By 1945 the South African government had recognised more than 800 independent African-led churches to which Sundkler’s classic study on Bantu Prophets added another 123.¹⁵ Similar patterns of independency were developing elsewhere in the Christian world at the same time, including in Europe, and were being recorded by historians, to which I will turn later.

The Early Church

In the introduction to his book on the conversion of the ‘Old World’, Richard Fletcher comments that ‘by the year 1000 Christian communities had been planted from Greenland to China’.¹⁶ This was a considerable achievement, beginning in the urban centres of the Roman Empire, which became officially Christian in the early fourth century, and spreading beyond the imperial frontiers. As Fletcher says: ‘There was a variety of ways in which such communities might come into existence, by means of trading settlements, diplomatic contacts, veterans returning from service in the Roman army in the course of which they had been converted, cross-frontier marriage, the settlement of prisoners carried away from the homelands by barbarians, and so on’.¹⁷ The great North African scholar Augustine of Hippo in his influential book City of God discounted the idea of Christianity as exclusive to the Roman hegemon and argued that a universal gospel was for the whole world. Would that we knew more about the way knowledge of Christianity was spread and took root in the very early medieval world. Certainly by the eighth to tenth centuries the church in Europe had become a mission church sustained by sympathetic secular rulers, monastic orders given to prayer, piety and charity, devout bishops and a system of parishes, many with faithful priests, all of which brought ordinary people into contact with the church. Great names of church leaders stand out: Augustine who preached in Kent, Alcuin in York, Bishop Boniface; but the Cornish landscape is littered with the names of minor saints. Some of those are obscure men and w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Locating the Faith
• Part II: Writing the Faith
• Part III: Building the FaithChinese Literati and their Christian Poems in the Seventeenth Century
• Part IV: Living the FaithChinese Literati and their Christian Poems in the Seventeenth Century
• Part V: Commending the FaithChinese Literati and their Christian Poems in the Seventeenth Century
• Contributors
• Back Cover