aspirations and problems, and to learn from you. Now I must hold my tongue and use my ears and heart. Thank you.
4 Where Theology Seeks to Integrate Text and Context, in Asian Voices in Christian Theology, ed. By G. H. Anderson, 1976, p. 181.
5 Ibid., p. 205.
The Post-denominational Unity of the Chinese Protestant Church
(Nanjing, March 21, 1998)
While I was preparing for this conference, two topics on the list of presentations attracted my attention: “Recent Trends in the Study of New Religious Movements” by Armin W. Geertz of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and “The Post-Denominational Unity of the Chinese Christian Church—Dream or Reality?” by RostislavFellner of the Oriental Institute, Czechoslovakia.6 The first involves the emergence and spread of new sects and cults, which in the Chinese context pose some threat to church unity, and the second seems to call for an apology.
Religions are like trees. As they grow they bifurcate or trifurcate and branch out into a number of organized groups that bear some resemblance to, and preserve their identity with, the mother trunk, and yet keep on differentiating until in the end they tend to become mutually exclusive or antagonistic to each other. Attempts at reunion often seem difficult, if not completely fruitless. Is the experiment which aims at the post-denominational unity of the Protestant church in China today a dream that can never be realized? Is it, as the Chinese saying goes, navigating upstream against the current?
This perennial phenomenon of the differentiation of religions has been long observed and studied by historians and sociologists of religion. The classical Weber-Troeltsch church-sect dichotomy and their analyses have been generally accepted, and further developed and elaborated by H. Richard Niebuhr, Howard Becker, Liston Pope, Milton Yinger, to mention just a few representative figures amongst a host of scholars. The end result may be summarized into the following typological schema, which I have found very useful:
ecclesia—the church
denomination—class church
established sect
sect
cult
new religion.7
Applying this schema to the Christian churches in China in the second half of the twentieth century, we find that there were three churches (ecclesiae) in 1950:
1) the Catholic Church, about 3.5 million members strong;
2) the Russian Orthodox Church, with about 300,000 members; and
3) the Protestant Church, with approximately one million church members and enquirers.
In the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church there were no denominations, and their sub-divisions are beyond our present interest. But with the Protestant Church the situation was more complicated. Protestant Christianity had been introduced into China for about one and a half century, and on the eve of the revolution there were at least twenty denominations supported and dominated by twice or three times as many foreign missionary societies.8 Their ridiculous geographical distribution, and competition and contention among themselves, was seen as a scandal and won the disrepute of “imported foreign religions” as a tool of “cultural invasion” by Western Powers. Then there were a number of church groups that fall into the category of “established cults,” such as the True Jesus Church, Seventh Day Adventists, the Salvation Army, Assemblies of God, The Pentecostal Church, and the Little Flock (Christian Assembly). Some of them were of foreign origin and others of indigenous origin. The only known group that I would classify as a sect or cult was the Jesus Family in Shandung.
Religious traditions are differentiated by nation, class, educational level, patterns of secular conflict and other non-religious variables. As Richard Niebuhr observes, variations in the ethics, polity and theology among various denominations “have their roots in the relationship of the religious life to the cultural and political conditions prevailing in any group of Christians . . . The exigencies of church discipline, the demands of the national psychology, the effect of social tradition, the influence of cultural heritage, and the weight of economic interest play their role in the definition of religious truth.”9 All denominations have a raison d’etre for their emergence and transmission. The evolution of each denomination, in the final analysis, is the result of processes of contextualization. All denominations introduced into China during the nineteenth century missionary movement brought with them particular valuable legacies and contributed to the enrichment of the churches in China. But they failed to make the Church Chinese, partly, I would say, by their persistence in denominationalism. Each denomination has its roots in the soil of its origin, and when transplanted to the Chinese soil in toto it became stunted and failed to grow. Naturalization was needed. In the political and social changes of the early fifties the roots of the imported denominations were cut off and the “trees” began to wither, trunk and branches. The churches had become so weak by 1957 that they had to be reorganized and merged to hold “united services.” (It must be pointed out that during the period from 1949 to 1957 the implementation of the religious policy of the Party was, taken as a whole, as good as could be expected, or at least much better than in the succeeding years. The dwindling of the Christian Church in this period has been wrongly attributed by many Western observers to the supposed stringency of religious policy on the part of the Party and People’s Government. This is entirely groundless and based upon biased presuppositions.)
It is not my intention here to dwell long on the launching and development of the Three Self Movement. Suffice it to say that one of the purposes of the Three Self is to make the Church in China really Chinese, just as the Church in England was made English or the Church in Germany German. In the early nineteen-fifties when the Three Self Movement was launched, to safeguard solidarity and smooth cooperation, a principle of mutual respect was proposed and adopted. This meant that in matters of doctrinal differences, of liturgy and church policy (these three often being the causes of controversies leading to schism and splits), one should be patient and tolerant toward those who hold different views because of different denominational backgrounds, by “seeking common ground in major matters and preserving trivial differences.” This policy of mutual respect proved very effective in preparing the way for the churches to merge and hold “united services” in 1957.
When the “cultural revolution” was over, religious activities began to surface again. The China Christian Council was established in 1980. This marked the beginning of the post-denominational stage. The old roots of imported denominations having been cut off, the churches began to take root in the Chinese soil in a new social context. One observed an unexpected, rapid Church growth. In the course of the following twelve years (from 1980 to 1991), the total number of church members and enquirers increased to about 6.5 million, more than six times the pre-1950 total. Churches (local congregations with church buildings and leaders) are being reopened or built anew at the rate of three churches every two days. (Only two churches were reopened in the fall of 1979.) Now there are more than seven thousand churches and over twenty thousand assembly points (congregations without regular church buildings, also known as “home meetings”). There are no denominations. Church members under the age of forty have little or no knowledge of denominations, and mostolder Christians are quite satisfied and happy with the non-denominational pattern of services and church organization, and have no desire to return to the old path. With the exception of three groups of “established sects,”
