Scholarship on Chinese Christianity is a field of diverse methods and contested spaces.
Despite differences among individual scholars and theological communities engaged in this academic pursuit, one remarkable feature is the strong collegiality that characterizes gatherings of Chinese theologians and Sino-Christian scholars at academic symposia and conferences.
Sometimes it feels a bit like church; at other times, like a typical conference in China: rich meals with shared dishes at round tables, a group photo beneath the conference banner, the marking of generational hierarchies, and an opening ceremony with strictly prearranged seating.
At other times, the rhythms are those of a large international conference: packed, impersonal schedules endured through jet lag, and networking over early breakfasts and late-night receptions. Even in those situations, meetings of scholars of Chinese Christianity often feel more like reunions than occasions for grilling emerging academics on the job market or for senior scholars to show off and mark their territory.
Last month’s conference on Chinese ecclesiology, planned and organized by Ximian Simeon Xu and David Fergusson along with their colleagues at the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology (established in 2025), was no exception. With more than 60 speakers overall, 21 thematic panels, a book launch, and a glittering lineup of keynote speakers, this conference was, to my knowledge, the first of its kind. It highlighted pressing questions surrounding contemporary Chinese ecclesiologies from theoretical, practical, and historical perspectives, both academic and confessional.
There was relatively little focus on urban Calvinists, who have figured prominently in scholarship since the 2010s. Their movement has received scholarly attention somewhat disproportionate to its actual presence within Chinese house church Christianity since the 2000s. While the voices of elite and educated Chinese Reformed Christians have been “voluble,” as Chloë Starr has rightly observed,1 there are other styles and voices shaping the Chinese ecclesial landscape in and beyond China today that are neither Reformed nor restricted to the officially prescribed post-denominationalism of state-sanctioned Protestantism in the PRC.
This conference showcased a broader landscape, from panels on “House Churches” and “Church and Politics” to papers on the Local Churches in China, British Chinese congregations, Hong Kong churches, and transnational movements in Chinese theology; from Chinese Catholics to Hong Kong Pentecostals and more.
This conference was not only an opportunity for young and emerging scholars to present their research; importantly, it brought together a handful of experts working on much-neglected Manchu Christian texts, an often-overlooked part of Chinese church history.
The roundtable, “Texts, Translation, and Faith: Manchu Sources in Religious Contexts,” and a panel on “Manchu Faith Communities” not only spotlighted rare Christian texts written in a critically endangered language but also provided opportunities for academic conversations rarely heard in Sino-Christian contexts, whether in China or overseas. Selected contributions will appear in a forthcoming edited volume, which will be a gift to scholarship on Chinese Christianities.
Rich as all these exchanges were, the event reminded scholars from vastly different backgrounds that they spoke different languages: cultural, confessional, ideological, or shaped by the conceptual vocabularies of their disciplines. This reminded me of Chin Ken Pa’s verdict on the so-called “Cultural Christian Debate” of the 1990s, which pointed to the divergent influences on mainland scholars studying Christianity and Hong Kong theologians: Anglo-American versus continental European vocabularies, secular versus religious mindsets, and Cantonese versus Mandarin or other Chinese languages.2
The real issue in communicating across these languages, even through translation and patient listening, is not that scholars are unaware of potentially divergent perspectives. Scholars should, after all, be self-reflexive and thoughtful about the influence of worldviews on their own academic work. Rather, they differ in how they interpret the nature and importance of those divergences.
One is committed to systematic theology as a discipline; another, to established tenets of faith; and a third, to guarding the idiosyncrasy of Chinese culture over discipline or doctrine, a position as likely to be defended by a non-Chinese scholar as by a Chinese Christian.
Following this three-day conference, I exchanged some reflections via email with one participant who noted that the categories used by some Anglophone systematic theologians were defined quite differently in other contexts, including European intercultural theology. We both agreed that perspective played an underappreciated role in the conversations at this conference. It is perhaps impossible to spend vast amounts of time clarifying how theological or philosophical terms are used in every argument of a scholarly presentation when there is so much diversity in the room.
On the last morning, a fellow Westerner told me how “Chinese” the conference was, a view I could not share, if only because of the British menu. On my way home, another participant texted me about how “Western” the conference was, an assessment with which, again, I could not fully agree, given that many of the presenters were Chinese and 100 percent of us had gathered to discuss Chinese theology, albeit in English.
Overall, the conference featured not only a range of perspectives on Chinese ecclesiology—some stretching the interpretation of that term to its limits—but also diverse approaches to the importance of perspective itself, which was eye-opening.
- Chloë Starr, Chinese Theology: Text and Context (Yale University Press, 2016), chap. 10.
- Cf. Peter K. H. Lee, “The ‘Cultural Christians’ Phenomenon in China: A Hong Kong Discussion,” in Sino-Christian Theology: A Theological Qua Cultural Movement in Contemporary China, ed. Pan-chiu Lai and Jason Lam (Peter Lang, 2010), 53–62.
