Editorial reflection and analysis on issues shaping Chinese Christianity.
Surveying the fraught relationship between church and state in China, the late Chinese church historian Daniel Bays asserted that government control of religion has been a constant feature from Imperial times to the present.
Traditional China’s worldview—Confucianism, Daoism/folk religion, Buddhism, and the management of “heterodoxy”—shaped how Christianity was first seen: foreign, sometimes tolerated, and often misunderstood.
Chinese students are not just recipients of ministry but future leaders—pastors, entrepreneurs, educators, and bridge-builders in the global church.
I used a soccer match as an analogy for forming effective teamwork in an outreach program for delivering holistic blessings to the community. The ministry can be initiated by a faith-based non-profit with church members joining the endeavor.
Like every technological advancement before it, AI presents both opportunities and threats—to society at large, and to the church. Balancing those requires divine wisdom and discernment.
When grand narratives no longer serve as the backdrop for self-definition, the question of how an individual can better become themselves arises.
Diasporic Chinese Christians are reimagining their identity and purpose in God’s mission. Once viewed primarily as recipients of outreach, they are now emerging as active agents in cross-cultural ministry, reaching beyond co-ethnics and engaging in global collaboration.
A new series adapted from Sam Ling’s 2025 HLS lecture asks four guiding questions across four axes—China, the West, the church, and ideas—to help us think and serve faithfully as we look toward the 2040s.
While honestly embracing their own evangelical legacy, with its imperative for gospel witness, the Mennonites also found in their heritage values of “hosting, listening, waiting, learning, inquiring, affirming.”
Though Chinese house churches experience ongoing and intensifying restrictions, they have begun to develop sending structures to support cross-cultural missionaries. Even churches that have been forced to close are still finding ways to support missionaries that they have sent.
Based on a review of over 160 years of modern church history in China, the author takes an optimistic view of the current situation and firmly believes that God is preparing present-day China to embrace another great revival of Christianity—hereafter referred to as "China’s Next Revival."
Now that God has spread us to all parts of the world, allowing us to contact and interact with all global ethnic groups, how can we not seize this great opportunity to participate and serve in cross-cultural missions?