We can work toward becoming what Sherwood Lingenfelter described as a 150 percent person, a person who retains 75 percent of their birth culture and adopts 75 percent of their new culture. Such a person becomes more than they used to, able to minister cross-culturally with greater empathy and impact.
Chinese house churches must deliberate on how to be genuinely Chinese and truly Christian. Both the concepts that are overemphasized cause distortion. It takes constant navigating to be “in the culture but not of it.” Authentic Chinese Christianity will result from keeping both ideas in healthy tension as Chinese house churches negotiate between indigenizing and acting as pilgrim communities.
The Lord builds his church, and the church he constructs will look a bit different in each climate and landscape. It is the seed that has power to grow roots down into deeply buried cultural expressions and expectations, roots that will produce fruit fitting the context, fruit that is both beautiful and empowering.
We need to go beyond dogma and statements to show and tell in more holistic, contextual and embodied ways. As the apostles declared and displayed Christ through prayer and worship (Acts 4:24; 16:25; Philippians 2:5-10), so can we find unique expressions that are embedded and empowered in our own cultures and tongues.
Perhaps Wu’s important message for Christians (and perhaps former Christians, or “nones”) in the West, is that we need to recover to the experience of joy that follows from interior harmony, as was known by Christian mystics.
In our catechetical teaching, we cannot only mention love of God and man, but need to holistically bring out “love of God, love of humans, and love of the Earth.”
Celebrated annually on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, the Double Ninth Festival (重陽節/重阳节) falls on October 11 in 2024. From a Christian perspective on traditional Chinese festivals, it provides an opportunity to reflect on biblical values like wisdom, longevity, and honoring elders, blending cultural heritage with faith.
In AD 781, during the reign of Mahdi, the third of the Abbasid caliphs at Baghdad and spiritual and temporal head of the Muslim religion, Timothy and the caliph convened for a two-day dialogue in Arabic with portions in Syriac. The fraternal dialogue format with the caliph was in the form of questions and answers.
Their critical contextualization of who belonged in Jesus’s kingdom, who were the real Christians, freed the gospel from ethnic cultural imprisonment, and opened the door to for an all-peoples Church.
I am not Chinese, and yet I was so helped by this exploration of the Year of the Dragon. And I realize that for my Chinese Christian brothers and sisters this series of articles may have produced a much deeper sense of relief than mine. For this I am grateful and looking forward to an eternity in which I can know them better.
We should not erect an artificial barrier to sharing the gospel of Jesus by insisting on a Western language that non-Christians in Asia are not familiar with. Jesus is the answer, yes, but to what questions? East Asian people have a rich tradition of spiritual formation in the general sense of renovating the heart.
Enjoy the recording of I’Ching Thomas’ lecture, “Human Flourishing in Chinese Thought: A Christian Response.” Drawing on themes from her book Jesus the Path to Human Flourishing, I’Ching explored the notion of human flourishing in Chinese thought, focusing especially on Confucius’ teaching on self-cultivation and benevolence as keys to achieving the ideal of the Noble Man.