Choral Evensong with Sermon, 5pm 5 July 2015

China: Bold New Faith or Bad Old Church? A sermon by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading: Numbers 13.25-end; Matthew 10.5-16

For about the last 15 years the name China has been inseparable from the word ‘strategic.’ Every self-respecting multinational corporation or governmental department or university has been having long board meetings discussing the merits of opening a new campus in China. Every port or heavy industrial plant or African country has been pondering a proposal for major inward investment from China. There’s a lurking fear that one morning the whole world will wake up in bottomless debt and discover that all the credit notes are located in Shanghai. Being as ever half a generation behind, at best, the churches are now waking up to the same realities. From being the Forbidden Country prior to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, China now appears to many to be the land of milk and honey. Tonight I want to offer some background to the issues of Chinese Christianity, some reflections on a recent visit of my own to three mainland Chinese cities, and some exploration of what’s at stake in the years to come.

Christian history in China comes in broadly four periods. The first goes back a very long way – at least as early as the seventh century. Since the fifth century orthodox Christian doctrine has stated that Jesus was a union two natures (divine and human) in one person. But in the early centuries Christians in China were Nestorians – that’s to say they were descended from a dissenting party in the fifth-century debates which held that the humanity and divinity of Jesus were separate. So while ancient, there was always something unofficial about Christianity in China. From the fourteenth century the regime turned against the toleration of Christianity. Jesuits and others sought to spread the Catholic faith in the sixteenth century, but the second period really begins from the early nineteenth century with the coming of the Protestant missionaries. It’s an ugly truth that the First Opium War, waged by British soldiers to enable British merchants to sell Indian-grown opium in China, made missionary work in China much easier for Protestants. The Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s, with its devastating death toll of around 25 million, was partly inspired by Christian ideals. Likewise the Boxer Uprising in the 1890s was amplified because a lot of the bandits whom the authorities were seeking to quash converted to Catholicism as a tactic to gain foreign protection, with the result that Catholic churches became the target of extensive violence. In the late nineteenth century Hudson Taylor, through his China Inland Mission was said to have been responsible for more people coming to faith in Christ than any missionary since St Paul.

In the twentieth century the transfer to indigenous church leadership took hold. The three-self principle was originally articulated by the great CMS missionary Henry Venn. It asserted self- governance, self-support and self-propagation. While the coming of Christianity to China is as shrouded in murky colonial dealing as anywhere else, the adoption of the three-self principle gave Chinese Christianity an impressive indigenous post-denominational Protestant quality that remains to this day.

The 20 years following the Japanese invasion of 1931 were chaotic in China, and church organisation inevitably suffered. But the third era begins with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Mao expelled all foreign missionaries from China in the early 1950s, a move that hastened the handover to local leadership. Until 1966 the Three-Self Patriotic Movement was able to oversee the Protestants and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church the Catholics, although from this time on the independent house churches and the Catholics loyal to the Vatican constituted major dissenting voices. The Cultural Revolution sought actively to dismantle and destroy Christianity in China with devastating results. Only in 1979 did the church have the chance to begin again. Back in the fourth century there was a split in the church between those who had succumbed to the Roman persecution and those that had remained steadfast; those that could not forgive or accept leadership from their less courageous brothers and sisters were known as Donatists. There remains a similar split in the Chinese church today. Officially the split is between those under state authority and the independent underground churches. But at root the split is between those who held out during the years of the Cultural Revolution and those who found they could not. It’s a Donatist issue.

The fourth era begins in 1979. China today finds itself in tension between two historical spiritual contexts. On the one hand there’s what we might call the ‘smoke’ – the ancient, the mysterious, the sense of blending of truth and story, the saffron aroma and depth of tradition, the seamless blending of Confucianism and culture, the frequent reference to unity, heaven, peace, and harmony. On the other hand there’s the ‘blank page’ – the unspeakable horror of the Cultural Revolution, its ghastly effect on trust and culture and ethics, and the sense that China began again from scratch in 1979 and is thus operationally only 35 years old. So Christianity is either a late and intrusive challenge to a culture older than time, or it’s a profound and traditioned answer to the problem of empty and superficial materialism in the wake of the vacuum left by Chairman Mao. Both dimensions are challenging and distorting. The irony is that the devastating legacy of Mao has left fertile soil for rapid church growth. Today Christians in China constitute around 2.5% of the population. The Three-Self Patriotic Movement, at 23m, is the most visible strand. There are around 9m Catholics, split between the official state-sanctioned Catholic church and the unofficial Roman Catholics. Finally at 35m there is the so-called underground movement, bigger than both the official strands put together.

For anyone who has spent significant time in the global church, the most striking thing about the post-denominational Three-Self movement in China is the comparative degree to which it seems free of the colonial and postcolonial baggage that surrounds so much of Christianity in general and Anglicanism in particular in the developing world. This is extraordinarily liberating. There are almost no Westerners to be seen in Chinese church leadership. What is less clear is who does dominate the state-authorised China Christian Council, and what the role of government in influencing the church really is. Outside China, in Hong Kong and the West, everyone told me before my recent visit vigorously and with some vituperation that the state dominates and infiltrates the church, and treats it like a puppet; inside China, I couldn’t see a great deal of evidence of this. The first thing to say is that China is an enormous country and the diversity of church-state relations across this massive canvas is bound to be considerable. There’s no doubt that persecution of Christians and demolition of churches in some provinces is real, as attested by Amnesty International and others. But persecution is by no means universal.

What I sense this reflects is a distinction between Christians on the ground and administrators in the centres of power. I found the ordinary Christians that I met to be humble, faithful, wise and innocent in appropriate measure, and truly inspiring. The clergy at the church where I spent the most time were overflowing with programmes and oversaw a congregation of 5000 with countless volunteers and only a handful of staff. They regretted their lack of social outreach but were simply overwhelmed by the task of assimilating new Christians. There was markedly less energy from the senior Christian Council officials than from the lay disciples in the shadows; when asked about issues like political prisoners, Falun Gong, and Tibet they gave rather unsettling, party-line answers, which hinted at the more sinister side of the church’s commitments, and suggested they were more likely to line up with their own government than with Western Christians.

The promise and challenge of Christianity in China was illustrated by visits I made to two institutions not far from each other in the same city. The first was a seminary. The combination of the eradication of the church during the Cultural Revolution and the lack of extensive partnership with the global church since that time has meant the Chinese church has grown rapidly but in shallow soil. For example Jiangsu province, of which Nanjing is the capital, has 2m Christians but only 415 pastors. That’s 5000 disciples per pastor. It means some churches never see a pastor from one year to the next. The 21 seminaries don’t offer a sophisticated curriculum, and only one – Jinling in Nanjing – offers graduate-level study. I found the 10-year-old buildings at Jinling (on a suburban site sold for a very low price to the Jiangsu CC by the government) to be short of care, the curriculum old-fashioned, and the average age of the students to be very young. Despite the Three- Self principles, I wished Jinling had a couple of foreign seminary leaders on its board to challenge and hold it to higher standards. The defining contemporary work in global Christianity argues that the Thee-Self principle become a Four-Self vision by adding Self-Theologising – that’s to say the practice of developing indigenous theology, connecting significantly with local culture, belief ritual and social location. If that’s going to emerge in China, Jinling is where it would most likely be nurtured. I can’t see that happening any time soon.

The most inspiring moment of my visit was at Amity Press in Nanjing. It has a brilliantly simple business plan – make money by selling Bibles around the world (I saw Bibles in Fijian, Spanish, and English) and spend the money by distributing free Bibles around China. The concept, execution and internal workings of the organisation were exemplary. Having the United Bible Society provide some of the printing hardware and take some seats on the board seemed an ideal non-paternalistic form of partnership. There’s a residential block for many of the staff and the whole process seemed to embody well-being and care. It was moving to witness. But there’s more to church than Bible, and I wondered how such imagination and skill could be applied to deepening the life of the church in other ways.

We’ve seen how Christianity in China has grown rapidly since 1979; on impressively indigenous foundations, but too rapidly for its infrastructure, particularly the education of its pastors and the local character of its theology, to keep up. There is undoubtedly persecution of all strands of the church, not just the underground movement, varying according to province – although since the unravelling of the Arab Spring some of the West’s naïveté of expectation in regard to a regime’s transition to democracy and the rule of law has diminished.

I see two areas of huge opportunity. The first is in relation to Hong Kong. The history of Hong Kong is inextricably linked with the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, and should this, for Britain, be a cause of repentance. The fear in 1997 was that Hong Kong would turn into China; the reality has been that China is turning into Hong Kong. During the Mao era large numbers of Christians and institutions relocated to Hong Kong; which today makes Hong Kong a powerhouse of indigenous Chinese Christianity. Much energy has been spent striving to ensure Hong Kong is not swamped by China; a more positive outlook would suggest that most of what Chinese Christianity is currently lacking is available to it in Hong Kong. Creating a more trusting two-way bridge and finding a common faith that transcends historic political antagonism seems to me a top priority for both sides.

The final opportunity relates to the fast-changing nature of China, its unknowable destination, and the challenge for the government to find a social contract with its citizens based on anything beyond rapid and probably unsustainable economic growth. The Three-Self church, for all its struggles, represents the possibility of a fertile culture between the shallow materialism spawned by economic expansion and the spectre of an abrasive Islam gaining ground particularly in the western provinces of China. Anglicanism offers a long and truly global history of how the church can relate closely to the state without dominating it or becoming its puppet. It’s not impossible to imagine the Anglican watchwords of scripture, tradition and reason taking a more prominent place alongside harmony, wisdom, peace and heaven in the public Chinese imagination. At the same time the Three-Self principle has practised some Anglican ideals more successfully than many parts of the Anglican Communion have managed to do.

Once China was the Forbidden City. Now it is not quite a land of milk and honey. Provided the Western church is not naïve about persecution, remains mindful of the painful and divisive legacy of the Cultural Revolution, and humbly recognises ways in which the Chinese church has got right many things other churches have got wrong, this can be a time of hope, adventure and reciprocal learning. If the West can imagine a church without lament, nostalgia, or decline, it may be ready to be in dialogue with the church in China.