The Growth of the Church
The Spiritual Dynamic. Our account so far has largely ignored the internal dynamic of the Church itself. Missionary attitudes towards Chinese culture could never be fully shared even by the most Westernised Chinese.
Thus unselfconsciously in the Eves of individual Christians faith was in encounter with Chinese tradition. To date there have been few attempts to elaborate a Chinese theology out of the Chinese experience but the profound spiritual experience is not to be denied and will one day bear theological fruit. Bishop K.H. Ting, President of the China Christian Council, speaks of the ‘thing that has become the most real and most precious to us... after these last thirty years. It is the faith in the Risen Christ.’ He continues:How strongly many Chinese Christians feared at the time of the liberation in 1949 that we were losing so many things dear to us, only to find later they were mostly just excess baggage. But it was during the Cultural Revolution... that the Chinese people suffered so much and we Christians suffered so much with them. We felt the gospel to be something precious, but the Red Guards and the so-called rebels thought of it as nothing but poisonous weed. We had no means of communicating it or of answering the attacks in the big-character posters. Not a single church remained open. There was no government organ to protect us from lawlessness. We had no rebel group of our own to support us, nor any bandwagon to ride on. It would be fortunate if we could just worship in a small group in a home. We were very weak indeed, a little flock. By all human reckoning Christianity, perhaps for the fourth time in Chinese history, was again breathing its last breath.2
The Rebirth of the Church. Three years after the formal end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, a public meeting in Shanghai announced the restoration of‘normal’ religious activities and the rehabilitation of religious leaders.
Revolutionary values took second place to the needs of‘modernisation’ and there was a re-emphasis on the ‘united front’ policies of the early 1950s, but this time in a very different international climate. Christianity seemed no longer to be regarded as a foreign religion. The state remained concerned to limit the social impact of religion but appeared willing to allow a much greater degree of freedom than before.It was in this context that the two patriotic Christian organisations were restored at the respective national conferences in 1980. At the same time new organs were established to deal with internal church affairs—an interesting and significant indication of more freedom. Catholics established a Bishops’ College and National Administrative Commission and Protestants set up the China Christian Council. The state oversees the general religious situation through its national and local Religious Affairs Bureaux. Christian leaders have to operate within a complex and shifting political reality. On the one hand they are expected to inculcate values acceptable to the State and on the other hand their Christian constituency relies on them for defending the position of the Church in society. The Religious policy of the State retains certain ambiguities and many local officials are still influenced by the ‘leftist’ values of the past, as indeed are some church officials.
The development of church life between 1979 and 1987 has been quite remarkable. Almost 4,000 Protestant churches have been reopened and around 1,000 Catholic. Both groups have a national seminary and six or more regional colleges. The China Christian Council organises lay training in many localities and a monthly syllabus is sent out to about 40,000 lay leaders in rural churches. The Council claims that ten thousand home meeting-points are in touch with them and estimates the number of Protestants as around three to four million, a fourfold increase over 1949. This is generally considered to be a conservative estimate but it is Ekely to be closer to the actual number than the figure of twenty-five or even fifty million sometimes quoted in non-Chinese Christian publications. The number of Catholics is officially stated as three million, the same as in 1949—again probably a cautious estimate.
The China Christian Council has published the Bible in Chinese, Korean, Miao and Lisu. A Catechism produced in 1983 forms some sort of common theological basis for the diversity of traditions that coexist under the Council’s auspices.
Ecumenical Contacts. The China Christian Council is considered to represent an intermediate stage on the road to a united nonCatholic Church. In the meantime Christians from different backgrounds are learning to co-operate together in local churches. However, while a variety of liturgical and other practices can be accommodated and even a considerable agreement over doctrine discovered it has not so far proved possible to reach consensus over the most appropriate form of church government. It is hoped that the unity being developed locally will lead in the end to a solution of the national problem.
Ecumenism in China does not extend to seeking closer links between Catholics and Protestants. In the nineteenth century there was overt hostility, and Protestants developed their own Chinese theological vocabulary even to the extent of rejecting the Catholic term for ‘God’. To this day most Chinese regard the two branches of Christianity as different religions—not surprisingly in view of the fact that the Chinese for ‘Protestant’ means ‘Christian’ (Jidujiao), while Catholics are termed followers of the ‘religion of the Lord of Heaven’ (Tianzhujiao). Today the hostility has gone but the differences remain profound.
Chinese Catholics and Rome. The political atmosphere in the 1950s made continued links with the Vatican problematical—yet for Catholics the Pope is the living visible expression of the catholicity of the Church. Events in this period were therefore particularly traumatic for Catholics tom between two loyalties. The first national Catholic conference in 1957 declared its loyalty to the Pope in spiritual matters but asserted its right to deal with matters relating to Chinese church affairs. Crisis came over the nomination of new bishops, and when no agreement with Rome was forthcoming the consecrations went ahead, leading before long to a break with Rome.
The problem remains unresolved and has deeply wounded the Church. Yet it appears unlikely that this issue is in the forefront of the minds of the laity who seem willing to accept the services of priests working under the autonomous structures. The future is uncertain: a reconciliation is probably desired by all but a small minority of Catholic leaders, but on terms acceptable to China. A long-term failure to resolve the problem could lead to an irrevocable break, and reference is made to the precedent of the English Reformation.Some Protestant Issues. Protestant problems stem from isolation. At its simplest this means nothing more than geographical isolation, a problem shared with the Catholics. But there is also the isolation stemming from sectarian origins or in some cases resulting from the influence of modem sects such as the ‘Shouters’—a group who infiltrated Chinese Christian communities after 1978 and caused much trouble. Problems of isolation relate to the controversial question of the role of the home meetings in China. There appear to be three sorts ofhome meetings: those linked to the official church structures, those which are not directly linked but have occasional contact and groups who have no contact. Some of these last refuse contact on theological grounds which also relate to the issue of co-operation with the State. Disagreement amongst observers concerns the number of these last groups. The limited evidence that is available suggests that they constitute only a small proportion. The majority of Christians are gradually being drawn into the networks being established by the China Christian Council.