The Church in China in the 20th Century: Collected Writings

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While the Peoples Republic of China is officially an atheist country, Christianity continues to experience rapid growth on the Chinese mainland. Many observers see the country as on the way to becoming the world’s most Christian nation. Yet there is widespread ignorance in the English speaking world about how the Chinese Christian community fared during the decades prior to China’s opening up to the West in the aftermath of the historic visit of Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972. This collection of essays, the first of them published in 1939, provides an invaluable record of developments in mainland Chinese Christianity during that period and for the remaining decades of the twentieth century. The fact that the essays were all authored by a key participant in the Protestant churches in China provides significant added value. Professor Chen discusses a wide range of important topics: various stages of rural and urban development, the Three Self principles for structuring officially sanctioned worshiping communities, Bishop K.H. Ting’s advocacy of a genuinely indigenous Chinese theology, patterns of international cooperation, worship, seminary education, and much more. These essays make a unique and significant contribution to the Western understanding of Asian religious life in the twentieth century.