Like the blind man who grasped the elephant’s tail and drew the conclusion that all elephants were like snakes, my experience in China is so limited that the better part of wisdom would probably be to refrain from comment. But, acknowledging that my impressions should not be taken as universal Chinese truths, I can’t help but share some thoughts and impressions after being here only five days.
I find my thoughts, in quiet moments of contemplation, returning to our Sunday morning experience in Shanghai’s Mu’en Church.
Jim White
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Two years ago, Jerry Jones and I were invited by Lynn Yarbrough to visit sites in China where Virginia Baptist teams were at work in partnership with the Amity Foundation. Our efforts were stymied, however, when I could not get a visa to enter China. Our plans to visit happened to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the showdown at Tianamen Square and a modest uprising of a religious sect in western China, so the government was especially sensitive to allowing journalists into the country.
This time, however, when her invitation was renewed, my application was approved, along with Jerry’s, without delay.
On Sunday morning we were met by a young woman, Shi Meiying, who guided us on a 10-minute walk to the Mu’en Church. Her grandfather, Shi Qi’ Gui , is a revered former pastor who was sent away from Shanghai to work in a factory when the church was closed in 1966. For 13 years he lived apart from his wife and son while the church building was used for other purposes and at times vandalized, and generally fell into disrepair. He also experienced the joy of reopening the church.
With the help of the Methodists, a large gothic style sanctuary was built in 1929. Meiying had shepherded us to the balcony where I sat before the service soaking it all in. Lottie Moon, herself, was in China in 1879 when this church was established, having arrived only six years earlier.
I have described the service in an article on page 5, so I will not repeat information needlessly; but except for the overflow crowd and the fact that the service was conducted in Chinese, the church building and the order of service could have been placed in Rocky Mount (Virginia or North Carolina, you choose) and would not have been the least bit out of place.
I found a strange paradox in this. On the one hand, there is something comforting in singing familiar hymns in a strange culture. In our case, the words were unintelligible, but the tune was unmistakable. We enthusiastically joined in the singing adding our English to their Chinese.
But the familiarity was also strangely disconcerting because it was so un-Chinese, so out-of-step with Chinese culture. This would have been especially so in 1879!
In his classic book Understanding Church Growth, Donald McGavran, refers to this phenomenon. American missionaries went to foreign cultures and established western religious colonies. Not only did the Chinese have to change their religious beliefs, but they worshipped in a building that bore no resemblance whatever to anything familiar; they sang songs that must have been as strange to them as it would be to us if we sang traditional Chinese tunes. Added to the barrier of religious belief, the Chinese (and other cultures where early missionaries served) had to cross the barriers of architectural and music styles to come to Christ.
I’m not blaming the missionaries. They were limited in their own experience to what was familiar to them. It is no wonder that fewer than one million Chinese had become believers before the missionaries were expelled from the country in 1950. It was only when the Chinese became responsible for reaching the Chinese did they show great gains.
But things have changed dramatically since those old days when missionaries introduced western religious enclaves into Chinese culture. Although skyscrapers are known world-wide by their distinctive profiles — the Chrysler Building, for example — one tall building pretty much looks like another, whether in Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur or New York City. And music? The Chinese woman beside me on the bullet train from Shanghai to Nanjing was probably not listening to traditional Chinese music on her iPod.
In our time, city dwellers in Shanghai may have more in common with city dwellers in other parts of the globe than with rural cousins in their own country.
With globalization, city cultures are standardizing while keeping much of their distinctiveness. All this is to say that the 1929 Mu’en church building seems hardly out of step at all today. And the Chinese themselves are writing hymns and choral music for worship.
I have to wonder if God in his providence was, in some strange way, preparing for a China that would be rather than for the China that was then when Mr. and Mrs. Moore, Methodists from the United States, gave the money to build the Mu’en church as a memorial to their daughter.
When the bullet train arrived in Nanjing, we were met by a Chinese woman who goes by “Jesse,” a name given her by a New Zealand English teacher. Four years ago she came to faith in Jesus Christ because she was looking for answers. She had been taught there is no God and that life on this earth is a purely accidental occurrence. But that did not satisfy her. “Isn’t it all pointless, if that is true?” she asked.
Jesse, a university professor, got involved in a Bible study conducted at the St. Paul’s Church in Nanjing led by Lynn Yarbrough who Virginia Baptists have supported for years. Jesse laughed as she said, “My family used to say that I thought the sky was falling always. But my husband says he has noticed how I have changed since I have been a Christian.” Asked if her husband, also a professor, has become a believer, she replied optimistically, “Not yet!”
This is the new China. Mao envisioned a new China in the 1940s when he led the communist revolution. But it seems to me that God must have envisioned a new China long before that. Who knows but that China, known now for its manufacturing exports, will one day soon be the leading exporter of the gospel?