National Council of Churches Delegation Visits Church in China
Episcopal News Service. August 22, 1996 [96-1548]
(ENS) Members of an official National Council of Churches (NCC) delegation to China in late July returned with news of a vibrant church facing the challenge of training leaders to meet the needs of its fast-growing numbers, worshipping freely, yet still restricted in many ways by their nation's communist government.
"We saw a church very vital and alive," said the Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, NCC general secretary who was the 13-member delegation's co-leader along with United Methodist Bishop Melvin Talbert, the NCC's president. "Chinese Christians' faith is very deeply personal. They speak very freely and often of their own personal conversion."
The NCC delegation -- the third since 1981 -- visited China in response to an invitation from the China Christian Council to experience first-hand the changes in China's burgeoning church.
"The rebuilding of China is marked by the omnipresent icon of the construction crane," observed Episcopal Bishop Craig Anderson, president of General Theological Seminary and NCC president-elect. "Paralleling such rapid change in the skyline is the religious change and reformation born of the new religious freedom in China."
Congregations accommodate the many worshippers by holding three or four services each Sunday. In order to cope with a shortage of pastors -- Campbell estimated there to be only one pastor for every 3,000 to 4,000 parishioners -- the Chinese church has trained a large number of lay people to serve "meeting points, or what we'd call house churches."
But formal religious training of children under age 18 is prohibited by law, and there are areas of the country where Christians have a much harder time than in other areas, Campbell reported. "We were told that whatever you say about China, it will be true in some places and not true in other places, and true some times and not other times."
The NCC delegation found several congregations that are providing homes for the elderly in their churches.
"We went into one where they had just a few rooms in the upstairs of the church," Campbell reported. One of the 15 or so residents was "a very bright-eyed, able woman, 93 years old, a United Methodist minister who had been ordained well before the years of the Cultural Revolution," Campbell said. "She told us how happy she was to see in our delegation four ordained women."
The NCC delegation visited churches and seminaries and met with Chinese Christians and church leaders to explore what it means to be a Christian in a country where less than one percent of the population is Christian, but where the church has experienced much vitality and rapid growth in recent years.
"We come to spend time with you in order to deepen and sustain our relationship; to learn more about the recent developments in the churches and society in China, and to reinforce the unity we share in and through Christ," the NCC church leaders said in their "Message to the Christians and Churches in the People's Republic of China," delivered through the China Christian Council.
They also sought to deepen their understanding of the Chinese church's selfhood and integrity as expressed in the Three-Self Principle -- self-governing, self-propagating and self-supporting -- during nearly five decades as a 'post-denominational' church existing within a socialist system.
The official Chinese church has emphasized a Christianity that transcends denominational distinctions -- which critics have said has been at the cost of denominational independence.
But "post-denominationalism and the phenomenal growth in membership within Chinese Protestantism contains elements that might well deepen our understanding of ecumenism in the United States," Anderson said. "Central to such 'post-denominationalism' is evangelism based on deeds as being more important than words."
And yet identity with particular denominational structures dies hard, the delegation discovered. The old woman who was a Methodist minister made a point of getting her picture taken by Bishop Talbert, "when she found out he was a United Methodist bishop," Campbell related. "Even in their post-denominational times, those who were in denominations before still carry those memories." (See this issue's Reviews and Resources section for a description of resources that explore the Chinese church now available from the NCC's Friendship Press).