SELF-UNDERSTANDING OF THE CHURCH
IN THE
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
K. H. Ting
1. The ecclesiological reality and self
understanding of the church in the PRC
One of the important theological problems that the
Chinese Christians are faced with is ecclesiology. Before 1949,
missionaries came to China from various denominational backgrounds, and
you could find in China reproductions of practically all the American
and European denominations. Around 1960, denominational partitions were
withdrawn and we entered into a period which we call
"post-denominational" -- in other words, denominational structures
ceased to exist.
But we are not yet a United Church of China. We are only united within
the Three-Self Movement, and since 1980 within the China Christian
Council. The China Christian Council is something somewhere between a
national council of churches and the Church of China. Many of the church
leaders in the PRC today think that conditions are ripe for us to make
the transition from our post-denominational existence in the China
Christian Council to an existence as the Church of Christ in China, and
we are in this stage of making the transition. Some of our colleagues in
Shanghai especially are working on a constitution for this future
non-Roman Catholic Church of China. What is visualised is some form of
church government which is partly Presbyterian and partly
Congregationalist, with bishops in historic episcopacy who would not be
diocesan or administrative. These future bishops will be giving help or
direction to the church by means of their moral, theological and
spiritual prestige. It is going to be a bishop of a new kind.
Our present main difficulty comes from certain
Protestant groups which don’t believe in any form of church government
higher than the grass-roots level. They emphasise the localness of the
church to such an extent that they cannot tolerate any church government
on the regional or national level, and certainly these people cannot be
expected to join our national United Church. The same people don’t think
that there should be any ordained ministry, out of their strong emphasis
on the priesthood of all believers. But it will be very bad if our
United Church of China goes ahead without these Christians. So today we
are working out some method to keep them within the fellowship of the
new church and yet allow them to consider themselves not as members. You
have heard about the solution for the Hong Kong problem -- one nation
with two systems -- and we hope to apply that same method in the case of
Taiwan. We think that there should be an ingenious way to solve our
Chinese church problem too. For instance, we can visualise the existence
of certain sections within this church which will relate with certain
groups which are not exactly church groups, such as the YMCA and YWCA,
theological training centres, and these local Christian groups. They
could be affiliated with the future United Church. These are the
structural considerations that are going on today among the Chinese
Protestant leadership.
A very important part of the self-understanding of
the church in the PRC is that this church is to be evangelistic, and it
is a church that will give nurture to converts, because we have many of
them and we need to do better work in shepherding and discipling. And in
this church, although denominational structures no longer exist,
denominational characteristics which Chinese Christians cherish are
honoured, respected and maintained. That is why in Beijing, for
instance, Holy Communion is celebrated in five different ways, from the
highly liturgical to the entirely informal. They are open to all
Christians. Here in this seminary we also have the Eucharist celebrated
in different ways because Chinese Christians cherish certain traditional
ways. Mutual respect in matters of faith and worship is a very important
policy, without which we could not have entered into our
post-denominational existence.
Part of our self-understanding is the conviction that
this church exists to bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, but
not as a political means for taking an antagonistic attitude towards the
people’s state. We think that new China is so much better than old
China, that we as Christians should not stand against this people’s
state. We support it, and support includes criticism. It doesn’t mean
that because we support this people’s state, we have to say that
everything that happens in the PRC is very good. We know that there are
many bad things that still exist and are happening in the PRC. We
Christians are to stand in criticism of these things. We have to
criticise and to work against them and not be irrelevant.
2. Christian education, with particular reference
to mission and evangelism
Evangelism is a very important phenomenon in the
Chinese church. The number of Protestant Christians in the PRC has
increased, not decreased, in the last 36 years. In 1949 probably there
were only 700,000 Protestants. But today there are at least 3 million,
maybe approaching 4 million. So Chinese Christians are evangelistic.
However, we have not studied this phenomenon theologically, and
therefore, as I stated in one of my papers, evangelism is a very
important theological problem that we Chinese Christians are faced with.
We need to study how evangelism is happening so that we can do away with
wasted efforts, so that we can introduce our Christians to a better
knowledge of how evangelism can be effective. We have articles written
on this subject, but I don’t think I can tell you very much because this
is largely a problem which we haven’t gone into much yet. We are only
coming to an awareness of its importance.
We have found that Chinese Christians are
evangelising, most of all, in places where they work and in places where
they live -- that is, in their factories and institutions and in the
neighbourhood. In the PRC, families live very closely together and there
are neighbourhood organisations in which many Christians are taking an
active part. By doing a lot of good things for neighbours, Christians
are arousing their neighbours to ask what is motivating them. And
through conversation with neighbours, they gradually develop friendship,
and Christians would usually bring those who are interested to church.
Many Christians are doing very good work in their
workshops and in factories and in so doing they are bearing witness to
Jesus Christ. There is a doctor of Chinese traditional medicine in
Shanghai who wrote an article on some special kind of cancer, and an
overseas Chinese in the Philippines read this article and invited him to
go to the Philippines to try to cure a friend there who was suffering
from it. The doctor went and did his best, but after a few months the
patient died. This doctor stayed in the Philippines for half a year,
during which he dealt with many other cases, and when he was about to
return, he was given some US$50,000 as a gift. But upon his return to
Shanghai, he gave this money to the hospital where he was working, and
his fellow workers thought he was doing something quite foolish because
it was his money, and asked him why he did that. His answer was very
simple: "I have done that because I am a Christian." That was very
effective evangelism in that hospital. So we think that this sort of
thing is drawing a lot of people to asking what Christianity is all
about, and that is evangelism.
Christians constitute a very small minority in our
population. We think that evangelism must include any effort on the part
of Christians to make the presence of Christianity felt by the people
living around us. Evangelism is not always to tell people directly about
Jesus Christ. The Amity Foundation here in Nanjing has done a lot of
evangelistic work already during the last six months of its existence,
because it tries to do things that the PRC needs. As Chinese citizens we
want to do certain things for the PRC for its modernisation; and as
Christians we would like to do certain things to make the presence of
Christianity and the Christian church more widely felt. A lot of
evangelism happens not through direct confrontation.
We have found that an evangelistic united front with
non-Christian scholars and writers and poets is also very important,
because although they are non-Christians, they have certain ideas that
are close to Christianity and we have no reason not to welcome the
spread of these ideas. There are poets in the PRC who have written poems
that to a certain extent can reflect biblical thinking, and we think
that we can form a united front with them. Not all non-Christians are
our enemies.
3. Relationship between church and society
This is a third area of our theological concern,
because we in the PRC today need a Christology which is thoroughly true
to the New Testament, but at the same time allows us to be open to all
that is good and true and beautiful around us -- even if these true
things have been said by atheists, even if these beautiful things have
been done by people who don’t confess Jesus Christ. We need to be open
to all of them, but at the same time we need to be true to the
Christology as given us in the New Testament. Again I can’t report to
you how much we have achieved, but we feel this is a very important area
of our concern for theological reorientation, for theological building.
Early in the 1950s we had Christian leaders in the
PRC who taught that nothing could be beautiful or true or good outside
of the Christian revelation in the Bible; that teaching led a number of
Christians to stand against socialism and our new society. We know that
this would not be true to the New Testament and ultimately not be good
for Christian witness in the PRC. We think that the church, which has an
experience of two thousand years, has all along been working together,
been fellow-travellers with all sorts of people outside of the churches.
Even in the formation of doctrines of the church, the church has
accepted a lot of things from non-Christian sources in Greece, in Rome
and elsewhere. We have no reason to take an antagonistic position to all
the good things we discover around us if we believe that God is the
source of all goodness.
We are a very tiny church in a very vast country. At
present I have to say that not very many Chinese church leaders are able
to think on these important issues because -- for the time being anyway
-- our top priority has to be given, first, to the reopening of
churches, and second, to the establishment and improvement of
theological training centres, which we need very badly in order to
overcome the very critical age gap in leadership. And then there are
difficulties in the implementation of the policy of religious freedom
here and there in different parts of the PRC, and our church leaders are
spending a lot of time dealing with these situations which are the
result of ultra-leftism in the minds of certain people.
As to intellectuals among the Christians, a new
development which may interest you and which is related to all three of
these questions, is to engage ourselves in dialogue with social
scientists on religion, because if you read our Chinese journals on
social sciences and philosophy, there are many articles on religion,
supposedly from the Marxist point of view. We believe we have a stake in
the discussion on the question of religion, because it has so much to do
with the way the policy of religious freedom is understood and
implemented. For instance, the question whether ‘‘opiate of the people’’
is a sufficiently good definition of religion, is being opened up. There
are many Marxists who disagree with this definition. There is a narcotic
role that religion plays under certain circumstances, but it is not the
only role that religion plays under all circumstances; religion plays
many other roles. When our Chinese scholars are writing in that fashion,
we have every reason to welcome it; we would like to see more Christian
intellectuals taking part in this discussion, and we consider it one of
the tasks of this seminary to produce such intellectuals.
Discussion
Q: Could you tell us more about the
feeling and experience of the Christians before 1949 and during the
Cultural Revolution?
The year 1949 marks the establishment of the People’s
Republic of China. Before 1949, the government was Nationalist, that is,
the Kuomintang government, which is still the government in Taiwan.
Before 1949, the government in the Kuomintang area was truly fascist,
and Chinese Christians weren’t in favour of that government either. Of
course some Christians were confused because Chiang Kai-shek was
supposed to be a Methodist. However, most Chinese Christians couldn’t
really support that government -- although Chinese Christians didn’t
have any liking for the Communists either, because so much was said then
about the cruelty of Communists, how they would do all sorts of inhumane
things. For instance, all families were to be disbanded; men and women
were to be mixed up; a lot of intermarriages would be forced; churches
would all be banned; Christians were going to be crucified, and so on.
So that was the state before 1949 as far as Chinese Christians were
concerned.
Of course, after 1949, Chinese Christians found that
the Communists were reasonable human beings too. The Communists weren’t
so foolish as to want to destroy churches or to liquidate religion,
because to do that sort of thing would not be beneficial to the cause
they stood for. So from 1949 to the Cultural Revolution, on the whole
the policy of religious freedom was being implemented. We had
difficulties here and there, but we could always refer these problems to
proper authorities.
However, in 1966 the Cultural Revolution began and pretty soon became
controlled by what we used to call "the Gang of Four", which represented
not only ultra-leftism, but political careerism. They put forth a lot of
ultra-leftist ideas. For instance, they believed that the
revolutionaries of the previous stage of history became the
counterrevolutionaries of the stage which began in 1966. So all the high
government officials who were revolutionaries before 1949 became the
targets of the Cultural Revolution. They were labelled "capitalist
roaders" and "counterrevolutionaries". They were put in jail and
tortured. This happened to individuals too -- no university professor
was considered a good person, because intellectuals were looked down
upon by the ultra-leftists.
Religion was considered to be bad. No good Chinese
citizen could at the same time be a religious believer. So early in the
Cultural Revolution, all the churches, temples and mosques were closed
down. This seminary became the headquarters of the Red Guards of
Nanjing. We were all driven out in 1966, and 90 per cent of the books in
our library were destroyed -- we lost them, anyway -- and we didn’t get
these buildings back until 1980. So during the Cultural Revolution,
Christians could only meet in homes. We had our meetings and services in
our homes quietly, because during those days intellectuals and high
government cadres and religious leaders were treated as second-or
third-class citizens. It was only since the end of the Cultural
Revolution that the policy of religious freedom has been restored, and
therefore more and more churches and theological training centres are
being opened or reopened today.
Q: My question concerns the theological
and biblical foundations that the church has for its understanding
of socialism. For example, what has been the experience of the
church in a situation in which religion is seen as a private matter
-- as is so stated in the Constitution of this country. How does the
church reconcile this perspective with the communal and social
action of Christian belief?
May I first say that we Christians have never said
that religion is a private matter. It is the state which treats religion
as a private matter, and we like the state to do that. For instance,
recently we had a national census, and among the questions asked of
every citizen there wasn’t a single question on religious faith, because
religion is a private matter and the state is not supposed to ask such a
question. However, there are many, many Christians in the PRC who think
that religion needs to concern itself with the whole of life, including
our attitude to socialism, to the social system, and to the people’s
state. Many of us think that socialism is worth supporting -- partly
because of what we have seen, in the way the life of the people has been
changed for the better, materially, culturally and morally; and then
partly because we think that socialism is love organised for the masses
of the people -- because we are dealing with one thousand million
people, and when we are dealing with such a large mass of people, love
becomes justice and becomes a socialist social system. So you will find
that most Chinese Christians will tell you that they support our
socialist social system out of their conviction that God is love, and
love is the command that Christ has given us.
Q: How do Christians express their concerns
to the government when they see something bad in the implementation of
the Constitution of the state?
Again, I have to say that we are a very small church
and we are faced with a lot of tasks which are immediately important. We
cannot afford to organise or to put within our organisations a special
staff to study all sorts of social problems and to draft statements,
declarations, which some other churches seem to do very often. Even if
we did that, I don’t think our voice would be heard by many because of
the small size of this church. However, we do have many church leaders,
both lay and clerical, who are serving in the national, provincial and
local People’s Congresses, and in the national, provincial and local
People’s Political Consultative Conferences,- where all sorts of views
are expressed -- sometimes verbally, sometimes in writing -- on all
sorts of issues which we or they consider important. Up to this moment,
most of the views expressed by Christians have had to do with the
implementation of religious policy, and that, again, is due to the
special situation we are in. However, our representatives do express
themselves on other matters. We express our views concerning many
articles in the national Constitution, for example, not just the one on
religion, because in the People’s Congresses and the People’s Political
Consultative Conferences on the different levels, all important state
policies are discussed and decided, and important officers in the
government appointed. We Christians are there first of all as citizens,
to do our part as citizens -- but also as Christians, to make our
presence felt and voice heard.
Q: I’m sure there is a dialogue going
on between social scientists and the church, and that something is
emerging in terms of the experience of the church and the
undergirding gospel emphasis and theological insights, which would
be very valuable for the churches in Asia and elsewhere. I don’t
want to limit or compare your experience with liberation theology or
minjung theology, but we are longing to see something coming out of
the Chinese experience which would help us, motivate us, strengthen
us in our own struggles back home.
In the course of the last 36 years, there have been
many signs of contextualisation of theological thinking in the PRC.
However, we haven’t wanted to present something systematically.
We think that we will just let our Christians and
church leaders produce, in writing preferably, their thinking. But we
haven’t wanted to say that this is the new theology of the PRC or
something that represents new China. We are interested in liberation
theology -- many of my colleagues read their books -- but we haven’t
wanted to say that this is our theology, in parallel to yours or to
theirs. Beginning the end of 1985, an annual Chinese theological review,
that is, an anthology of Chinese articles of the past year, will be
published in English.
There is a lot of vital theological discussion going
on in our journals. We have a monthly journal in Chinese which contains
many attempts on the part of Chinese Christian intellectuals to wrestle
with the problem that they have found between keeping their faith and
basically affirming what has happened in the PRC. We call that
"theological reorientation". Hundreds of articles of that sort that
appeared in the l950s, and they are appearing again in the 1980s -- not
many in the ‘60s and ‘70s because of the ultra-leftist movements.
Earnest attempts are being made by my colleagues in this seminary to
help Chinese Christians solve such problems -- reflections on the way
the teachers themselves have wrestled with the problems.
Q: You wrote once that the change in
Chinese society has not been because of the church’s contribution
but because of the policies of the revolutionary party. The church’s
contribution to this new China seems to be very tiny. It seems that
the churches are largely against playing a prophetic role, and don’t
want to look at what God is doing in the history of China.
I think we need to resist triumphalism and
overestimation of what we can do. The churches in China claimed a lot of
things before 1949. We said we had 13 Christian universities, and
hundreds of hospitals and middle schools, etc. And yet, how could we do
all those things? Because we were supported by mission boards in the
United States, England, Canada, Germany and many other countries. And
the Chinese people didn’t have a favourable attitude towards the
Christian church. It was very common in those days for them to say, "One
more Christian, one less Chinese." In my student days (which were before
1949), missionaries would take us to Buddhist temples on their special
festivals to tell the people how wrong Buddhism was and how they should
become converts to Christianity. We thought that was Evangelism. But
today we think that this was not the kind of thing we should have done.
We were antagonising our own people by relying on Western political
power and money, and we didn’t realise the enmity the common people in
China had towards us.
So we need to be sober and, in my thinking, to make
the churches in the PRC truly Chinese, to live down the church’s Western
image, to make the Chinese people realise that Christianity, like
Buddhism and Islam, doesn’t need to remain a Western, foreign religion,
but could be a religion that all self-respecting Chinese can rightly
adhere to. To make the churches in the PRC self-governing,
self-supporting and self-propagating -- that for our small church is
already a big enough task, especially with the reopening up of the PRC
today. The Three-Self Movement is being threatened. There are forces
which are trying to make us give up these things.
So I would not demand my fellow Christians in the PRC
to do the impossible. For the church in China, just to be Chinese is
already some achievement, and we are continuing because this piece of
work is not completed yet. The Chinese churches could do something much
more impressive if we were willing to receive again financial and other
support from stronger churches in other countries, but the cost will be
for us to lose our Chinese selfhood and that is not desirable.
Q: Recently some groups in Latin America have become very interested in
the problem of religion, on how to put together all the witness of the
gospel and the political struggle to transform society, and how to
understand the different religious phenomena in society. I would like to
ask about the perspective that the church here has developed or is
developing about the question of other religions, like Islam, Buddhism,
Taoism, and so on. How do Christians see these religions and their role
in society and especially in the new China?
There are different shades of views concerning other
religions. The general trend is to depart from the complete negativism
which marked Chinese Protestantism before 1949. I think there is now
more contact with and appreciation of other religions -- which is a very
big departure from the state of affairs before 1949 when different
religions were openly antagonistic to each other, even between
Protestants and Roman Catholics.
Q: What are the activities which
neighbourhood organisations engage in, and where is the Christian
presence in those neighbourhood organisations?
Neighbourhood organisations are very active all over
the PRC. They are people’s organisations, not government organisations.
There are many problems within a family which the neighbourhood
organisations sometimes can help, for instance, divorce. Before a couple
can secure divorce in a court, usually the neighbourhood organisations
would do a lot of work, to talk with the man and with the woman and to
say how bad it would be for the children, and so on. Usually a divorce
can be avoided before having to go to the court. I know that many
Christians, especially Christian women who don’t engage themselves in
regular work, are active in these neighbourhood organisations, and they
go to various families to help out -- not only with divorce, but
sometimes quarrels between the mother and her daughter-in-law. These
matters are very good occasions for friendship to be established and
eventually for Christianity to be talked about.
Q: Another question is about the church
reflecting the actions of government in encouraging the investment
of Western capital and personnel -- for example, the Amity
Foundation. Is this to be a pattern for the future, or is it a
temporary arrangement?
With regard to social service work or humanitarian,
educational and cultural things that Chinese Christians have formed
themselves into certain organisations to do: we like to do them first of
all because we like to see the PRC prosper and modernise, and secondly
to make our Christian presence felt. We think that it is a good idea for
Western groups, both Christian and non-Christian, to help or cooperate
with certain Chinese institutions to carry on cooperative enterprise. We
welcome such support both from within the PRC and from abroad, from
individuals and from groups, from Christian sources and from
non-Christian sources, to help certain foundations and groups in which
Christians are taking an active part, such as the Amity Foundation. But
we like to make it clear to our friends that this is not a departure
from the principle of self-support to which the Chinese churches are
adhering, because no money from the Amity Foundation or any foundation
is going to be turned over to any of the churches for any work of the
church. So the Chinese churches continue to be self-supporting, but
these groups or foundations are doing things that are beneficial to
society in general.
Q: My question concerns how the
democratic decision-making process that is carried on in society is
reflected in the internal decision-making process in the church. I
know very well that it is difficult to be democratic in the church;
but this society tries to be democratic, and how does that affect
the decision-making process in the church?
As you know, there are two organisations at present
on the national, provincial and local levels: first, the Three-Self
Movement which aims to make the churches in the PRC self-governing,
self-supporting and self-propagating; and then, the China Christian
Council and provincial, regional, and local Christian councils, with the
aim to see to it that the churches in the PRC are better governed,
better supported, and are carrying on the work of propagation better.
Once in four years, representatives are produced from various provinces
all over the PRC to come to a national assembly to produce a national
committee of the Three-Self Movement and of the China Christian Council.
Then there are Standing Committees for these two organisations, which
meet once a year. On the provincial and local levels the same thing
happens. Besides the yearly Standing Committee meeting, the leaders, the
chairperson and vice-chairpersons of both committees (I think the total
number is around 22) meet very often in Shanghai to decide on current
matters. Important matters are decided by the Standing Committee, and
even more important matters such as the transition to the Church of
China are discussed and decided upon by the general assembly, which
meets in once in four years.
Aside from this more or less official set-up, we have
meetings on special matters -- for instance in August we had a seven-day
conference on theological education. Then we have special meetings to
talk about publications, theological thinking, the printing of Bibles
(by the end of 1984 we had printed 1.6 million Bibles), and on
international relations. There are special committees, for example, a
special committee on hymnals. The national headquarters keeps the
Standing Committee members informed and participating in decision making
through papers that are circulated among the members only. That roughly
is the way that decisions are reached.
Q: I would like to know what efforts
are being made in the Chinese Christian church to develop indigenous
cultural forms of worship, music, etc.
We have made certain efforts to use Chinese art forms
to express Christian themes. Especially in this seminary, we are
training some of the talented students in Chinese brush painting and
good calligraphy, so that Christian themes can be expressed in ways that
could perhaps speak more deeply to the heart of the Chinese people. We
are also trying to encourage Chinese Christians to write our own hymns.
In our new hymnal of four hundred hymns, one hundred have produced by
Chinese Christians ourselves. We are also hoping to produce Christian
writers in this seminary. In all these ways we hope that Christianity
becomes indigenised in Chinese culture.
Q: What efforts are being made in the
PRC regarding the position of women in the church, in which
direction are they moving, and is there is any theological thinking
on this?
One-third of the students here are women, and now the
ministry is entirely open to women. My impression is that quite a number
of women are being ordained in various parts of the PRC. Unfortunately,
because of the male dominance that has been the case in China for
thousands of years, although legally speaking men and women are equal,
actually they are not, and therefore you will find that most of the
leaders in our church are men. Most of the leaders in our government are
men too. It is only this province where the governor is a woman, and it
is only in this province where the chairperson of the provincial
Christian Council is also a woman -- but these are exceptions. I don’t
think Chinese women Christians are conscious of their theological
responsibility. They are wanting to become ministers, but they haven’t
come to an awareness of their particular theological contribution. What
they preach is about the same as what men are preaching. In the last
issue of the Nanking Theological Review I wrote a short article on the
subject "God is not male". I am very glad to say that most of the
responses are kind and favourable, and only one person wrote to scold me
for having written that article. So I hope things are changing in that
respect too.
Q: What you have described in terms of
historical development helps explain a lot why the church in the PRC
is as it is today. For a church to develop it needs internal
strength and external conditions that would support that strength. I
understand the Chinese church more on the perspective that it is in
a transition stage, trying to find itself after all the turbulence.
We have a saying in Chinese: "If the pitch of the
music is high, then there won’t be many to sing in unison with you."
Today, the churches in the PRC are trying to be self-governing,
self-supporting and self-propagating. In other words, we are not relying
on Western influence and money and personnel and resources. We have to
rely on something -- we say we rely on God. But aside from God, it is
extremely important that we should rely on the Christians in the PRC. We
mustn’t sing songs at a very high pitch so as to lose touch with our
Christians. Since many Chinese Christians are conservative, the churches
in the PRC have to reflect that state of affairs. I myself wouldn’t like
to have church leaders in the PRC put forward a lot of theological
points of view that are unacceptable to Chinese Christians. The
Three-Self Movement cannot afford not to proceed together with the
masses of Chinese Christians. We don’t want to be isolated leaders. We
want to be leaders who have the support of the masses of the Chinese
Protestant Christians. And therefore, we have to be theologically
careful -- unless we fall back to the old state of affairs and get
support from the Western churches; then we could afford not to mind what
the masses of the Chinese Protestant Christians think of us.
Q: Is there any awareness among the
people involved in the Three-Self Movement and the Christian Council
that at some point in the future, the cost of maintaining unity may
be greater than can be borne, or that the Holy Spirit may bring
forth new wine that seeks new wine skins. Is it ‘‘unity at all cost"
in this thinking?
It’s a very real question with us whether it is so
important to maintain our unity. But to this moment, most of us think
that we should maintain this unity so as to unite all Chinese Christians
to proceed together. This is not a unity which is stagnant, because
things are changing. You may be disappointed at the speed of the change
or you may feel that there hasn’t been any change, but we feel that
things are changing. Our evangelical friends have changed a lot in the
last 36 years. Theological questions are interesting many more
Christians today than in the fifties. So, it’s not a stagnant unity. The
only point is that we want to be united with the rest of the Chinese
Christians so that we can go ahead together, even if more slowly.
* Bishop K. H. Ting is the Chairman of China’s
Three-Self Movement and President of the China Christian Council based
in Nanjing.
