At a large, nationwide missionary conference in Shanghai in 1907, a respected senior missionary, veteran of decades in China, said, "The self-government of the Chinese Church is not something which we [foreign missionaries] shall grudgingly concede under necessity but something we shall eagerly anticipate and promote."

Chinese Christians must have had their doubts. The conference took place 100 years after the arrival of the first Protestant missionary in China, Robert Morrison. Yet of the 1,100 delegates, only six or seven were Chinese.

All during the great missions century, from the 1840s to the 1940s, missionaries claimed their purpose was to help create a Chinese church, run by Chinese Christians. Eventually an indigenous Chinese church emerged, but first it had to overcome political and social obstacles—and foreign missionaries themselves.

There were only a few dozen Protestant missionaries in the 1840s and 1850s, and these were limited to the five port cities. Chinese ...

FREE E-Newsletter Sign up for the ChristianHistory.net e-mail newsletter. Discover more about your Christian heritage with this weekly e-newsletter that features key people, topics, and events from the history of Christianity.      RSS Feed   RSS Help