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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 congregations were small and weak, and self-government was out of the question. But during these years, the first example of indigenous Protestant Christianity, wholly led by Chinese leadership, emerged in south and central China. It is called the Taiping Rebellion, a violent and destructive mass movement that sought to overthrow the Manchu dynasty.

The Taiping leader was Hung Hsiu-ch'an, who had been exposed to Christian doctrines through Chinese-language tracts. Hung also underwent a startling vision in which he was transported to heaven. He said God the Father spoke to him, declared him to be the younger brother of Jesus, and commissioned him to purify China of false religion—in Hung's words, to "seize the killing power in Heaven and earth."

Accordingly, Hung unleashed a bloodbath. Foreign missionaries declared Hung deluded and his movement a caricature of true Christianity. The Chinese government, which almost perished, and the officials and social elites of central China, where over 20 million died and whole provinces were laid waste from 1850 to 1864, viewed the Taipings as a product of Christianity, pure and simple.

The decades from 1860 to the early 1900s were the heyday of the foreign missionaries. Protestant missionaries increased in number from fewer than 100 in 1860 to several thousand soon after 1900, spread over the entire empire (thanks to new political privileges granted by treaties in 1842 and 1860). This was the age of institution building in China missions: schools, from primary through college; hospitals and clinics; translation and publishing. It was a remarkable achievement by a remarkably capable and self-confident generation of missionaries.

Yet just below the surface of this "missionary" achievement can be seen the real secret of its success—Chinese Christian partners.

Chinese Protestants increased from a paltry few hundred in 1860 to over a quarter million in 1905. Though mission records often omit the names of the Chinese, Chinese Christians played key, though subordinate, roles—in churches, as assistants, preachers, and translators; in rural mission stations, as resident staff where foreign missionaries seldom visited; and in education, medicine, and publishing, where they did most of the day-to-day work.

Compared with earlier generations of Chinese Christians, they were better educated (thanks to mission schools) and more prosperous. Many entered business and the professions as well as the pastorate. They had a greater say in their churches. They wanted to hire and pay their own Chinese pastors and to manage their own programs.

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