From Foreign Mission to Chinese Church Missionaries in China were hampered by pressures from home, mistakes in leadership, and identification with the West, but they planted the seeds that would someday yield an astonishing harvest. by Daniel H. Bays, from issue 98: Christianity in China
In the first half of the 20th century, the foreign missionary movement in China matured, flourished, and then died. In these same decades, a Chinese church was born—a church that is today growing incredibly rapidly. From 1900 to 1950, Christianity in China forsook its foreign origins and put on Chinese dress. The turbulent forces of history, which shaped all aspects of China's politics, economy, and culture, also burst upon foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians. More …
From Foreign Mission to Chinese Church Missionaries in China were hampered by pressures from home, mistakes in leadership, and identification with the West, but they planted the seeds that would someday yield an astonishing harvest. By Daniel H. Bays
Person of the Week
Missionaries Hudson Taylor Faith missionary to China.
"China is not to be won for Christ by quiet, ease-loving men and women … The stamp of men and women we need is such as will put Jesus, China, [and] souls first and foremost in everything and at every time—even life itself must be secondary."
—Hudson Taylor
May 11, 1610: Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, the first Catholic missionary to China, dies. Entering the country as a repairer of clocks, Ricci was criticized for becoming a Confucian scholar and allowing ancestor "worship." Though the number of his converts was relatively small, it included many influential Chinese scholars and families, who played key roles in the future of Christianity in China (see issue 52: Hudson Taylor)
The first Protestant missionary to China was Robert Morrison of the London Missionary Society, who arrived in 1807. In order to legally stay in China, he worked as a translator for the East India Company. Morrison baptized his first convert in 1814 and by the time he died had baptized only nine more. But his Chinese dictionary and translation of the Bible laid the groundwork for future missions. Protestant missions in China reached its peak in the mid 1920s, when there were over 8,000 missionaries living there.
"For a servant of God to have authority in every sentence he utters, he must first suffer for the message he is to deliver. Without great tribulation, there is no great illumination."
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