Yiting Tsai read her first Christianity Today article while she was in the United States, working on her master of divinity degree at Moody Theological Seminary. The article was about a church scandal. It shocked her. Not the scandal, but the way a Christian news outlet was reporting in depth on a scandal in the church.
Back home in Taiwan, church scandals might be acknowledged, but an investigation like that would be taboo. For Yiting, it was refreshing.
Not long after that, Sean Cheng, former CT Chinese managing editor, was asking friends who were pastors if they knew anyone who was interested in translation work. Jiang Shaolong, founder of Living Water Tea House, connected Cheng with Yiting, who started doing translations for CT in the summer of 2022 after she graduated. Yiting’s translations were so good that Cheng asked her to become CT’s Chinese coordinator to help proofread and edit translated articles.
On the process of translating Christianity Today articles from English to Chinese, she said, “It’s really not about how much you understand English. It’s about how good your Chinese is so you can write beautifully.” Yiting first translates in Traditional Chinese and then, with the help of the Traditional/Simplified Chinese Conversion feature in Word, she adjusts vocabulary as necessary for Simplified Chinese readers.
There are two reasons why Yiting says it’s necessary to provide both Traditional and Simplified Chinese translations: “First, people who are accustomed to reading Traditional Chinese often find it quite difficult to read Simplified Chinese, and vice versa. Secondly, there is a significant political factor involved—many readers who are used to Traditional Chinese may resist reading articles in Simplified Chinese, as they associate it with China as a nation. Traditional Chinese readers from Taiwan may identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese, and may view Simplified Chinese as being for ‘Chinese citizens of China.'”
As the Chinese coordinator, Yiting finds articles on CT’s website that she believes would resonate with the Chinese-speaking world and either translates them herself or assigns them to another translator. “This is like a dream job,” Yiting said. “I was so in love with all of CT’s articles, [this role] uses all the things I learned from school, and I get to share about CT with a lot more people.” And share she did.
About a year into this role, Yiting felt called to return to Taiwan. “I decided it was time for me to go back and just go home so I can serve the church in Taiwan,” she said. While at home, Yiting has been sharing CT articles with the students in the public theology class she teaches at Logos Evangelical Seminary, through her work with WE Initiative, a mission mobilization organization, and with the adults at her church when she teaches Sunday school.
Yiting uses CT’s articles in her seminary class because she sees a lack of important, nuanced content in Chinese Christian publications. CT’s translations fill that gap.
“I really need to use CT’s articles to start a conversation with my class each week,” Yiting said. “We have Christian magazines, and some magazines have good theological content about things around culture, but we don’t have a magazine that talks about a Christian perspective on current things in the world—the principles of Christians being in this world, loving your neighbor, being a good witness, and just being a church. We have zero resources about that kind of theology and perspective, and there are a lot of issues that Taiwanese or Chinese don’t ever talk about, like divorce and abuse in marriage. It feels like most Christian websites that talk about things like this are either too deep or too simple—there’s just no good theology.”
During her time in the States, Yiting learned about the blind spots of the American church, but her experience also helped her see a blind spot in the way Christians in Taiwan still embrace some of Confucius’s teachings. One of those teachings is respect for elders. While inherently that’s not a bad thing, Yiting said, “in Asian churches, whatever our pastor says, we agree with. We don’t think for ourselves.”
This also hinders reporting on spiritual abuse and church scandals related to pastors. “Asians really hate talking about church scandals. It’s such a taboo in our culture. If it’s something just happening inside a church, then it’s kind of fine, but if it’s from a pastor, then it’s no, it’s a total no.”
Also rooted in Confucianism, Yiting said, is a feeling of “We really like people to tell us what is right and wrong. There’s always definitely right and definitely wrong, there’s not something in between. So when they become Christians, the Bible is just about salvation. That’s it. If you don’t do this right, then you go to hell.”
Yiting uses content from CT’s articles to push back on her students’ black-and-white thinking, wanting them to reason for themselves and consider different perspectives. “Sometimes when I read CT articles, they say, ‘Hey, teacher, which [position] do you choose?’” And she tells them, “It doesn’t matter, because these things I show you, it’s not about definite right and wrong.”
In her class each week, Yiting says, “I have a topic I want to talk about, like two kingdoms, Augustinian, Reformation or liberation theology, and I will use CT’s related articles to make [my students] do their own critical thinking. CT’s articles also present all different kinds of voices. I would encourage my students that you don’t have to agree with the author, but give me a good argument. CT articles really make them think.”
Beyond that, the articles that Yiting shares with her students have impacted their own spiritual lives. “Some of my students will say, ‘Oh my gosh! This article changed my life, and I’m going to share this with everyone in my church.’”
One topic in particular drew her students’ interest, especially the ones joining her class virtually from China: the argument for divorce in abusive marriages. “My students said, ‘I never heard about that. I never learned about this kind of theology.’ In our churches, it’s always a no. It doesn’t matter what happened. Divorce is always a no.”
Yiting also shared an article with her students about Palestinian Christians and Messianic Jews coming together to learn how to disagree well. “I remember that article really touched their hearts,” she said. She felt like the tensions described in the piece applied to the tensions between Taiwan and China, where her students are from. “There’s hope in our conflict,” she said. “Yeah, our countries are enemies, but we are first of all Christians; we are secondly Taiwanese, secondly Chinese.”
Yiting’s students have noticed how the articles put to words things they might have already been thinking and feeling. “They feel something is off in the church, but they’re not sure how to counter that feeling,” she said. “They don’t know how to point it out. I think the articles help them to think through things.”
And because the articles often use biblical references, they can go look at those verses themselves and make connections. “The Bible is so relevant to our life. It’s not just about salvation and right and wrong,” she added.
So much of what has encouraged Yiting’s students has encouraged her also. Thinking back on the first article that she read, Yiting said she has appreciated the faithful investigations CT has done on church and ministry scandals. “It rebuilds my faith,” she explained.
Some of those reported scandals have included leaders like Ravi Zacharias and Mike Bickle. The one about Mike Bickle has consistently ranked among the top five most-read Chinese translations. “We are the only website with a Chinese translation or Chinese news reporting on this, so we got a ton of clicks about that. Current events about church scandals and spiritual abuse—we can’t find resources about that.”
Another type of content Yiting says is difficult to find is information on global missions, which is why she has started to share CT’s missions-related articles on WE Initiative’s Facebook page to inspire and equip the group’s followers with a heart for missions. “No organization in Asia has the resources to do reporting about missions—missions to us or from us,” she said. “CT Global really helps. … Sometimes my coworkers will say, ‘Wow! This article is amazing. How do they do that?’”
One of those articles was about a Kenyan man and woman who were called to minister to Chinese people in Kenya. Yiting recalled, “Sean’s friend told Sean about this, and Sean told CT, and CT literally sent a reporter to write about that. Those are the kinds of things we don’t have the resources for.”
CT has broadened Yiting’s knowledge of the world. “In general, [the coordinator position] is like learning about this world, because CT has so much reporting from all over the world.” And that’s likely also the case for CT’s Chinese audience. “All the firsthand Christian news in the Middle East—CT’s the only resource that has Chinese translation.”
When Yiting first started working at CT, the Chinese translation team were only doing two to three translations a week. Now, they do four or five. “And the number of clicks has also gone up a lot.”
Looking to the future of CT’s Chinese content, Yiting said, “I’m hoping to see more than five articles [translated a week]. I definitely wish we could have more articles, because there’s so much I want people to read. I also want more original authors [from the Chinese-speaking world]…I think CT has already found several really good authors, and my hope is they can have more, because culture-related, news-related articles get a lot of attention if we have more from our own place. More from East Asia would be really helpful.”
More content would mean more for Yiting to share and more opportunities for CT to make an impact on the Chinese-speaking world.
