A Down-to-Earth Gospel in Taiwan
Tony Chuang is a pastor and conference speaker who lives in Malaysia but grew up in Taiwan, where he found Christ in high school despite being raised in a family that practiced various forms of Chinese folk religion.
Chuang’s experience living and evangelizing in a syncretistic culture suspicious of Christianity shaped his recent book, Religiosity and Gospel Transmission: Insights from Folk Religion in Taipei. In an adapted excerpt for CT, Chaung pinpoints two pressing questions for believers looking to reach Taiwanese people: How can Christian faith address the spiritual and supernatural ethos that pervades Taiwanese society? And how can it offer practical support to everyday people as they navigate life’s quotidian challenges?
Regarding the second subject, he writes, “an abstract gospel does little for most Taiwanese. What many Taiwanese need is a more down-to-earth gospel that addresses the same things that folk religion deities address: daily lives and felt needs. These needs are not a side project for the deities but their sole purpose.
“A contextual approach to gospel presentations in Taiwan should frame the Lord as better than the goddess Mazu in her protection of fishermen, better than the earth God in his protection of land, better than Guanyin in her compassion for people, better than Lord Superior Wen Chang in his concern for academia, and better than Yue Lao in his understanding of love.
“That doesn’t mean Christians should water down the gospel or make it only about fulfilling daily needs. The gospel has eternal significance and brings a person into a relationship with the Lord. The gospel is also not about fulfilling one’s desires; rather, it is about fulfilling the desires of God. Taken to the extreme, this kind of prosperity gospel robs Jesus’ focus on the kingdom, John’s call to love, and Paul’s admonition to live a life worthy of the calling we have received.
“In Jesus’ ministry, he encountered people and provided for both their external and spiritual needs. Jesus spoke about how to deal with a Roman soldier asking a civilian to carry luggage or other items (Matt. 5:41). He spoke about paying taxes (Mark 12:17) and how often to forgive people (Matt. 18:21–22). Abstract truth sometimes came with the fulfillment of daily needs and sometimes did not. Even in large-scale public meetings like the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught people how to act in daily life.
“When evangelizing to Taiwanese people, it is important to discuss the challenging issues they are facing. Christians could ask adherents of folk religion about the last deity they visited and what they were seeking. Knowing the answers to these questions can help Christians explain how the gospel speaks directly to their concerns, how God can solve their problems, and how God can do more than any deity.”
A Leader in Chinese Literacy
Were it not for intense waves of persecution and meticulous government efforts to control cultural memory, the names of heroic figures from Chinese Christian history might be better known. As it is, we know a staggering number of them. (Persecution, after all, has an unfortunate habit of expanding the ranks of Christian heroes.)
Though he came of age well before Communist oppression descended upon China, Yan Yangchu surely deserves an honored placed within this hall of fame. Educated at a school run by China Inland Mission, the organization founded by celebrated missionary Hudson Taylor, Yan would come to profess faith in Christ. This, in turn, inspired the passion for education that flowered into his life’s work: promoting literacy and rural development among the peasants and poor farmers of his nation.
Author Stacey Bieler tells Yan’s story in a chapter from Salt and Light, Volume 1: Lives of Faith that Shaped Modern China. CT recently ran an excerpt from the book.
“For several years,” writes Bieler, “Yan co-led the National Association of Mass Education Movement (MEM), which organized literacy programs in several cities in China. One of the volunteer teachers who participated in this program was Mao Zedong, who later wrote his Thousand Character Primer that introduced Marx and attacked the militarists, bureaucrats, and capitalists.
“Yan’s larger goal was to establish a comprehensive rural reconstruction program that would combine education, agriculture, public health, and self-government. In 1926, his family moved to Dingxian (now called Dingzhou), a county in Hebei Province south of Beijing. Yan began recruiting American-trained Chinese graduates in agriculture from Cornell or Ohio State University and convinced educators from Columbia University and a Harvard-trained political scientist to live in Dingxian despite offering small salaries.
“When Yan and his colleagues first told the peasants in Dingxian that they had come to teach them how to read, the peasants laughed at them and said it was impossible.
“But when the first class of peasants graduated, village heads asked for schools in their towns. By 1931, all 453 villages in Dingxian had their own schools, with 20,000 students taught by volunteer teachers.”
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in the magazine
As this issue hits your mailboxes after the US election and as you prepare for the holidays, it can be easy to feel lost in darkness. In this issue, you’ll read of the piercing light of Christ that illuminates the darkness of drug addiction at home and abroad, as Angela Fulton in Vietnam and Maria Baer in Portland report about Christian rehab centers. Also, Carrie McKean explores the complicated path of estrangement and Brad East explains the doctrine of providence. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt shows us how art surprises, delights, and retools our imagination for the Incarnation, while Jeremy Treat reminds us of an ancient African bishop’s teachings about Immanuel. Finally, may you be surprised by the nearness of the “Winter Child,” whom poet Malcolm Guite guides us enticingly toward. Happy Advent and Merry Christmas.
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