The Church in China in the 20th Century - Chen Zemin

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church in China. We have already examined the first two of these above, so there is no need to examine them again. The third of these is the most complex and difficult, so let us give it special attention here.

      Submitting all the past work of the Christian church in China to a detailed and penetrating review would be a very difficult task. Much would need to be based on specialized academic knowledge. The American Layman’s Foreign Missions Inquiry is a work specifically devoted to such questions, but since its vantage point and goals differ from ours, it cannot fully meet our needs as a source of reference. All we have at present is a miscellaneous set of reports, incomplete statistics, and empty and uncertain superficial judgments. At present, all we can do is, on the one hand, gather these miscellaneous data and documents, make a tentative overall evaluation, and—to the extent possible—ascertain the directions and effectiveness of the church’s past work to serve as a guide to our present nation-constructing efforts; on the other hand, we should actively urge the central organizations of all the nation’s churches to quickly set up an investigative group to examine the work of the churches, a group which gathers especially qualified and experienced experts in all areas, including evangelism, education, rural construction, and literacy work, to produce a detailed and penetrating account of the past work of the church, and to investigate the actual situation and challenges, the possibilities for future development, and best means of promotion for all areas of church work. This group should produce a concrete and definite overall plan for all the nation’s churches to use and refer to. We shall come back to this idea later.

      What the author wishes to do in the present article is the first of the two kinds of work mentioned above, that is, to do my best with the materials at hand to make a preliminary evaluation and examination of what our nation-building work and method should be. This is discussed in combination with the “practical work of constructing the nation” below, so here I will not discuss it separately.

      The Practical Work of Constructing the Nation.

      When examining the practical work of building the nation, there is one thing that we definitely should not forget—as we as the Christian church wish to construct a new China, we should stand on a solid and united foundation, and hold to a shared faith and goal in our efforts. So, this work is comprehensive rather than fragmented, and takes the Lord Christ as its head. While it has many facets, they cannot be separated from each other. For the sake of convenience, many people separate this work into spiritual and material work. This is correct if we see these as two different kinds of work within one unified plan and project, but it would be a great mistake to see these as two as separable and independent. Some people whose work focuses on the spiritual even go to the extreme of thinking that spiritual work is the entirety of Christian work, ignoring the link between religion and life. Overlooking the fact that human life cannot be separated from its material conditions leads to a decadent and narrow “personal gospel” in which individual spiritual cultivation is the only impact of religious faith. The result is detachment from the world, which threatens the nation and the entire world. On the other hand, some view the material work of Christians as everything, with the result that they lose the real meaning of the spirit of religion and fall away from religion, becoming materialist social reformers. This also is not what we should do. These two camps even attack each other and tear each other down, which is the most regrettable thing in Christian work. Now what we should see clearly is that spiritual civilization is the soul of material civilization, and material civilization is the body of spiritual civilization. These two are inseparable, and as we discuss various aspects of the Christian work of construction, this is a point we need to frequently remind ourselves of. Take, for example, the task of rural reconstruction. This task combines both spiritual and material work, and we cannot distinguish which takes the bigger part, so the epistemology of our philosophy of construction is not entirely idealist, even less is it mechanical dualism, and it is also not entirely materialist. Instead it is a Christian philosophy with love at its core that harmonizes the spiritual and material. We have discussed this above.

      However, in practical terms, with a view toward making our work more convenient, we have no other choice but than to divide our work between separate departments, because the task is too great and this is not something that can be completed by an individual or small group working alone. So, in order to complete the task, we need an organization, and we need the work to be distributed appropriately by the organization. As we discuss this kind of work, we need to discuss according to how the task is divided according to the system of organization. But we should understand that what we are discussing is different aspects of one whole task.

      Let us start by discussing the task of spiritual construction. With regard to this, there are at least five tasks the Christian church can do, divided according to their nature and degree of progress. The lines separating these tasks are not entirely clear, and they overlap each other to a considerable extent, as is often unavoidable with the social sciences. Now let us look at these five.

      1. Evangelistic work.

      In all work that is presupposed by the task of constructing the nation, evangelistic work should be distinguished to some degree from “preaching the gospel” in the ordinary sense in terms of their significance and methods. Here we are concerned with evangelistic work, in other words, active rather than passive evangelism. The purpose of this evangelism is to make people firmer in their faith so as to give correct guidance to their lives, so this kind of evangelism is not overly concerned with issues of sin and rewards, but rather with giving people a Christian love outlook in their daily lives, with giving them hope and creating proper and perfect ideals and—with such ideals as their goals—with helping them set high moral standards, build new habits of life, and prepare for the coming of the kingdom of heaven.

      Here we should refer to the experience and achievements of past evangelistic work. In the past, evangelism made up most of the church’s work, and in some places all of it. This is the work to which most church human effort and funds were devoted, and in which achievements were most evident and most worthy of our attention. But if we examine this carefully, we will see that in much past evangelistic work, most attention was given to teaching doctrine, the Bible, and church governance, and that less attention was given to the practical aspects of living out Christian doctrine in daily life and using Christian teachings to develop a progressive view of life. In other words, in the past evangelism was quite successful with regard to form and organization, but our ideal results—building a new view of life, setting new standards, and forming the basis of a new Christianized society—have not yet been reached. This is like the revival movement that has been popular in the last few years. Superficially it appears to be a very positive phenomenon, but in fact many wonder whether those who are moved have a fundamental change in the way they approach life or permanent changes in the way they live their lives. Various other kinds of traveling gospel teams, “boat and cart” evangelistic bands, “new spring” evangelism teams and so forth do only the work of introducing the gospel, but probably too few can thoroughly inject the Christian spirit into the lives of the audience. There are various kinds of fellowship group movements that have deeper impact, and such efforts are very hopeful, but because of issues such as geographic limitations, limited time, and narrowly focused interests such fellowships can rarely become widespread movements. Also, fellowships have a natural tendency to become cliques, which is an inherent feature of group psychology, and if we are not careful this could become an obstacle to evangelism efforts.

      In general, it has been common for past evangelistic work to place too much emphasis on promotion and to neglect deeper study. Too many people only see the form of Christianity and the outline of its doctrine, but their real understanding of it is all too shallow, so Christianity doesn’t have much impact on their lives or give them

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