By Steve Weatherbe

CHRISTIANITY has not only expanded rapidly in the developing word since shedding its colonial trappings, but it is also forging forward in theological directions of its own making.

So said Pui Lan Kwok, a Hong Kong-born professor at an Anglican theology school in Massachusetts, who was in Victoria recently to give four lectures on ‘Post-colonialism and Christianity.’  

In China, she said, ever since the communists forced out the missionaries along with Western economic and political emissaries in 1949, Christian churches have expanded greatly  – despite decades of oppression.

From about 900,000 in 1949, Protestants have grown “to an estimated 50–55 million today,” said Kwok.  The Chinese government admits to a figure of 23 million. The Catholic church has grown much less, she said, perhaps because early missionaries targeted the rich and powerful, while Protestants aimed at the masses.

“The lower classes joined the Protestant churches, because the mandarins didn’t,” she said.

In Africa and Latin America, with no communist government to oppose it, Protestantism has grown much more rapidly. In Brazil, for example, “there are more Protestants in church on Sunday than Catholics,” said Kwok, despite the latter having several centuries head start. By 2025, Christians from Africa and South America will likely comprise a majority of believers.

Kwok said the church’s pastoral response to suffering and poverty partly explains the growth. A recent poll of Chinese Christians reports 69 percent converted after an illness in their family.

She noted that indigenous people have increasingly taken on a larger role in cultivating forms of worship – especially in Africa. “The dancing, the singing, it is purely African,” she told BCCN. The Chinese, though more conservative, have also begun writing their own hymns.

The indigenization is both cultural and political. In Latin America, Africa and China there are increasing numbers of local churches with few (or no) structural ties to the European or American denominations that originally planted the seeds.

In China, the government officially supports Christian churches – as long as they are independent, under the banner of ‘the three selfs’: self-governing, self-propagating and self-supporting.

Post-colonial countries, upon attaining independence, often attributed only bad things to colonization and imperialism – which they believed included the mission movement. But many have passed beyond that initial reaction, Kwok said. Now the attitude is more nuanced, and feminists and other thinkers see positives in Christianity.

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The communist Chinese regime has itself become more open to religion and its benefits, and has allowed 18 seminaries and Bible schools to be set up.

Kwok herself was introduced to Christianity by a neighbour. She was drawn to it because the Anglican church she was first taken to was pastored by a woman. “And so I understood Christianity to be liberating,” she noted. Likewise, previous generations of Chinese women were impressed by the independence of single female missionaries and missionaries’ wives, who evangelized them.

Christ, too, is now being looked at through a post-colonial “lens,”she said. “Jesus did not just die for our sins. He died because He challenged an imperial power, and that power tortured and killed Him. He was an anti-colonial figure.” The founders of China’s nationalist movement, Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai-shek, were both Christians

Kwok points out that evangelical Christianity in the U.S. also was a liberating force – literally, with its promotion of the anti-slavery movement; but also with social reform, such as the temperance movement’s liberation of people from alcohol; and with issues such as poverty. Some cultural analysts see an artistic flowering in many countries because Christian missionaries devised alphabets for them, turning oral traditions into literature.

Free to develop their churches in ways compatible with their own cultures, many Chinese Christians do not attend church regularly. As with Confucians and Buddhists in China, they see themselves as living their faith day to day, not as a thing they demonstrate on a weekly and communal basis.

“These are usually highly educated people, who are more open to the spiritual and religious background of China,” said Kwok. But many Christians in the more conventional underground churches “don’t think they are Christians at all.”

Kwok said the churches planted in China and developing countries, especially in Asia, because they are often in a minority position, are leading the way in dialogues with other world religions.

“The point is not to dialogue to find out whose faith is superior. They are not dialoguing about dogma – but about life and action,” she said. She cited recent Pentecostal experience in the United States, where evangelization of Hispanic immigrants led to their involvement in the immigration issue, and also with Buddhists who have become similarly invested in helping immigrants.

Christians can be a light to the nations without converting them, said Kwok, citing Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman, whose daughter He exorcised.

“The Bible does not say He converted her.”

January 2011