New Alliance Aims to Unite Chinese Churches Divided by Geopolitics
Leader explains why members of the World Evangelical Alliance visited leaders of China’s government-sanctioned Three-Self churches.
Anyone wanting to bring together the more than 100 million Chinese-speaking Christians around the world must deal with the thorny issue of the church in China. There, Christians are split between unregistered house churches and the government-sanctioned Three-Self church. Additionally, heated differences in political views make it difficult for the global Chinese-speaking church to unify.
Nevertheless, global evangelical leaders want to bring this community together. Last week, a delegation from the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) traveled to China to meet with the leaders of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and the China Christian Council (CCC)—which are both overseen by the Chinese Communist Party—and offered them an invitation to collaborate.
The WEA launched the World Chinese Christianity Alliance (WCA) a year ago to serve the Chinese-speaking church with a think tank, publishing house, and media center, along with academic exchanges, resource sharing, and trainings.
Ezekiel Tan, general secretary of both the WCA and the Evangelical Alliance of Singapore, spoke with CT about the WCA’s aims, its current progress, and the unique challenges it faces as it brings together ethnic Chinese from around the world. (In the article, the term Chinese refers to all ethnic Han people regardless of where they reside.)
The WCA is the WEA’s first language-based network, instead of its typical location-based network. Why was Mandarin Chinese chosen to pioneer this?
Mandarin Chinese is our first endeavor because Chinese speakers are unique: They are overwhelmingly ethnically Han Chinese and share the same ancestry from China. Other international language groups, such as Arabic and Spanish, include people from ...