Chinese conversion to evangelical Christianity: the importance of social and cultural contexts

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 1998 by Fenggang Yang

CCC is an average church in the recruitment of new members: not among the fastest growing Chinese churches, nor one of the smallest churches. In 1995 it had a registered membership of about 300, with average Sunday service attendance numbering about 270. Its membership composition reflects the general pattern of Chinese immigrant churches. Most members are well-educated professionals who immigrated from Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and other Southeast-Asian countries; more than half of them have college or graduate degrees; they live in racially-mixed, middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs. The church also has a sizable number of Chinese students attending universities in the region.

CCC is an evangelical church. Its collective rituals of Sunday worship service, Holy Communion and baptism, manifest strong influences of the Reformed tradition with a Baptist tone. The pastors who served this church for long periods all had theological training in conservative seminaries, such as Wheaton College, Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, and Dallas Theological Seminary. Evangelism has been the mission of the church and it has almost no community service program except for the weekend Chinese language school. The church remains apolitical in reference to both American and Chinese politics.

The majority of CCC's immigrant members are adult converts from non-Christian family backgrounds. Membership records show that among immigrants who have ever joined this church, 72 percent were baptized at age 18 or older. Many received baptism at a much older age, in their fifties, sixties, or even seventies. Among its current members, 58 percent were baptized at this church. Many people who joined CCC through membership transfers were also adult converts who were baptized elsewhere in America or Asia. The high rate of adult converts is not unique to this church, but a common characteristic of many Chinese-American churches.

This high conversion rate is in remarkable contrast to previous Chinese resistence to Christianity. Between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, China was the "mission field" par excellence for Western Christianity. Thousands of Western missionaries made tremendous efforts to evangelize the Chinese (Brown 1986; Fairbank 1974). By the early 1950s, when Western missionaries were driven out of the mainland by the Chinese Communists, however, Christians remained a tiny minority in China, less than 1 percent of the population.(1) Christian missions to the Chinese in America fared little better. By 1952, after a hundred years of missionary efforts to Chinese immigrants, there were only 66 Chinese churches in the United States. Most were small congregations and had little influence in Chinatown communities (Cayton and Lively 1955). The increase of new Chinese immigrants since the 1960s sparked a period of rapid growth in the number of Chinese churches in America. By 1994 they had increased to 700 (AFC 1994). Some survey data suggest that as many as 32 percent of Chinese in the US today are Christians (Hurh and Kim 1990:20; Dart 1997). This high rate is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese in diasporas as well as in China. Moreover, large scale Chinese conversion to Christianity is continuing in the US.