Tried With Fire

China's Reforming Churches: Mission, Polity, and Ministry in the Next Christendom , Bruce P. Baugus - editor, Reformation Heritage Books, May 2014, 320 pages. China's Reforming Churches is a collection of essays which covers the history of Presbyterian missions to China, the current state of the church with its challenges and opportunities, and the potential indigenization of the reformed faith in China. The writing is more scholarly and theological than typical missions stories, but this gives the necessary depth to accurately depict the complex nature of China's church and culture. It's easy for Western Christians to see the Chinese church through the lens of one of four narratives: the   persecuted church , the   needy church , Christian China , or the missionary church. [99-103] While all these aspects are true, a single one does not give the whole picture, and to think those would distort the true nature of the Chinese church. This book offers a more in-dept...

"While we do not know why God allowed the Communist Revolution to occur, we can describe some of the surprising results for the Western mission to China and Reformed faith in China. One consequence, for example, is that it purged China of theologically liberal Western missionaries. Since then, many orthodox evangelical missionaries have returned to China, but relatively few theological liberals have. However tragic the expulsion of orthodox men and women from China was, the very real danger posed to the church in China by Western liberal theology was checked. Likewise, however much we may mourn the destruction of much good Christian literature and the theological famine the Communist Revolution produced, it also rid the country of most of the harmful Christian literature as well, leaving the Chinese church with one main document: the Bible . From my perspective, this appears to be a significant reason the church in China as a whole, even the state sanctioned Three Self Church, h...