A very happy and blessed 2023 to our dear readers! I’ve been the assistant content manager at ChinaSource for just over a year, and it’s been a year of intense learning for me. Today I’m sharing the ten blog posts that most impacted me in 2022. It’s an eclectic list, and it was hard to narrow it down to just ten posts.
I’m looking forward to all the new learning that 2023 will bring!
- Expatriate Ministry in China during the Age of COVID by Swells in the Middle Kingdom. January 9, 2022. This was the first article of several this year that spoke to the grief expats in China were experiencing, along with the felt sense of God’s presence in their lives. I was moved by many other entries in the series, too.
- Raising the Walls of the Sandbox by Joann Pittman. January 14, 2002. One of the things I quickly learned to appreciate about ChinaSource content is the balance between personal accounts and analysis of broader context. This piece brought both elements together and gave me a template for reading and understanding the news coming out of China for the rest of 2022.
- Getting to Know China’s Migrant Workers by Reggie Reimer. March 9, 2022. I might be cheating a bit here. This is the editorial to the spring issue of ChinaSource Quarterly, which looked at the faith and struggles of migrant workers in China. This was an area of Chinese life that I knew little about, and I found the entire issue very moving and thought provoking.
- Found: A Film Review by Hannah Lau. April 6, 2022. “What makes a person Chinese?” asks our reviewer, echoing the question asked by three teen girls, all born in China and adopted as infants by American families.
- The Changing Religious Landscape in Modernizing China by Yang Fenggang. May 9, 2022. In the context of Communism, how do people come to faith? How do religions survive and even thrive in such a hostile environment? Dr. Yang’s perspective on these questions was informed by both deep historical study and a strong Christian faith.
- A Visit to Shaoshan and What I’ll Not Forget by Laura de Ruiter. July 25, 2022. This was one of the most challenging posts I worked on last year. In asking readers to reconsider their perspective on Mao, it tackles the issue of cross-cultural understanding head-on.
- What if Christianity Is No Longer Successful? by Brent Fulton. August 22, 2022. How do you know when a missions project is blessed by God? How do you know if your gospel work is “worth it”? What if we measured success in terms of faithfulness rather than numbers?
- When the “Golden Age” Is Over by Chen Jing. October 10, 2022. This was another very challenging post, which generated lots of reader responses that became a whole series. Chen Jing called on readers to consider the history of missions in China over the past 40 years, reflecting seriously on both the successes and failures of Western cross-cultural work.
- An Aesthetic Dance: When the Poet Haizi Meets with Jesus by Xiaoli Yang. November 9, 2022. Xiaoli Yang’s meditation on the resonances between the gospel and the poetry of Haizi illuminated another facet of Chinese culture, especially the way that a longing for “home” can open people to faith. (Easten Law’s review of her book is an excellent companion piece.)
- An Interview with a Missions Leader in China (1) by TT and Julie Ma. December 12, 2022. In light of the tightening in China, how are Chinese missions leaders doing? Is there still a way that Western workers can serve the church in China? The answers to these questions became a three-part series that posed provocative questions and deep answers.
Image credit: Alexandre Valdivia via UnSplash.
Rachel Anderson
Rachel Anderson serves as the Assistant Content Manager at ChinaSource. Though she has never been to China, her ancestors were missionaries in East Asia and passed on a deep love and respect for those cultures. Rachel lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their five delightful children. View Full Bio
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