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Urbanization and the Church: East and West


As China has urbanized the challenges facing the church increasingly mirror those in other urban societies.

Materialism, postmodernism, family breakdown, leadership failure, and the temptation to use secular techniques to further the work of the church are all familiar themes in the West. Today’s urban Chinese church leaders point to many of the same issues. In a recent Chinese Church Voices post, for example, a pastor in Xiamen mentions increasing sexual promiscuity, post-modern ideology introduced through popular entertainment, and the worship of money as among the key challenges facing the church.

Despite the similarities, however, it is important to keep in mind significant differences in how China’s church has arrived at its current place in the city, as well as in its capacity to face these challenges.

Processes of urbanization that took a century or more to unfold in Western nations have, in China, occurred within the space of one generation. The current cohort of urban leaders has no reference point by which to gauge the effect of change upon the church, for they themselves have grown up within the social transformation that has redrawn China’s cultural map.

As first-generation believers, they struggle to grasp a sense of where the church has been. The Chinese church’s not-so-distant past may in fact seem quite distant and very foreign to those whose only church experience has been in a reform-era urban environment. Furthermore, when they look to the previous generation of urban church leaders to ask how they dealt with the church’s contemporary challenges, that previous generation simply does not exist.

Secondly, unlike the church in the West and in many urban societies in Asia, the church in China has not been free to develop robust and independent institutions that would enable this generation of believers to face its challenges in a coordinated, holistic manner. It is true that officially sanctioned church structures have allowed for some scalable responses, through the literature work of the China Christian Council and provincial council publishers, for example. Unofficially, the internet has provided myriad forums for Christians to explore solutions to common problems and to share resources.

Yet restrictions on forming organizations, along with a lack of experienced leadership, have hampered Chinese Christians’ formal attempts to jointly respond to the major challenges facing the church. The “Christian infrastructure” comprising specialized organizations, associations, training institutions, and media producers that leaders in the West instinctively rely upon for resources is largely nonexistent in China.

 Pointing out these differences is not to say that the church in China will be unable to face the challenging effects of urbanization, only that the way in which they are to be faced must be different. Rather than dwelling on what the church in China does not have, we would do well to focus prayerfully on the Chinese church’s unique strengths and on the promise that “His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.” (II Peter 1:3 NIV)

Image credit: Gaylan Yeung
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Brent Fulton

Brent Fulton

Brent Fulton is the founder of ChinaSource. Dr. Fulton served as the first president of ChinaSource until 2019. Prior to his service with ChinaSource, he served from 1995 to 2000 as the managing director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at Wheaton College. From 1987 to 1995 he served as founding …View Full Bio


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