During the season between the Resurrection and Pentecost, commonly called Eastertide (or the Great Fifty Days) in the church calendar, it is appropriate to reflect on the role of the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised to send soon after his reappearance. He encouraged the disciples to wait in the city until the Holy Spirit came and filled them with power from heaven (Luke 24:49). It was indeed on Pentecost that the outpouring of the Spirit came upon the early church, changing the course of the entire human history. Today, the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement has become one of the fastest-growing church movements in the Global South, including the land of the Middle Kingdom.
The term Pentecostal spirituality, however, is contested, subject to a variety of scholarly interpretations. Whether one believes most Chinese churches are Pentecostal, “quasi-Pentecostal”1 or “Pentecostal-style Protestantism,”2 defining Chinese Pentecostal spirituality can be like attempting to “tame an untameable animal.” Without delving into its diverse understandings, I simply hold that Pentecostal spirituality is about “the lived experience of God, in the Spirit of Christ,”3 characterized by the baptism of the Spirit described in Acts 2.
I was recently invited to respond to two newly published academic books in a panel discussion at the Society of Pentecostal Studies: Spirit(s) and Chinese Religiosity and China’s Indwelling Spirit. Here, I offer a bird’s-eye view of the two books, pose questions for further reflection, and suggest possible future directions for Chinese Pentecostalism.
These two highly dense and sophisticated academic books, based on recent PhD dissertations, fill a significant gap in the scholarship on the historiography of Chinese Christianity. For several decades, dominant narratives have largely revolved around missionary biography, nationalism, inculturation, ecclesiology, and religious phenomena. What has been underdeveloped is a scholarly engagement with Chinese spiritual cosmologies and lived pneumatology as interpretive frameworks of history. Both of these books insist that something vital has been insufficiently centred in the telling of the story, that is, the “Cinderella of the Trinity”—the Spirit and her interaction with Chinese spirits. From the unique lens of Pentecost, the two authors insist that the history of Chinese Christianity cannot be adequately narrated or understood without attending to the spiritually saturated worlds within which Christianity has infused Chinese life and expression throughout the centuries. They propose explicitly that pneumatology is one of the neglected sites for retelling Chinese Christian historiography. They too implicitly employ a comparative theological paradigm that seeks to bridge the spirits of Chinese traditions with the Third Person of the Trinity. The key question is: can Chinese Pentecostalism be easily adapted within a Chinese framework? They both respond with a resounding YES.
Centring Spirit(s) as the Key Framework
Spirit(s) and Chinese Religiosity sets China’s Spirit World as the “Dance Floor” for the Holy Spirit, expanding the historical horizon of the Spirit’s cosmic dance across 1400 years of Chinese civilization, albeit focusing on two strands of the Chinese indigenous movement in modern history. The move to speak of “spirit(s)” rooted in “Qi” sets out an important methodological work. It reopens the religious landscape of China not as a background of superstition awaiting correction, nor as a sociological container into which Christianity arrives, but as a spiritually dense field already alive with presence and agency within Chinese cosmologies. The book argues that Chinese Christianity emerged and developed within a world where spirits were not metaphors but everyday realities, allowing the Holy Spirit to freely “dance” in multifaceted styles on the land in its enduring civilization. Here, “spirit(s)” functions not merely as a theological category but as a historiographical key, creating a new lens to interpret archives and narratives. Testimonies of healing, possession, dreams, and prophecies become central data for understanding Christian faith.
China’s Indwelling Spirit narrows its scope historically, focusing on Pentecostal roots in Republican China from 1907 to 1949. Yet this narrower frame does not diminish its conceptual ambition. Instead, by delving deeply into the classical texts of Chinese religions, dating back 2,400 years (focusing on the works of Mengzi), it demonstrates with remarkable clarity that Pentecostal pneumatology in China was not simply imported wholesale from Western missions. Pentecostal spirituality “felt Chinese” because it aligned with deeply rooted values around spirits, healing, and communal life. Its success lay in resonance rather than replacement.
Both authors insist that the “continent of the Spirit” (shenzhou) is a fertile ground for the Holy Spirit to move and become infused into Chinese lives through both local and foreign agencies. They attempt to correct “historiographical myths” and convincingly argue that Pentecostal pneumatology deeply resonates with Chinese tradition and culture, especially the concept of Qi. Relying on missionary letters, testimonies, healing narratives, and key players, they reconstruct a history that is otherwise invisible in state archives and ecclesial studies. This methodological choice argues that Pentecostal movements are not under-documented; they are under-theologized. Together, these historiographical works press theologians and missiologists, especially those shaped by the post-Enlightenment of Western contexts, to reconsider how deeply local spirit cosmologies shape our accounts of the Spirit.
Some Questions for Further Thought:
While affirming the indisputable contributions of the two volumes, I am also posing some questions for further thought. The first question is whether, by narrating through the Spirit, we risk marginalizing Christology or ecclesiology that is intertwined with pneumatology. Without engaging the Spirited Christ, I wonder if it underplays the important distinction between the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Christ and other spirits in China. Does pneumatology become an all-inclusive category that absorbs what might require a more differentiated theological treatment?
This leads to the second question: how are we to understand the theological relationship between plural spirit cosmologies and the singular Holy Spirit? With the continuity and discontinuity, would the interaction generate a more unstable configuration than our theological categories easily allow? How could this potential dilemma be held in prayer and discernment? Further, how should we interpret and translate “Qi-tology”, a Chinese pneumatology developed by Jingjiao, into Chinese, conceptually and practically? Up until today, most Chinese would still associate “Qi” with Qigong, Falun Gong, or Daoist/Buddhist practices, tinted with New Age spirituality.
The third question concerns interreligious dialogue and textual comparisons. I wonder about the potential engagements between the contemplative aspects of Pentecostal spirituality (as exhibited in the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the medieval mystics and the Eastern Orthodox) and Chinese traditions (especially Daoism and Buddhism), which are also contemplative in nature.4 Both traditions allow for the mystery of the unknown, leaning towards an apophatic spirituality that accentuates negation, silence, and mystery. This calls for comparative studies that bridge these traditions within the praxis of the Spirit.
Potential Future Trajectories
The two books have laid a valuable foundation for the study of Chinese Pentecostal historiography. While there may be more questions than answers, here I offer three possible trajectories for the future of Chinese Pentecostalism.
1) A Spirit-Driven Chinese Mission Movement
If the Holy Spirit has been dancing on the rich spirit(s) world of China, what would it mean to hear “the music of God’s future and dance to it today,”5 or specifically, the missio Dei for the Chinese church in a glocal (global-local) world? In an age “from everywhere to everywhere,” Chinese mission is taking new shapes and forms, carrying on the rich heritage of its own mission history.
This is one of the goals of the recently published volume Chinese Christian Witness. It presents a multi-paradigmatic view of gospel expression and expansion in the lives of Chinese believers over several centuries, featuring 19 scholars and 7 artists. It argues that Chinese Christians have been bearing witness to the transformation of the gospel for the sake of the whole creation. This is the first attempt to address Chinese Christianity through a missiological lens across continents and theological traditions, holding that the Spirit has been actively at work and, in fact, driving Chinese mission movements from the beginning.
What would the changing, ever evolving and fluid Chinese pneumatology look like in the reconfiguration of Chinese Christianity today? More specifically, what would it look like when the boundaries between categories blur in transnational and translinguistic discourse, and the “dance floor” becomes a liminal and polyphonic space in which theological meaning is negotiated rather than presupposed? The experiences of Chinese immigrants in the US following the Azusa Street revival in an otherwise restrictive and prejudiced environment could be a valuable historical example.
Further, how might African, Latin American, or Korean Pentecostals read the proposed Chinese “Pentecost-driven Qi-tology”? Would they recognize familiar patterns of charismatic agency, or would they see something uniquely Chinese? The answer to that question has implications for how we situate and practice Chinese Christianity/Missiology within wider Global Christianity.
2) A Women’s Movement
The empirical evidence produced by scholars indicates that World Christianity, including Chinese Christianity, embodies a women’s movement, as it is birthed and sustained largely due to the efforts and contributions of women.6 I suspect that this trend will continue, even with the rise of male urban elites in church leadership who are vocal in media and prolific in publications. The silent majority remains female Christians.
Spirit(s) and Chinese Religiosity addresses little the prevailing narratives of women and their contribution in the history of Chinese Christianity, except for short accounts of a few women in history. In contrast, China’s Indwelling Spirit argues extensively about women’s roles in Chinese Pentecostalism throughout the book, exemplifying attention to the marginalized in Pentecostal spirituality. The book provides a couple of reasons why the Chinese church undermines women in leadership: communist propaganda and traditional Chinese views of women.
I wish other contributing factors were named, especially the theological disposition of Neo-Calvinistic Reformed theology that has influenced many urban Chinese churches in recent years. Unfortunately, American fundamentalist theology that advocates a complementary view has disrupted the locally germinated ecology of faith, including the empowerment of women in ministry. The misguided perception of gendered understandings of Christianity is that men are more rational, as in Calvinism, and women are more emotional, as in Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. The fear of seeing charismatic women in leadership is amplified with the dangerous sect Eastern Lightning, led by a woman who taught that Christ has returned in female form. These social constructs, as widely noted in scholarship, tend to reproduce and intensify existing gendered hierarchies.
Scholars have argued that just as Daoism incorporates the complementary forces of both yin and yang, Pentecostal faith challenges the dominance of males and the authoritarian elements found in Confucianism and Christian fundamentalism. The spiritual movements adopt a liberating stance toward women.7 This expression of Christianity, notable for its empowering of women within the house church movement, stands in sharp contrast to urban Christianity with its Neo-Calvinistic theological stance. Consequently, greater scholarly and ecclesiastical consideration needs to be given to a robust pneumatology of feminine expression, for example, the intricate connection between feminine Yin and the Holy Spirit.8
3) Pneumatological Poetics
If deep listening to indigenous spirituality is fundamental to intercultural and interreligious encounters, then a much-neglected area in Chinese tradition also needs to be named: the poetics. Poetics, especially poetry, as a long-lasting tradition in Chinese culture, speaks not only to the Chinese mind, but its elusive, imaginative and embodied nature opens a fertile ground to allow the aesthetic dance of the Spirit(s). This is clearly evident, though not explicit, in both authors’ archival research. For example, in Spirit(s) and Chinese Religiosity, the theology of Yelikewen is expressed in a poetic dancing with Qi; in China’s Indwelling Spirit, “the Daodejing presents extraordinary philosophical and ideological insights that I [the author] contend the Zhuangzi makes material through the use of stories, parables, and anecdotes.”
Although it is refreshing to read both volumes that adopt a lived pneumatology approach rather than a static belief-comparison model, they originate in doctoral research undertaken within North American theological institutions and are therefore shaped, at least methodologically, by Western scholastic traditions of constructive and discursive theology. This raises a broader question: might the retrieval of Chinese poetic traditions—placed in dialogue with Scripture, the Church of the East, and the wider monastic and mystical heritage in which poetry itself functions as theology—open alternative modes of theological articulation beyond the analytic frameworks that have largely formed our academic training of this and the next generation of theological education? More concretely, how might pneumatology be translated not only conceptually but existentially, rendered as lived spirituality, in ways that resonate with the pragmatic and “fuzzy” dimensions of Chinese religious sensibility?
In this regard, Pentecostal scholarship is uniquely situated to interpret Chinese Christian history precisely because it recognizes lived experience, not as an anecdotal supplement to doctrine, but as a primary site of theological reflection. It takes seriously sources that Western scholastic traditions often marginalized: oral testimony, narrative, affective and embodied worship, and corporate discernment. Songs, prayers, healing, and prophetic insights are not secondary but primary theological loci. The two authors respectively record that Jing Dianying and Watchman Nee wrote hymns, and that Xi Sheng Mo’s hymns were considered more to the liking of the local people than the hymns introduced by the missionaries. Another example, Canaan Hymns, composed by Lü Xiaomin, a semi-literate rural woman without any music training, includes more than 2200 songs that have spread around the world. This is an example of what Chinese Christianity can contribute to the global church “out of the treasure trove of her own rich Christian history.”9
In both books, we see accounts of dreams, healings, glossolalia, exorcism, and prophetic speech. These are not merely historical accounts, but theological affirmations inspired and propelled by the Spirit. They are imaginative performances of presence that shape faith and build communities. What we are witnessing in these histories is not only doctrinal development, or religious practice, but a kind of pneumatological poetics—a way in which the Spirit shapes the imaginative and affective texture of Christian life. If so, then these works may have implications not only for historians but also for contextual theologians. They challenge us to consider how pneumatology forms worlds—not abstractly, but narratively, ritually, and aesthetically.
In addition, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence in our time forces us to confront the question of whether we should wrestle with life’s mysteries or attempt to master them. The following poem theologizes the creative tension between poetics and AI. It is a poem prophetically composed in 1943 by Cassiano Ricardo, a Brazilian poet, ironically translated by a machine today:
Why think, imagine?
The machine will do it for us.
Why write a poem?
The machine will do it for us.
Why climb Jacob’s ladder?
The machine will do it for us.
“Oh Machine, pray for us!”
In truth, a machine, without an interior self and the breath of God, cannot and will not pray for us. Yet, through the indwelling Spirit of God, we can join with the saints of ancient times and pray with Chinese Christians for the empowerment and manifestation of the Spirit for the Kingdom of God here and now, and in the age to come.
References
Albrecht, Daniel E., and Evan B. Howard. “Pentecostal Spirituality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Bays, Daniel H. A New History of Christianity in China. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
Kao, Chen-yang. “The House-Church Identity and Preservation of Pentecostal-Style Protestantism in China.” In Christianity in Contemporary China. Routledge, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203094143-24.
Mayfield, Alex, and Daryl Ireland. Christianity as a Women’s Movement?: Hard Data from China. April 4, 2023.
Robert, Dana L. “World Christianity as a Women’s Movement.” International bulletin of mission research 30, no. 4 (2006): 180-88. https://doi.org/10.1177/239693930603000403.
Tong, Joy K. C., and Fenggang Yang. “The Femininity of Chinese Christianity: A Study of a Chinese Charismatic Church and Its Female Leadership.” In Global Chinese Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. Brill, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004342811_018.
Wright, Christopher J. H. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. InterVarsity Press, 2013.
Yang, Xiaoli. “Contemplative Aspects of Pentecostal Spirituality—a Case Study of a Retreat Experience in Asia.” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 28, no. 1 (2019): 303-21. https://brill.com/view/journals/pent/28/1/article-p123_123.xml?language=en.
Yang , Xiaoli. ““Revive, Sisters!”: Chinese Women in Ministry through the Lens of the Canaan Hymns.” Missiology—An International Review 53, no. 4 (2025): 423-33. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00918296251320651.
Yang, Xiaoli, and Daryl Ireland, eds. Chinese Christian Witness: Identity, Creativity, Transmission and Poetics. Brill, 2025.
Zurlo, Gina A., Todd M. Johnson, and Peter F. Crossing. “World Christianity 2023: A Gendered Approach.” International bulletin of mission research 47, no. 1 (2023): 11-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/23969393221128253.
- Daniel H. Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
- Chen-yang Kao, “The House-Church Identity and Preservation of Pentecostal-Style Protestantism in China,” in Christianity in Contemporary China, ed. Khek Gee Lim (New York: Routledge, 2013), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203094143-24.
- Daniel E. Albrecht and Evan B. Howard, “Pentecostal Spirituality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism, ed. Cecil M. Robeck Jr. and Amos Yong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 251.
- Xiaoli Yang, “Contemplative Aspects of Pentecostal Spirituality—A Case Study of a Retreat Experience in Asia,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 28, no. 1 (2019): 123, https://brill.com/view/journals/pent/28/1/article-p123_123.xml.
- Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, (InterVarsity Press, 2013).
- Alex Mayfield and Daryl Ireland, “Christianity as a Women’s Movement?: Hard Data from China,” April 4, 2023.
- Joy K. C. Tong and Fenggang Yang, “The Femininity of Chinese Christianity: A Study of a Chinese Charismatic Church and Its Female Leadership,” in Global Chinese Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, ed. Fenggang Yang (Leiden: Brill, 2017), vol. 22, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004342811_018.
- Xiaoli Yang, “Revive, Sisters!”: Chinese Women in Ministry through the Lens of the Canaan Hymns.” Missiology—An International Review 53, no. 4 (2025): 423-33. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00918296251320651.
- Daniel H. Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 205.
