On the Sunday before I went to Cambridge, I attended two churches in London.
The first was All Souls Langham Place, the church long associated with John Stott. Above the front of the sanctuary were the words, “GREAT JOY FOR ALL THE PEOPLE.” Once I sat down, I noticed how many of those serving appeared to be Chinese. Wien Fung, who opened the service that morning, mentioned his Hong Kong background, wished the congregation a happy Mid-Autumn Festival, and said that he had recently joined All Souls as Executive Director of All Souls Serve the City. Those I took to be Chinese were part of the visible life of the church, rather than gathered in a separate Chinese congregation.
A little later, I crossed London to attend the Mandarin service at Chinese Church in London’s Soho congregation. CCiL holds Cantonese, Mandarin, and English services. At the Mandarin service I attended, almost everyone was a young Chinese adult.
Two days later, I was in Cambridge for the inaugural conference of the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology, which was launched in 2025. Held on September 22–24, 2026, the conference was titled Churches in Global Chinese Communities: Chinese Ecclesiology in the Making. Ecclesiology is theological reflection on the church: what it is, how it should live, and what makes its members one. I began thinking about those two Sunday services again.
Why did I instinctively call only one of them a Chinese church?
The distinction made sense: CCiL offered Mandarin worship and called itself Chinese; All Souls did not. But where did the people I took to be Chinese at All Souls fit in that description?
For a long time, Chinese had felt like a remarkably safe word for me to use. Its ambiguity was part of what made it useful: I could use it without having to specify much. But this year, I had begun to see how differently the same word could function in different settings, and how often I had relied on its ambiguity to sidestep difficult questions. I could no longer keep doing that.
When the Adjective Becomes Unstable
Earlier this year, after a gathering of Chinese Christian scholars, pastors, and leaders in Hong Kong, I had begun thinking about how deceptively simple the word could seem. Chinese could name a language or a cultural inheritance. It could also carry much more complicated questions of history, identity, and belonging.
A few months later, at a Chinese-language public theology conference in Kuala Lumpur, that question became more specific: whose experience do we assume when we speak about a “Chinese” context? Shared language and cultural inheritance did not mean that Christians from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and the diaspora inhabited the same political or social world.
In Kuching, at the 10th Chinese Congress on World Evangelization, the question shifted again: Who gets included in the “we” of a global Chinese church, and who gets to shape it?
Then, at Arise Asia in Manila, Chinese Christians were one voice among thousands of young Christians from across Asia. That change of position mattered to me. Chinese remained meaningful, but it could no longer function as the final boundary of Christian belonging.
At Cambridge, Yinxuan Huang’s research gave the question an empirical footing. His work examined the changing Chinese Christian community in Britain, including the consequences of recent Hong Kong migration.
One slide showed that roughly 62 percent of Christian respondents in the group labeled “HK-post2021” favored Chinese churches over non-Chinese ones.1 Even within that group, patterns of church belonging were not uniform.
That figure did not tell us why people attended a particular congregation, or what Chinese meant to them. What exactly was the Chinese doing in “Chinese church”?
Huang’s earlier research, conducted in partnership with the British and Foreign Bible Society and London School of Theology, drew on a survey of 1,179 Chinese people in Britain, both Christian and non-Christian, alongside 45 interviews with Christian workers and leaders and a series of focus groups.2 Migration was changing where people worshipped and the communities they formed. The categories through which we described those communities needed examination too.
I remain convinced that calling oneself Chinese need not diminish other identities. But that conviction cannot settle what the word means for someone else. Identity is not something an editor, scholar, or theologian gets to decide for other people.
From Migration to Institutional Memory
Another session that afternoon gave the story of Chinese churches in Britain a longer historical arc. Helen Barrs traced Chinese Christian congregational life in postwar Britain through Pastor Stephen Wang, who gathered dispersed Chinese migrants and redirected missionary attention from China to the Chinese diaspora. What later appeared to be a British Chinese ecclesial form had itself been carried, adapted, and reorganized across geography.
The next morning, Renie Chow Choy’s plenary, “Becoming Established: The Chinese Diaspora in the Church of England,” moved the question from migration to institutional life.
Her account of a Chinese congregation within St Martin-in-the-Fields traced its involvement in governance, shared lay leadership, and the institution’s own historical memory. Her slides included an icon and a memorial book commemorating Florence Li Tim-Oi, the Hong Kong-born priest who became the first woman ordained to the priesthood in the Anglican Communion in 1944—fifty years before the Church of England ordained its first women priests.3 Chinese Christian lives were part of the story the institution told about itself.
A migrant congregation does not remain a guest simply because it arrived later.
Choy’s account made me ask what happens when Chinese Christians help shape a historic British institution’s memory and exercise leadership within it. To describe them only as people being welcomed would miss their contribution to the church that welcomed them.
The question I had carried from London was beginning to split in two. What made a church Chinese? And what, in the first place, made it a church?
Who Gets to Shape Ecclesiology?
How History Shapes Ecclesial Identity
Brian Stanley’s opening plenary offered an early reminder that ecclesial forms rarely fit neatly into familiar categories.
Among Stanley’s examples was the wonderfully unwieldy “Episcopresbygationalism” of the 1919 Tranquebar Manifesto, which sought to hold episcopal, presbyterian, and congregational elements of church governance together. Its aim was not “compromise for the sake of peace,” but “comprehension for the sake of truth.”4
Stanley ended with Andrew Walls recalling his early years in Sierra Leone. While teaching second-century Christian literature, Walls realized that the African Christian community around him was itself in its second century of Christian allegiance. Its life and worship helped him imagine the communities behind those ancient fragments.
That question of how history is told returned in Pui Him Ip’s paper. What would it mean to write an ecclesiastical history of “the Chinese church” at all? He outlined three possible inheritances: the Tang dynasty’s Jingjiao tradition, the denominational histories of missionary-founded churches, and a biblical-apostolic inheritance in which “Chinese” was chiefly a linguistic or ethnic description. Each approach, he suggested, carried a different understanding of catholicity—of how a particular community understood its place within the wider church. Writing a church’s history was also a way of shaping its identity.5
Letting Context Raise the Questions
Tianji Ma’s paper asked how Chinese churches in Germany might understand belonging differently when New Testament language of citizenship was brought into conversation with the familiar image of church as family. Ephesians 2:19 supplied both images: “fellow citizens with the saints” and “members of the household of God.” For Ma, citizenship suggested participation in a common life—not a replacement for family, but a way of imagining ecclesial belonging that could extend beyond familiar boundaries.
I found myself thinking about how naturally many Chinese Christians call the church a family. I do too.
Families can offer deep care while drawing a firm line around those they recognize as their own. In a migrant congregation, I wondered, how might that intimacy affect its relationships with people beyond its membership?
Elsewhere in the program, scholars approached the church through Catholic liturgy, disability, Confucian ritual, political constraint, and historical memory. I could see no single model that would encompass the range of Chinese Christian life represented there.
The significance went beyond the number of contexts represented. Chinese Christian experience might change what ecclesiology noticed and the questions it asked.
Duanran Feng’s paper on Bao Guanglin took the question into a historical setting.
Duanran Feng traced Bao Guanglin’s Christian socialist ecclesiology through both his participation in international theological conversations and the practical demands of leading Beijing’s Gangwashi Church. As Bao worked toward independence from the London Missionary Society, financial difficulties helped shape his emphasis on the organic growth of churches and the voluntary character of ministry. The parish was not merely the setting for his theology; its challenges helped make it.6
Still, tracing how a theological question arises is not the same as deciding whether its answer is adequate.
Hannah Nation offered a clearer example. She compared sixteenth-century Reformed writings on persecution with reflections by contemporary Chinese urban Reformed house church pastors. Both drew on union with Christ, but their urgent questions differed: How could a persecuted believer be assured of salvation? And how could a community persevere as the church when its gatherings and institutions were under pressure? In the Chinese texts she examined, union with Christ came to the fore as a corporate reality sustaining the church’s perseverance in suffering and public witness. These themes were not new to Christian theology; their prominence and the questions they answered were different.
Jenny Yan Yang approached the problem from another direction. In her reading of Wang Mingdao, she placed Ernst Troeltsch’s church–sect typology alongside the Nicene marks of the church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The point was not to discard sociological description, but to prevent it from becoming a theological verdict: “The theological task begins after classification, not before it.”7
In her account, Wang’s insistence on separation from the world could coexist with ordinary social participation and moral responsibility. “Sectarian” might describe aspects of a community’s organization; it did not establish that the community had withdrawn from the world.
Nation’s and Yang’s papers pointed to different but related tasks: allowing particular histories to bring theological questions into focus, and refusing to let social classification do the work of theological judgment.
These distinctions matter in my work at ChinaSource. How we introduce a church or an author shapes what readers expect to hear. The more I do this work, the more wary I become of allowing any one label, or any one part of the church, to stand for the whole.
From Description to Theological Judgment
After the conference, I had an opportunity to speak with Ximian Xu, a founding co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology. I asked why the first conference had focused on ecclesiology. One of the starting points, he said, was that academic theology should not become detached from the church. A direct way to take that relationship seriously was to talk about the church itself.
Xu distinguished studying Chinese Christianity from doing theology from within Chinese Christian experience. History, anthropology, and sociology could tell us indispensable things about churches. Ecclesiology also had to ask theological questions about the church’s identity and calling. The conference welcomed historical, sociological, and political studies as contributions to that conversation.
That distinction did not make empirical inquiry dispensable. It could reveal aspects of a church’s life that its own theological account overlooked. But describing a social form and judging its ecclesial faithfulness were different tasks, and each could challenge the other.
When I asked how he saw Cambridge in relation to the Chinese-language gathering in Hong Kong earlier this year, Xu described them as complementary. Each language and setting enabled a different exchange. The choice of language also helped determine who could take part. An English-language conference could not escape questions of representation simply by gathering scholars from several countries.
Communion and Difference
The range of churches and histories discussed at Cambridge made it difficult to imagine that any single ecclesial model could account for them all. Yet Shao Kai Tseng’s plenary challenged an equally easy assumption: that diversity itself amounts to Christian unity.
Drawing on Jean-Marie Tillard, Tseng argued for a “communion of differences.” Communion neither abolishes difference nor merely assembles different groups. It requires participation in a shared reality. Particular churches must therefore be willing to judge their differences in relation to what they hold in common, rather than treating every contextual feature as inviolable.
For Chinese Christianity, that distinction matters. The search for a single model can flatten difference, while a celebration of plurality can leave unanswered what these churches actually share.
Tseng concluded by calling for the Lord’s Supper to be restored to the center of worship. He located ecclesial communion in participation in Christ, given concrete expression at the Lord’s Table. Shared ethnicity or cultural affinity could not supply an equivalent account of what makes Christians one.
Yet if communion is more than a generous way of speaking about difference, what would it require of churches divided over authority, doctrine, or worship? Tseng’s proposal offered a theological starting point, not a shortcut past those disagreements.
Theology from the Space Between
Clement Wen began the final plenary wearing a tie he had worn the last time his father heard him preach. Born in the United States and raised primarily in English, he had delivered that sermon entirely in Mandarin. His father died a few weeks later.
The tie carried a family history that was also part of Chinese American Christian history. His parents had emigrated from Taiwan and become Christians in the United States. They later helped establish a new congregation following a split in their Chinese church. It was there that Wen grew up, was baptized, and was eventually ordained.
That history made Wen’s next move all the more striking. He acknowledged that without the modern missions movement, his parents might never have become Christians, nor might he. Yet, drawing on the work of missiologist Michael Stroope, he began his theological argument with what he anticipated would be a “very controversial working theological assumption”: that Christians might benefit from moving beyond the modern language of “mission.” Among the propositions he offered were these: “Mission is not an attribute of God” and “God is not mission, and neither is the church.”8
Wen was not disputing the biblical language of being sent. He was questioning whether mission should serve as the defining category for the church. He turned instead to calling and election, which, he argued, made room for different gifts and different forms of Christian life within the one body. When a questioner later asked why he would not simply reclaim the language of mission, Wen replied that it could flatten the varied callings of churches into a single task.
Listening to Wen, I began to wonder whether the in-between condition I had kept encountering all year was something diaspora churches were meant to graduate from, or a place where theology was already taking shape.
Wen’s account of contextual theology deepened that question. He suggested that it emerges organically as Christians live their faith, rather than being manufactured to satisfy an expectation that each community should produce a distinctive theology.
His argument took me back to Nation’s paper. For the house church writers she studied, union with Christ sustained the church’s mission and public witness; Wen questioned whether mission should govern our language for the church at all. Both located the church’s life in Christ, but they did not ask the same question of mission. What did Wen’s language of calling and election bring into view, and what might be lost if mission ceased to be our governing category? Their contexts made the questions urgent, but did not settle them.
After three days, “Chinese Ecclesiology in the Making” felt less like a title than an accurate description of where the conversation stood.
In his closing remarks, Xu named areas needing fuller attention: the ordination and leadership of women in Chinese churches, and Orthodox Christianity and theology in Chinese contexts. He described these gaps as invitations to extend the conversation.
For three days, I had kept choosing one room and missing several others. That was an inconvenience of parallel sessions, but also a reminder of how partial my own account of the conference would be.
One More Sunday
The Sunday after the conference, I went to Cambridge Chinese Christian Church.
That morning happened to be a Mid-Autumn evangelistic service. Dr. Joy Cheng had been invited to speak, and the title projected above the pulpit was simply “The Story of Home.”
It would have been easy for “home” to mean what it so often means in migrant churches: the comfort of finding people like ourselves in a foreign place. In their research in Germany, Tianji Ma and Szu-Chin Chen described churches that functioned as extended families. People could speak their own language, eat familiar food, and share the frustrations and hopes of migrant life.
Yet in the particular network of evangelical Chinese migrant churches they studied, that shelter could also become an ethnically enclosed world.9 I carried that question about home with me into the service.
Cheng began by welcoming newcomers, even though this was her first visit to the congregation. She could call this place home, she said, because churches everywhere belong to the same family of God.
She then invited the congregation to complete familiar lines of Chinese poetry associated with the Mid-Autumn Festival.
“床前明月光” (“Moonlight before my bed…”), she began.
“疑是地上霜” (“Could it be frost upon the ground?”), the congregation answered.
Other familiar lines about the moon, distance, and longing for loved ones drew equally ready responses.
For a moment, it was easy to understand the dream of finding something of home among one’s own, even far from home. Yet I wondered about the reverse: might someone still feel like a stranger among people who shared their language and cultural memories, longing for a belonging that familiarity alone could not provide?
Cheng used those shared cultural memories to introduce three words that would shape her sermon: culture, context, and Christ.
Speaking about culture, she showed photographs of the twisted aspen trees of Saskatchewan, Canada. Yi fang shuitu yang yi fang ren (一方水土養一方人): the water and soil of a place shape the people who live there.
But she did not stop with culture.
Culture forms us, she said, but it belongs within a larger context. Cheng moved from humanity’s lost home to the God who seeks those who have wandered away, and finally to Christ. Through him, we are no longer strangers and aliens but members of God’s household.
Thinking back to Cheng’s opening words about home, I was struck by the distinction. Shared language and cultural familiarity could help people find their way into a congregation. But they could not determine the boundaries of God’s household.
When the service ended, I walked back out beneath the old lettering over the entrance: CASTLE END MISSION AND WORKING-MEN’S INSTITUTE 1884.10 Inside, the congregation called itself Cambridge Chinese Christian Church.
I still say “the Chinese church.” The phrase names histories worth hearing. But as an editor, I want to ask whose experience I am describing, whose I may be leaving out, and what theological claims I am asking the label to bear.
It can tell me something important about a congregation. It cannot, on its own, tell me what makes that congregation a church.
- Yinxuan Huang, Chinese Christianity in Britain: A Booklet of Ten Vignettes (Swindon: British and Foreign Bible Society, 2023), 13, accessed October 11, 2026 https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/content/news/china_report_2023/English_report_v2.pdf. Huang reports that 38 percent of recent Hong Kong arrivals favored non-Chinese churches; the approximately 62 percent figure represents the complementary share. The subgroup denominator is not separately reported.
- Huang, Chinese Christianity in Britain, 6.
- Anglican Communion News Service, “Celebrating the 80th Anniversary of the First Anglican Woman Priest,” January 11, 2024, accessed October 12, 2026, https://www.anglicannews.org/news/2024/01/celebrating-the-80th-anniversary-of-the-first-anglican-woman-priest.aspx; Church of England, “Celebrations Mark 25 Years of Women’s Ordination to the Priesthood,” March 11, 2019, accessed October 12, 2026, https://www.churchofengland.org/media/press-releases/celebrations-mark-25-years-womens-ordination-priesthood.
- Brian Stanley, “Ecclesiology in World Christianity” (presentation slides, Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology inaugural conference, Cambridge, September 22, 2026), slide 17, citing Bengt Sundkler, Church of South India: The Movement Towards Union 1900–1947, new ed. (London: Lutterworth Press, 1965), 100.
- Pui Him Ip, “Ecclesiastical History of the Chinese Church? Multiple Trajectories and the Question of Catholicity” (conference abstract, Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology inaugural conference, Cambridge, September 23, 2026).
- Duanran Feng, “Parochial Practice and the Global Co-production of Bao Guanglin’s Christian Socialist Ecclesiology, c. 1915–28” (conference abstract, Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology inaugural conference, Cambridge, September 23, 2026).
- Jenny Yan Yang, “Wang Mingdao and the Limits of Sociological Ecclesiology: A Creedal Reappraisal” (conference paper, Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology inaugural conference, Cambridge, September 24, 2026).
- Clement Wen, “Inhabiting the ‘Space Between’ and ‘Space Amidst’ in View of the Coming Basileia of God: Constructing a Theologically Eclectic Ecclesiological Future for the Chinese Diaspora in North America” (plenary address, Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology inaugural conference, Cambridge, September 24, 2026).
- Tianji Ma and Szu-Chin Chen, “An Exploratory Study of Chinese Migrant Churches in Germany with a Focus on Their Multidimensional Functional Purpose,” Missiology: An International Review 53, no. 3 (2025): 236–37, accessed October 11, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1177/00918296241305400.
- Originally opened in 1884, the Castle End Mission and Working Men’s Institute grew out of educational and religious classes begun by Frances Whibley for working-class men in Cambridge in 1879. The building also has an indirect connection to Christian missions in China. According to a 2018 account by Pastor Stanley Wong, Whibley influenced Samuel Lavington Hart, who later served as a missionary in China and founded the Anglo-Chinese College in Tianjin in 1902. See Historic England, “Castle End Mission and Working Mens Institute with Attached Iron Hall,” National Heritage List for England, accessed October 11, 2026, https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1495713; Stanley Wong, “Pastoral Sharing,” Cambridge Chinese Christian Church Monthly Bulletin (May 2018), 3–5, accessed October 11, 2026, https://www.cccc.org.uk/resources/monthly/201805S.pdf.
The original mission ceased operating in 2014. The Cambridge Chinese Christian Church acquired the building in 2018 and continues to use it as a place of worship. On April 8, 2026, the building was designated a Grade II listed building. See Historic England, “Castle End Mission and Working Mens Institute with Attached Iron Hall”; Cambridge Chinese Christian Church, “Cambridge Chinese Christian Church,” accessed October 11, 2026, https://www.cccc.org.uk/.
