One Virus, Two Cities
If the global pandemic has laid bare our shared vulnerability, then it has also highlighted our interdependence as global citizens.
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 US director of China Ministries International, and from 1985 to 1986 as the English publications editor for the Chinese Church Research Center in Hong Kong.
Dr. Fulton holds MA and PhD degrees in political science from the University of Southern California and a BA in radio-TV-film from Messiah College.
An avid China watcher, Dr. Fulton has written and taught extensively on the church in China and on Chinese social and political phenomena. He is the author of China's Urban Christians: A Light That Cannot Be Hidden and co-authored China's Next Generation: New China, New Church, New World with Luis Bush.
Dr. Fulton and his wife, Jasmine, previously lived in Hong Kong from 2006 to 2017. They currently reside in northern California.
He is currently facilitating a network of member care professionals serving missionaries sent out from China. He also consults with other organizations on the impact of China's religious policy.
If the global pandemic has laid bare our shared vulnerability, then it has also highlighted our interdependence as global citizens.
Getting beyond how many Christians there are in China to how is this remarkable growth of the church taking place.
Those partnering with China’s emerging missions movement would do well to consider what they may be passing on without even realizing it. Careful filtering of concepts and methods—but more importantly, values and unspoken assumptions—could help guard China’s future mission leaders from replicating painful mistakes.
Fulton analyzes the “Wenzhou Model” of missions for how it might be used in twenty-first century missions. He points out some of its strengths, liabilities, and aspects that can be replicated in today’s world and others that cannot.
A book providing a valuable inside view of an era of unprecedented openness for Christianity in China and a sober historical assessment of why that era could not last.
The COVID-19 epidemic has not only driven home the stark realities of living in a flat world where what happens in one country is able to radically alter life around the globe; it has also made possible a type of cross-cultural sharing among Christians that may not have happened otherwise were it not for the shared experience of a global pandemic.
Those who stay in China for any length of time often discover that their most meaningful work is quite different from what they had originally envisioned doing when they first arrived.
Challenged with the question, “What if your church suddenly had to go virtual?” the group prayed fervently for the believers in Wuhan and other Chinese cities. Little did they know that, within a matter of days, this question would no longer be hypothetical.
While Guilin is often considered a “must see” tourist site, Guangxi province itself remains, for many, a relatively unknown corner of China. This book helps fill the gap.
Except they were. And they still are.
Looking at the development of the church over the past four decades we can identify two significant dynamics. One is the level of political persecution upon the church. The other is the church’s own internal capacity.
"In the past three decades . . . [n]ew and healthy models of overseas Chinese churches and ministries have emerged. Yet the same questions remain. For every generation that has worked through the generational and cultural issues, another has just arrived, or is on the way." This book provides a means to revisit the these reoccurring questions in a new light.