Chinese evangelists on the move: space,authority,and ethnicisation among overseas Chinese Protestant Christians

Abstract

Since the 2000s, Chinese Christians in Europe have witnessed an increasing flow of resources and evangelists from Chinese Christian Communities in North America. Based on information gathered in the UK, Germany and China, this article aims to reveal the mechanisms and dynamics behind the space-making and network-building in overseas Chinese Protestant Christians’ missionisation processes. The authors suggest that the increased flow takes place in an imagined faith community reinforced by the discourse on the ‘suffering’ of the Chinese nation, that it is a result of a far-reaching geographical imaginary with ethnic Chinese evangelists as God’s new chosen people, and that it is linked to the dynamics in the specific locations of North America, Europe and China. These mechanisms and dynamics are entangled with a ‘network of moralities’ arising from the discourses on ‘authenticity’ and ‘suffering’. The result is a distinct ethno-religious space, which, however, does not conflict with the cosmopolitan aims of the grand missionary enterprise.

Introduction

Even though the church buildings in contemporary Europe are still grand, the sizes of the congregations are shrinking rapidly … Secularized clergy, vague theological education and rigid church organization have worn down their zeal for mission. This has made the Great Commission an impossible task for Europeans … Gospel-wise, Europe is the darkest place. ¹

The above excerpt is taken from the Revd Tao En-kwang’s Doctor of Ministry thesis, The strategy and vision of reaching Chinese students in Europe (2009), for the Logos Evangelical Seminary, a Chinese seminary in the USA. The Revd Tao was sent by a Taiwanese mission to evangelise ethnic Chinese in Frankfurt in 1991. During the succeeding years, the Revd Tao witnessed the rapid growth of the population of students and scholars from mainland China, who landed in Europe to pursue advanced education. This experience made him decide to move to London with his family in 1997 and focus on evangelising mainland Chinese students and scholars in the UK, which hosted the largest proportion of this group. By 1998, the Revd Tao had started a ‘London Chinese Scholar Christian Fellowship’. ² After working with the fellowship for some years, he began to feel the inadequacy of both his knowledge and the resources available to cope with the unexpectedly large population, which increased sixfold during the first decade of the 2000s, largely as a result of the tightening of the USA’s visa policies after 9/11 (Mathou and Yan, 2012). In 2006, the Revd Tao decided to join the Logos Evangelical Seminary in the USA to pursue two main goals: first, to equip himself with ministry knowledge, and second, on behalf of Chinese Christian communities in Europe, to give a ‘new Macedonian call’ to their counterparts in North America, inviting workers ‘to reap the Lord’s harvest in Europe’ (Tao, 2009: 161).

The Revd Tao’s aims were shared by many Chinese Christians ³ in Western Europe, particularly in the UK, France ⁴ and Germany, where the majority of mainland Chinese students and scholars reside. For example, in 2010, the new General Director of the UK-based Chinese Overseas Christian Mission (COCM), the biggest Chinese Christian mission in Europe, which has been implanting churches through campus ministries, reiterated that mainland Chinese students and scholars were the highest of their missionary priorities. ⁵ In fact, in both the UK and Germany, the most successful ministry has been the targeting of mainland Chinese students and scholars. ⁶ The ‘new Macedonian call’ sent out by the Revd Tao was heeded by Chinese Christians in North America. The COCM recruited its new General Director and other senior staff – along with the funds to support them – from the USA. At the same time, ethnic Chinese missionaries were sent from the USA and Canada to evangelise Chinese students in Europe, and Chinese-American evangelists undertook short-mission trips to Europe to evangelise students/scholars from mainland China. These evangelists were either students-turned-professionals or professionals-turned-missionaries who originally migrated to North America or Europe from Taiwan/Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Then, the evangelised students and scholars helped the evangelists to expand their missionary work to mainland China.

Missionisation is the primary means by which religion traverses geographical and cultural space; therefore, it is an important aspect of the globalisation of religion (Csordas, 2007). The aforementioned missionary practices are a manifestation of Chinese missionisation. In this case, however, a salient feature of the missionisation is that its development has primarily followed an ethnic line. In other words, a transnational ethno-religious space covering mainland China, North America, Europe, and East/Southeast Asia has been produced. Contrary to the conventional sociological argument that religious belonging contributes to social integration into the ‘host’ society, observations made among Chinese Christian communities in Western Europe show that the primary aim of their religious adherence is never assimilation or socio-cultural integration. ⁷

The establishment of these ethno-religious networks has been widely criticised, both within and beyond the community. The criticism within the community lies mainly in the concern that the ethnic focus might hamper the world mission; whereas outside the community, criticism has grown mainly out of the fear that the construction of this ethno-religious space, in conjunction with the recent economic growth and the revived political power of mainland China, might have political implications (Brandner, 2009).

In the face of these criticisms, one cannot help posing the following questions. First, why did Chinese evangelicalism take the path of creating a distinct ethnic network rather than integrating converts into similar global evangelical structures? Second, how did this transnational ethno-religious space come into being? In other words, how did Chinese Christianity create its own religioscapes? Based on Elizabeth McAlister’s definition (1998: 156), we use the term ‘religioscapes’ to refer to ‘the subjective religious maps (and attendant theologies) of diasporic communities who are also in global flow and flux’. Finally, could the construction of this ethno-religious space affect world politics, as some critics fear?

The current research intends to answer these questions by uncovering the mechanisms and dynamics behind this ethnicised transnational social space. The study suggests first that the flow from North America to Europe (and through Europe to China) takes place in an ‘imagined faith community’ produced by the borrowing of elements from the idea of a ‘Chinese nation’, which is a continuous political creation. Second, the making of the ethno-religious space is a result of a far-reaching and self-important geographical image, with ethnic Chinese evangelists as the new chosen people of God, who are meant to fulfil the ultimate missionary enterprise of the ‘Great Commission’. Evangelising mainland Chinese students and scholars who have migrated to Europe is considered a means of accomplishing this task. Meanwhile, the missionary geographies used by Chinese evangelists are not only physical but also moral and discursive (Van Dijk, 1997). The physical elements are entangled with the moralities deriving from discourses on ‘authenticity’ and ‘suffering’. In this sense, the present research is a study of the ways in which religion – Christianity in this case – constitutes a physical and imagined territoriality that produces visible and invisible spaces and how these feed back into transnational religious flows.

The article employs a ‘multi-sited fieldwork’ approach (Marcus, 1995), drawing upon in-depth interviews and participant observation among Chinese Christian ministers and converts in the UK, Germany and Shanghai. Between 2009 and 2013, we conducted research in Chinese Christian churches in southeast England (March–July 2009; October 2009–January 2010), central Germany (January–September 2010) and Shanghai (February 2012–January 2013). We interviewed a total of 37 Chinese ministers and 44 Chinese converts in these three countries. The information gathered was complemented by church publications, such as distributed prayer letters; articles in Chinese Christian magazines and newspapers, ⁸ and newsletters issued by the main Chinese Christian agencies in Europe ⁹ ; and information we collected from Christian camps and workshops organised by Chinese Christian communities in both Europe and Shanghai.

We first outline the existing theories and salient literature and then proceed to sketch out the formation of the ethno-religious space and the mechanism and dynamics behind this development. The transforming interactions between the changing political and economic histories of North America, Europe and China on the one hand, and the missionary agenda of ethnic Chinese worldwide on the other are the focus of this section. We then turn our attention to the moralities that guide missionary practice in overseas Chinese Christian communities. To conclude, we show that this Chinese case addresses the complex dynamics between ethnicisation and transnationalism, as well as contributing to the scholarship on Chinese transnationalism and religion, and raise a number of subjects for further discussion.

Globalisation, locality and (Chinese) religion: a brief review

Conventional sociological argument tends to describe ethnic religion among immigrant communities as a tool either for social integration into the ‘host’ society or for identity construction (Chong, 1998). These explanations, however, seem implausible in the ethno-religious space-making context of ethnic Chinese Christian communities mentioned above, in which the spread of religion itself is the goal. In the case of Chinese evangelists on the move, Christianity produces visible and invisible spaces, and the production of these spaces is closely linked to and, to some extent, is the result of ethnic consciousness at both local and transnational levels, and not the other way around (i.e. ethnic boundaries are deliberately reinforced by religion). This research therefore draws on studies of the ‘globalisation and localisation of religion’.

In Modalities of transnational transcendence, Csordas (2007) introduces four cultural modalities in which the globalisation of religion takes place. According to the first modality, the local religious imagination takes up the issue of the encroachment of the global economy and technology. The other relevant modality is the fourth one, which features the so-called world religions and their trajectories within the cultural space of globalisation. The cases we present in this paper involve both modalities. Based on their work with the Christian African diaspora in Europe, Knibbe and van der Meulen (2009: 127) emphasise the importance of localities; they then pose the question: ‘How [are] particular locales produced by religious networks and institutions [crucial] in establishing transnational linkages?’ Our research intends to combine the two approaches, with a dual aim. On the one hand, we aim to identify the extent to which the religious imagination and missionary practices of Chinese evangelists have been shaped by transforming global economy and technology – in this case, the changing status of ethnic Chinese societies with regard to Western countries, the migration of ethnic Chinese to the West, and the development of internet technology. On the other hand, we want to determine how the trajectories of Protestant Christianity are deeply embedded in the specific political and economic histories of North America, Europe and China.

The other field this research impinges on is ‘Chinese transnationalism’ and its application to religious studies, especially with regard to transnational Chinese Protestant Christians. In a widely disseminated book, Ong and Nonini (1997: 4) suggest a new rubric according to which Chinese transnationalism is ‘a culturally distinctive domain within the strategies of accumulation of the new capitalism – both Chinese and non-Chinese – emerging over the last two decades in the Asia-Pacific region’. Ong and Nonini argue that the current activities of transnational overseas Chinese must be viewed as a Chinese strategy of accumulation within contemporary globalised capitalism, and that Chinese transnationalism represents ‘an alternative modernity’ to the modernist vision of the nation.

A pioneering work on Chinese Christian transnationalism is Fenggang Yang’s (2002) study of the global ties of a Chinese church in the USA that testifies to strong institutional and individual ethno-religious links between America and Hong Kong/Southeast Asia (Yang, 2002). This research, however, does not explicitly state whether the transnational Chinese Christian networks identify with China and how the links affect the identities of transnational ethnic Chinese Christians. Other works follow the path set out by Ong and Nonini (1997) and tackle the issues of religion (particularly Christianity), transnationalism and identity. In Nyíri’s (2003) study of the transnational religious networks of Chinese immigrants – mostly business people going to Hungary – he suggests that Christianity functions as an elite religion for successful Chinese transnationals, as it suits their pursuit of the (American) concept of modernity, as represented by Chinese evangelists from the USA. In a study of Chinese migrant workers in Israel who converted to Protestantism, Kalir (2009) suggests that these workers are trapped between the two Chinese modernist imaginaries depicted by Ong (1997), namely, the Chinese nation-state modernist imaginary that promotes social essentialism and fixity, and the transnational variant of Chinese modernity constructed by affluent transnational Chinese elites that celebrates fluidity and change. The modernist imaginary promoted by the evangelical church combines the best of both imaginaries, according to Chinese migrants in Israel. However, based on a study of a Fuzhounese religious community in New York, Guest (2003) asserts that Ong and Nonini’s focus on the business elite masks the diversity within the social experience of transnationalism, because they fail to include Chinese transnationals from a lower-class background, such as Fuzhounese immigrants, who act as transnational agents through religious communities and village and regional associations.

In the three works mentioned above, all of which use converts as their research subjects, religious Chinese transnationals are presented as utilitarian, and Christianity is shown to be a means by which these transnationals create a transnational identity that appeals to them. In the present article, we focus on the transnational subjectivities of travelling Chinese evangelists and examine the relationship between Chinese transnationals and Christianity from a different perspective, that is, from Christianity itself.

The construction of ethno-religious space among ethnic Chinese Christians: Present, past and future

This section reveals how Chinese Christians have produced an imagined faith community and constructed an ethno-religious space within it. The ethno-religious space is constructed in response to the socio-economic and political contexts of ethnic Chinese societies in the present and the past, and in anticipation of future prospects.

‘Gospel into China, Gospel out of China’: The production of an imagined faith community and an imagined proselytising geography

At numerous Chinese Christian gatherings, we have heard the following sentimental expression: ‘Wherever the sun goes, there are Chinese sweating; wherever the moon goes, there are Chinese weeping’. This expression is often used by Chinese evangelists, who call upon other believers to reach out to the dispersed ethnic Chinese population. It does not demonstrate the ‘grand’ perspective of the transnational Chinese elites mentioned by Ong and Nonini (1997) and Nyíri (2003); rather, it refers to the suffering (sweating/weeping) of hard-working ethnic Chinese both in China and beyond. Chinese evangelists also mention past ‘suffering’, referring to the 150 years of humiliation and technological backwardness experienced by China. The rhetoric of ‘suffering’ constitutes an important part of the moral view of Chinese Christians, and produces an ‘imagined faith community’, to which all ethnic Chinese belong.

Based on Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept of ‘imagined community’, which is used to explain the genesis of nationalism in Europe, the modified term of ‘imagined faith community’ used here refers to a social imaginary that represents a religious recreation of the imagined boundary of the ‘Chinese nation’, which integrates people of different origins into one national teleology based on genetic heritage. Using the rhetoric of ‘suffering’, Chinese evangelists underline the notion of the ‘Chinese nation’, which is a product of a long-term interaction between the shifting societies in which overseas ethnic Chinese reside and the changing authorities in China since the 19th century (Christiansen, 2003), making it a basis for the construction of a faith community to which all ethnic Chinese belong. Unlike the ‘imagined community’ of a ‘Chinese nation’, which focuses on the political implications of ethnic solidarity, the notion of ‘imagined faith community’ emphasises the accountability of this ‘Chinese nation’ in fulfilling the ‘Great Commission’ – that is, its responsibilities in a heavenly kingdom, not a worldly world. Overseas Chinese Christian organisations, such as the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism ¹⁰ , are the products of this ‘imagined faith community’.

According to the Sixth Conference of the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism, held in Macau in 2006, the vision for Chinese Christian churches in the 21st century is ‘Gospel into China, Gospel out of China’ (see Tao, 2009: 24). This vision is linked to a prevalent ideology among Chinese Christian communities worldwide that ethnic Chinese have become the new chosen people of God to ensure salvation in the 21st century. The assertion that ‘the 21st century belongs to Chinese Christians who devote themselves to the World Mission’ is often heard in Chinese Christian camps and in Chinese preachers’ sermons, and seen in church publications. This ideology is more than just a marginal idea in Chinese evangelicalism, as evidenced by the existence of a ‘worldwide sentiment that the responsibility for or instrument of mission has moved over to the Chinese’ (Nyíri, 2003). ¹¹

In view of this imagined proselytising territory, the Gospel must first be sent to China and then be spread beyond China by mainland Chinese. However, the question remains as to who in mainland China must accomplish this task. Amid the tidal wave of Chinese students and scholars to the West, Chinese evangelists have found the new bearers of the gospel torch. Why and how mainland Chinese students and scholars are selected as ‘gospel agents’ is closely linked to the aforementioned salvation-centric historical self-understanding. According to the Chinese evangelists, a part of ‘God’s master plan’ is for the gospel to be taken back to mainland China through these new bearers of the gospel torch, and some have interpreted the recent history of overseas Chinese Christian communities as a part of this ‘plan’, in which each step of the communities’ growth has been designed by God. Therefore, the ministry that targets these students and scholars is an important link in the chain of the missionary enterprise.

The historiography of the Chinese Campus Ministry: An imagined interpretation

In a series of online lectures given in 2004 entitled ‘The church history of China’, Edwin Su, the founder of Overseas Campus Ministry (OCM), one of the most important and influential overseas Chinese Christian missions of all time, devoted an entire lecture to ‘contemporary overseas Chinese Christian churches’, identifying seven phases in their growth:

1. 1945–1950 in mainland China. During the Sino-Japanese war, the proselytisation of the Chinese Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship (CIVCF) resulted in a large number of conversions among college students. This revival, however, was interrupted by the Communist Party’s assumption of power. As a result, many people who were involved in the movement migrated to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia.

2. 1950s in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. The converts who moved from China and the expelled Western missionaries resumed campus evangelisation in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, which resulted in a Christianity revival in these regions as well as the establishment of the Fellowship of Evangelical Students (Hong Kong) in 1957 and the Campus Evangelical Fellowship in Taiwan in 1962.

3. 1960s–1970s, in North America. Riding a wave of students from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia to North America to pursue advanced education, the Chinese Christians initiated Chinese Christian Bible study fellowships on campuses, which were transformed into churches by the mid-1970s, eventually becoming the biggest source of Chinese Christian churches in North America.

4. 1980s, in North America. North America witnessed a wave of students and scholars migrating from mainland China for advanced education after 1978. These students became the main evangelisation targets of the Chinese Christian churches established in the third phase.

5. Post-1989, in North America. The Tiananmen Square events of 4 June 1989 led to a revival of Christianity among mainland Chinese students and scholars in North America.

6. Post-2001, in mainland China. The economic ‘rise’ of China brought increasing numbers of Chinese students and scholars back to mainland China. These returnees acted as ‘gospel agents’, bringing Jesus to mainland China.

7. Post-2007, in China. The year 2007 marked the 200th anniversary of the arrival of Robert Morrison (of the London Mission) in mainland China and the start of Chinese Christians’ mission to evangelise the world.

In the historical interpretation stated above, ‘God’s master plan’ has been fulfilled on two levels: first, temporally, in that the early phases have progressively prepared Chinese Christians for the ultimate great missionary enterprise of Chinese Christians; and second, geographically, in that the gospel has been spread by Chinese evangelists in a circle, beginning in mainland China, moving to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, then on to North America, and finally back to mainland China.

Su’s lectures have become highly popular and influential among overseas Chinese Christians. A similar ‘history’ has been told repeatedly by prominent evangelists at regional and trans-regional camp meetings to encourage believers to respond to the missionary enterprise, and the post-9/11 changes to the migration patterns of Chinese students and scholars from North America to Europe place Chinese evangelists in Europe in an important position to fulfil the enterprise. It was in this context that the ‘new Macedonian calls’ to Europe were made and a revised historiography of the Chinese Campus Ministry, in which Europe was described as an important ‘Gospel transit’ to mainland China, came into being.

The centrality of Europe: The revised historiography of the Chinese Campus Ministry

In the revised historiography of the Chinese Campus Ministry, Europe becomes the most important ‘gospel transit’ link back to mainland China. But why were so many mainland Chinese students and scholars in Europe transformed into important ‘gospel agents’, unlike their counterparts in North America? The Revd Tao lists several possible reasons.

The first reason is the increased migration of Chinese students and scholars to Europe, especially in the UK, Germany and France, after 9/11. The number of Chinese students studying in Europe increased sixfold during the first decade of the 2000s, 40% of them settling in the UK, 23% in France and 20% in Germany (Mathou and Yan, 2012), but, unlike Chinese students studying in North America, many of them would eventually have to leave because of the rigid immigration policies of European countries. ¹² Moreover, Chinese students (and scholars) who study in Europe are often from middle-class or affluent backgrounds, with families that can afford the education costs. They belong to a part of Chinese society that ordinary evangelists have difficulty reaching, and they often spread the gospel to their families after converting to Christianity in Europe. In addition, they themselves will be politically or socio-economically influential after returning to China. The Revd Tao therefore concluded that the mainland Chinese students and scholars ministry in Europe would result in an important extension of the ‘gospel into China’ (2009: 24).

The ‘new Macedonian call’ that the Revd Tao and others initiated has indeed worked. Europe, which has accommodated the majority of mainland Chinese students and scholars, especially in the UK, France and Germany, became the priority on the mission agenda of Chinese evangelists. Major US-based Chinese Christian organisations, including the aforementioned OCM, Great Commission Centre International, and Ambassadors for Christ, along with New York-based Christian Herald Crusade, began basing their offices or correspondents in Europe. In 2004, the OCM sent staff to work full time in Europe. These staff established the European Campus Ministry (ECM) in the USA in 2006 and its European branch, ECM-Germany, in Germany in 2009. The official magazine of the OCM, Overseas Campus – a publication targeting overseas Chinese students and scholars, and possibly the most influential Christian publication for Chinese Christians – published its first European edition in 2006, while Christian Herald Crusade, a US-based Chinese mission aiming to reach out to Chinese from more diverse backgrounds, had been publishing Herald Europe since 1997.

Irregular or regular individual Chinese itinerant speakers and short-term mission teams from North America also frequently visit Europe. Between late October 2009 and early January 2010, we came across four individuals and three couples from different parts of the USA who were on short-mission trips in the UK. The annual Christmas and New Year camps held by the COCM, for Chinese students and students-turned-professionals, together with their families, are predominantly led by short-term mission teams from the USA. Apart from paying for their flights, the team members each have to pay the COCM £300 to cover their food, hotel and transportation expenses during the mission period. A small Chinese Christian fellowship consisting of about 40 people in central Germany could see two to three individual Chinese evangelists and two to three groups of short-mission teams from North America within a single year, in addition to their assigned long-term Chinese-Canadian pastor couple.

As has been stated, the flow of people and resources from North America to Europe intensified after the start of the new millennium. Before that, the Chinese Christian communities in Western Europe had more connections with Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asian Chinese societies, which sent missionaries to evangelise Chinese in diasporic communities in Europe. The influx of mainland Chinese students and scholars after 9/11 changed this situation. From the point of view of Chinese evangelists in North America, Western Europe provided a ‘gospel transit’ to help them reach out to mainland China. Hence, the revised historiography of the Chinese Campus Ministry took a detour via Western Europe. Alongside this change, a ‘returnee ministry’ has emerged, ensuring that converted Chinese students and scholars hold on to their Christian faith after returning to China. This ministry will be the focus of the next section.

Taking Jesus back to China: The returnee ministry

To ensure that converted returnees bring their faith back to China, the returnee ministry conducted by the overseas Chinese Christian communities focuses on three things: training in the faith before the converted Chinese students and scholars return; finding a reliable faith environment for the returnees in the places where they are about to settle in China (a process that requires plenty of network-building); and finally encouraging returned Christians to spread the gospel in China.

Training constitutes an important part of the returnee ministry. Annual workshops for (would-be) returnees are held as part of Christian camp meetings organised by Chinese Christian communities in Europe. A Returnee Handbook was compiled by the OCM in 2009 and a revised and enlarged edition was made available in 2012, including the testimonies of ten returnees to help readers to adapt their own spiritual lives upon returning to China.

Two other aspects of the returnee ministry are illustrated by our own fieldwork on Christian returnees in Shanghai. After arriving in Shanghai in early 2012, we contacted John ¹³ , a Chinese Christian we had known in the UK. He introduced us to Matthew, who had turned his apartment into a house church. After obtaining his Master’s Degree in the UK in 2007, Matthew and his wife, a student from China and also converted to Christianity during her study period in England, moved back to China and settled in Shanghai. Upon arrival, they were introduced by church members back in England to a house church started by a couple who had returned from Germany in 2003. Being used to the style of Chinese churches in Europe, Matthew and his wife felt quite at home in the church. When the numbers became too large for the meeting place, they started three more home-meeting groups: one nearby, the second in an apartment in the city centre shared by two young women, one of whom was also a Christian returnee from the UK, and the third hosted by Matthew and his wife, who had chosen their apartment with the aim of accommodating a house church congregation. Among those attending these four churches, the majority are returnees, having studied in the UK, Germany, France the USA and Canada. Most of the others – from all walks of life – are migrants to Shanghai from different parts of China.

These returnees’ churches are invariably established and run by foreign-educated returnees. It is difficult to ascertain how many of these churches exist in China, but within Chinese Christian communities, both at home and abroad, it is recognised that returnees’ churches have become an important element among house churches in large Chinese cities. According to Peng (2012), about one-third of house churches and Christian fellowships in Chinese cities are led by foreign-educated returnees.

Returnees’ churches have also become an important ‘bridge’ between Christians in China and those in the West, particularly ethnic Chinese Christians in diaspora. In fact, in Matthew’s church and its ‘brother churches’, we often saw new returnees who had been introduced by an existing member with whom they used to go to the same church in a Western country. Chinese evangelists in the West have been working hard to create networks like these. In the UK and Germany, Chinese ministers share information on the whereabouts of the returned Christians they have worked with. Thus, every time someone from their own church returns to China, they will use the database of previous Christian returnees to try to find a reliable church with authentic Protestant teachings. They also regularly communicate with returnees via email, MSN, Skype or Yahoo group. Personal visits are another important way of maintaining faith among returned Christian. Of the Chinese ministers we interviewed in the UK and Germany, a large proportion pay regular visits to old church members who have resettled in China. During the visits, they find opportunities to attend the new church of the returnees in China to ensure that the Christian faith there is authentic.

A few overseas Chinese evangelists also manage to expand their missionary enterprise in China through these returnees. In one case, we heard that a group of US-based Chinese evangelists, after starting a series of faith courses that proved popular among Chinese Christians in the UK and Germany, followed returnees to Shanghai and then, through church members, expanded their mission to other parts of China.

Invisible space: The network of moralities within overseas Chinese Christian communities

So far, our discussion has focused on tangible locations (North America, Western Europe and China), their connections to one another, and the religious hierarchies and networks among them. Following Van Dijk (1997: 142), we suggest that the transnational expansion of Christianity among Chinese ‘creates a moral and physical geography whose domain is one of transnational cultural inter-penetration and flow’. We further argue that another element in this ‘geography’ is an invisible network of moralities, which inverts and contradicts the classifications of the visible geographies. We will elaborate on two aspects: first, on the complex relationship between Chinese Christian communities and European Christian communities; and second, on the morality of suffering among overseas Chinese Christian communities. Both aspects are related to the issue of the ‘authenticity’ of faith.

‘In the debt of gospel of the Westerners’

From the excerpt we quoted at the start of this article it is clear that a sentiment lamenting the decline of Christianity in Europe is pervasive among Chinese Christians and has contributed to a great extent to the production of the aforementioned ethno-religious space. Several Chinese student converts in both the UK and Germany mentioned in interview that they happened to join Western churches at the beginning, but then left them after making the discovery that ‘their church is like a social club for the elderly’. The contrasting age brackets (old Western churchgoer vs. young Chinese student) and financial or educational backgrounds (poor or little educated Western churchgoers and relatively wealthy or highly educated Chinese students) go hand in hand with doubt as to the authenticity of the Westerners’ faith. Juxtaposed with this sentiment is another, which suggests that ‘thanks to the Western missionaries who travelled to China two hundred years ago, we Chinese are in the debt of the gospel of the Westerners’. Hence, there is a sense of giving back, a feeling that ‘now it is our turn’.

But ‘now it is our turn’ has two meanings. On the one hand, it refers to the perception that now is the time for Chinese missionaries to evangelise their fellow Chinese. (Even though Western religious organisations are targeting Chinese students and scholars, their evangelising work towards the Chinese has proven less successful than the work done by ethnic Chinese evangelists: on different occasions, we heard Western church members jokingly complain that their sheep ‘had been stolen by Chinese churches or fellowships’.) On the other hand, however, it leads to the re-sacralisation of Western lands. This task is on the missionary agenda of overseas Chinese evangelists through a ‘second generation ministry’, i.e. evangelising the second generation of Chinese migrants in the West, which is one of the mission priorities identified by the COCM (Lu, 2010). Members of the second generation are viewed as the ‘bridge’ between Chinese and local Westerners because of their familiarity with both languages and cultures. In the UK, for example, every August since 2009, an annual Praise Him All Together summer camp has been organized by the COCM where approximately 200 young Chinese are brought together to explore their faith. In 2012, in response to the ‘new Macedonian call’ ¹⁴ , a Chinese-American moved from the US to join the COCM as a full-time member of staff working on the youth ministry.

The morality of suffering

The second aspect of the moral territory we would like to explore is the understanding of ‘suffering’ among Christians in different locations. There is a tendency among Chinese Christians to connect authenticity of faith with the suffering one has been through for the gospel’s sake. Material, physical or psychological suffering adds to the authenticity of one’s faith. Based on her research among Chinese Christians in Hungary and Romania, Nagy (2011: 81) has suggested that ‘it is all about life-conduct and witness’. In this sense, the tangible networks created by the flow of resources and personnel from North America to Western Europe and to China are undermined by an intangible factor: Europe and mainland China – but especially the latter – have been endowed with extra faith authenticity by their lack of religious resources and, in the case of China, freedom, whereas Chinese Christians from North America are often considered to be ‘declining in faith’. The mission fields in Europe are in a position to ‘reignite their faith’. A Taiwanese-American missionary called upon Chinese Christians in North America to ‘care for Chinese students in the eastern parts of Germany’ after making mission trips there. She wrote:

In North America, many Chinese churches have their own beautiful buildings and ample resources, but the young Chinese immigrants are not yearning for the gospel … But in Europe, Chinese students admire the gospel even in hardship. ¹⁵

On several occasions, we heard short-term mission teams to Europe from North America mention ‘spiritual returns’, which enabled them to ‘reflect upon our personal relationship with God, and make us serve God more fervently’. They thought that these returns outweighed the money and time they contributed. The discourse may sound familiar, as it has the same tone as statements on the decline of Christianity in the West – that is, material prosperity causes faith to decline. According to this logic, Christians in mainland China have the best opportunity to maintain the authenticity of their faith and, therefore, the greatest authority.

In this context, Chinese-American evangelists have to ‘earn’ their ‘faith qualification’ through self-sacrifice when evangelising in Europe and China. What they most often mention, apart from their actual teaching, are the contrasting identities they have had to maintain: a highly educated, successful professional serving as a university professor or senior executive in North America, and a missionary relying on raised funds after giving up or retiring from that position. Ong (1997) and Guest (2003) present successful transnational Chinese elites and transnationals from the lower class, respectively. In terms of their transnational subjectivities, these travelling Chinese-American evangelists are a complex mixture of the two, which puts them in a singular position in relation to the modernist project of the Chinese state. This phenomenon will be elaborated in the conclusion.

Discussion and conclusion: Chinese ethnocentrism or cosmopolitanism in disguise?

Thus far, we have examined the mechanism and dynamics of the production of an ethno-religious space among ethnic Chinese evangelists moving between North America, Europe and China. As mentioned previously, the ethnic network-building has been widely criticised both within and beyond the community. Members of the community fear that the ethnic approach might jeopardise the world mission, whereas outside the community, there is concern that the conviction among Chinese Christians that they are God’s new chosen people is linked to the recent economic growth and the revived political power of China as well as to its westward political outreach, which might have negative political implications. In a recent article featuring a critical analysis of this conviction, Brandner (2009) shows his concern about the ethnocentrism that seems to have captured the minds of many Chinese Christian leaders. He compares this equation of ministry to a position of power with American Christianity, which has been ‘hijacked’ by politicians and merchants and used to pursue worldly goals.

However, the current research views this ethnic network-building and the optimism behind it from a different perspective, that is, from Christianity itself. By claiming that all Chinese, rich or poor, need God – as encapsulated in the aforementioned expression, ‘Wherever the sun goes, there are Chinese sweating; wherever the moon goes, there are Chinese weeping’ – ethnic Chinese evangelists manage to neutralise the class differentiation among Chinese transnationals proposed by Guest (2003), and ‘cosmopolitanise’ them as potential proselytising targets. Given that ethnic Chinese travel wherever the sun and moon go, it follows that the potential mission fields for a Chinese evangelist to proselytise ethnic Chinese are unlimited; and targeting ethnic Chinese is just a temporary strategy within the long-term aim of a world mission. To non-Chinese, proselytism does not conflict with the ethnic nature of the Chinese evangelical network. The activities of Chinese missionaries are complex products of the construction of national or ethnic imagination and, at the same time, aspects of cosmopolitanism. The world has been mapped by these Chinese evangelists in terms of their Christian order, rather than in terms of worldly socio-economic and political orders. Therefore, their actions can hardly be condemned as evidence of Chinese ethnocentrism. Their manifesto is founded on their complex transnational subjectivities and the missionary enterprise they are pursuing.

Ong (1997) opposes the modernity discourse of the Chinese state to the capitalist narrative of modernity constructed by affluent transnational Chinese elites. However, the latter – with the potential of being an opposing force – is also embraced by the state. This is because with their fluid capital, the elites can help the Chinese state to fulfil its dream of modernisation and strengthen its global position in relation to other countries, despite the challenge of achieving a balance between political fixity and capitalism (Ong, 1997). These travelling Chinese-American evangelists possess the very same attributes – fluidity and flexibility – as the above-mentioned affluent transnational Chinese capitalists, partly because of their transnational lifestyles and their previous identities as successful professionals or entrepreneurs in the West. They are thus to some extent representatives of Western modernity (Nyíri, 2003) to ordinary Chinese, either in diaspora or in China. However, their missionary enterprise will do nothing to help the Chinese state to pursue its modernity project. On the contrary, their cosmopolitan and (possibly) class-free Christian ideal might pose even bigger challenges to the modernity project of the Chinese state, which emphasises biopolitics and boundary fixity (Ong, 1997). In this sense, a situation in which Chinese evangelists could collaborate with the national project in the way the capitalist modernists have done is unlikely to arise.

Furthermore, the national imagination of these Chinese evangelists and the purpose to which it should be put are different from those of Chinese state. On the basis of elements from the imagined community of the ‘Chinese nation’, Chinese evangelists have constructed their ‘imagined faith community’ and planned their missionary enterprise. However, diverging from the proposal of the Chinese state to pool resources and pursue prosperity, they emphasise the responsibility of this ‘Chinese nation’ to undertake the ‘Great Commission’ in a heavenly, not a worldly, world. In this case, the development of religious enterprise has taken advantage of ethnic consciousness, and not the other way around, where religious elements are utilised to strengthen ethnic boundaries. Therefore, the worry that the actions and missionary agenda of Chinese evangelists will have political consequences might not be justified.

There is no doubt that it is important to raise the question as to how long this imagined missionary enterprise will last. Active transnational Chinese evangelists are mainly Taiwanese-Americans or Hong Kong-Americans who fled, or whose parents fled, from mainland China in 1949. Nostalgic feelings towards the land they left behind contribute to their zeal for Christianising China. Contrary to the transnational Chinese elites studied by Ong and Nonini (2007), these transnational Chinese evangelists still take as their ultimate analytical reference the Middle Kingdom (Zhong Guo, China). However, there remains the questions as to what will happen after their demise, given that their descendants who grow up in North America or Europe will certainly have different transnational subjectivities, and how this will affect the formation of new religioscapes among overseas Chinese Christians. Therefore, more attention should be paid to the second-generation ministry.