| In the era between the two world wars, Chinese Protestants had the opportunity to contribute greatly to, if not lead, the social and intellectual revolutions taking place in China. As individuals, they contributed greatly to the changes taking place in China as she tried both to modernize and to end her semi-colonial status. But as a group they were ineffective. The reasons inhibiting concrete constructive contributions on the part of this identifiable segment of Chinese society form the body of the dissertation.; A major problem was the status of the Chinese church as an institution. Until the late 1920s the mission field dominated the church structure and related institutions (schools, hospitals, orphanages). The Chinese had little control of policy or finance within the institutional structure. Since the missions controlled these enterprises, they perpetuated in China the denominational fissures found in the Western ecclesiastical community. The Chinese found this divided approach to a united Christian edifice to be meaningless in their cultural context. Another challenge was created by the intellectual turmoil which criticized all systems, philosophies and institutions to prove their utility in China's effort to modernize. Several anti-Christian campaigns were launched in this period to discourage Chinese association with an institution viewed as one perpetuating superstition and imperialism.; Thus Christianity per se, as well as in its institutional form, came under attack. The Christians were not sufficiently organized to answer effectively. Therefore the solution which the Chinese enthusiastically, and the missionaries reluctantly, reached was to establish a self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing church--The Church of Christ in China. Such an institution was established in 1927, an amalgamation of sixteen denominations.; Yet this church as well lacked the ability to cope with the challenges presented by the political and economic situations which it encountered. Its basic problem was its lack of conceptualization of its place in Chinese society. It remained a Western institution in a time of rampant nationalism; it had not achieved Sinification. |
