Former Lecturer: Trends Show Need for Indigenisation of Christianity

Tuesday, May. 12, 2009 Posted: 9:14:27PM HKT

Ancestral veneration.

The 2000 Census report was not a missiologically favourable one for Christianity. Not only did the Church experience a continued decline in her growth, but she was coming up against a formidable competitor. And the trend continues to the present day.

For former Assemblies of God Bible College lecturer Monte Lee-Rice, the well-documented Buddhist revivalism and Christianity’s growth declension show that the Christian faith is “not yet fully inculturated into the Chinese Singapore setting,” he wrote in a 2003 research paper.

Titled Emergence of Buddhist Revivalism as the Primary Challenge to Church Growth in Singapore, the paper analysed the major trends and characteristics pertaining to the two religions in an attempt to understand the “ebb in conversion growth” in Christianity.

“In spite of inroads over the past years via varied and systematic evangelistic strategies towards community penetration and reaching dialect-speaking Chinese, the impasse is well acknowledged. It has also been often observed that continued growth among several mega-churches is largely transfer rather than conversion growth,” wrote the Rev Lee-Rice.

The minister noted that despite ‘sustained’ and ‘broad’ evangelistic efforts over the years, they have not “effectively overcome emerging trends arising from Singapore’s pluralistic setting over the past decade”.

First of all, there continued to be an increasing shift among Chinese from Taoism to Buddhism, which consequently now represents the largest profession of faith among the Chinese. And then there has also been Buddhism’s increasing growth among higher educated Chinese, corresponding to a proportionate decline in the number of Christian professions of faith among university graduates.

This is related to Christianity’s inability to contextualise itself particularly with regard to the Chinese perception of spirituality and religious values. Lee-Rice highlighted that the Western, Chinese and Indian cognitive approaches to reality differ in terms of the prioritising of three core elements in concentric circles: concepts, concrete relationships and psychical experience.

For the Chinese, concrete relationships form the core of the worldview, followed by concepts and then psychical experience. The Chinese worldview is basically lineage-centred and the Chinese conception of religion places heavy emphasis on familial relations and most Chinese, regardless of their religion, are morally and ethically Confucian.

On the other hand, the former lecturer noted an ‘ironic’ pull within the Church to ‘compartmentalise’ the Christian faith, with few believers having seriously thought through the implications of their faith in its social, political or economic dimensions or even being aware of them.

The resultant cultural discontinuity between being a Chinese and a Christian – Chinese Christianity has developed as a predominately English based religious tradition – has become an obstruction to the effectiveness of conversions among the non-Christian Chinese population.

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Edmond Chua
edmond@christianpost.com