Chinese has never been a simple word.
It is not only a language, nor only a culture. Whether we like it or not, it often arrives with some sort of imagination attached to it. It reaches far beyond landscape, food, memory, or sentiment.
I realized this most clearly after I had worked through an English reflection on this conference and then began trying to write about it in Chinese. Something shifted. What had felt analyzable in English became much harder to name in Chinese. More emotion surfaced. More unease. More attachment.
Perhaps that itself says something.
When we speak of Chinese Christianity, or Chinese theology, we are not speaking only about an object of study. For many of us, this is also an experience we inhabit. It involves language, history, identity, memory, and the particular burdens and blessings each of us bears.
That is why the April 2026 gathering in Hong Kong left me with more than observations. It left me with a more complicated feeling: a desire to draw near, and at the same time, a difficulty in saying exactly what I had encountered.
I traveled to Hong Kong on behalf of ChinaSource to attend a conference jointly organized by the Institute for Advanced Studies of Chinese Christianity, the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology, and the Biola Research Initiative for Chinese Theology. The theme was “Chinese Christian Scholarship and the Church in Global Perspective: Retrospect and Prospect.”
Naomi Thurston has already helped name the tensions behind what we call “Chinese theology.” Andrew Chiang has traced the historical shift from the old “Immortals’ Symposium” to this Hong Kong gathering. Kenneth Lau has shown what the gap between church and academy feels like in one life.
Together, their reflections map much of the conceptual, historical, and institutional terrain of the conference. What stayed with me was something harder to summarize.
It was the feeling in the room.
Hong Kong Made the Ambiguity Visible
Hong Kong mattered.
It was not merely a convenient place to gather. In the story of Chinese Christianity, Hong Kong is itself a site of tension. It belongs within the Chinese-speaking world, yet it cannot be fully contained by any single imagination of “China.” It is close to mainland China, connected to Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and wider Chinese diasporic communities, and still marked by its own layered history, church traditions, colonial memory, academic institutions, and urban character.
Hong Kong did not resolve the ambiguity of Chinese Christianity. It made that ambiguity visible, even strangely beautiful.
So when the conference spoke of Chinese theology “in global perspective,” certain questions did not need to be explained in order to be present. Chinese or Sinophone? Cultural belonging or political imagination? Contextual theology or official discourses of Sinicization? Inside, outside, or somewhere uneasily between?
The city held those questions before anyone named them.
That is part of what made Hong Kong a wise and meaningful location. Yet the room also revealed how unfinished this conversation remains. Local Hong Kong seminaries and universities were less represented than I had expected. Taiwan was present, but not as strongly as one might have hoped. Scholars clearly formed the largest group, followed by pastors; missional voices seemed fewer.
This did not lessen the significance of the gathering. If anything, it reminded me how challenging it is to form a truly multi-centered Chinese-language theological conversation—and made the effort feel all the more precious.
Most sessions were conducted in Chinese, while the English lectures were made accessible through Zoom’s AI translation support. That language arrangement shaped the atmosphere. The gathering was not first trying to explain itself outward. It was making space for a Chinese-language theological community to recognize, question, and listen to itself.
I am not a theologian or a pastor. In recent years, I have often found myself somewhere in between—writing, editing, observing, and moving among different Chinese Christian communities. Sometimes I introduce Chinese Christianity to English-speaking readers. Sometimes I sit in Chinese-language conversations and simply try to listen. Sometimes I am among scholars. Sometimes I hear pastors name the anxieties of church life.
Perhaps because of that, I was less interested in measuring the conference by its academic scale or number of papers. I was more interested in one question: when people who have long been studying, teaching, pastoring, and serving in different contexts finally sit in the same room, what becomes visible?
A Place to See One Another
The range of topics was almost dizzying: biblical studies, systematic theology, church history, philosophy, theology and science, intercultural studies, and Chinese Christian intellectual history. Presentations moved from Louis de Poirot’s Manchu Bible translation and Watchman Nee’s reception in the Jesus People movement to the authority and future of the Chinese Union Version, generational dynamics in local churches, new readings of Weber, economics and theology, and theological aesthetics as a method for public theology.
From one angle, the program could seem scattered.
But near the close of the conference, Professor Yao Xiyi offered a different way to understand it. The gathering, he explained, was not intended from the beginning to be a narrowly specialized academic conference. It was modeled, in some sense, after larger academic gatherings such as the American Academy of Religion. It also evoked earlier Christianity-related gatherings at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, informally known as the “Immortals’ Symposium.”
The point was not to settle the field in one meeting. The point was to bring people together first: across disciplines, locations, and generations. More focused research groups, publication projects, and specialized conversations could grow later.
But first, people had to see one another.
That helped me reinterpret the apparent looseness of the program. What mattered was not only the number of papers, or even the range of topics. What mattered was what happened between sessions: conversations over meals, in hallways, in small groups, after panels. Questions raised in formal presentations continued elsewhere, revised by friendship, disagreement, curiosity, and shared concern.
In that sense, the conference was not only a platform.
It was where a community began to come into view.
“It Felt Like Home”
This became clearest to me through the younger scholars in the room.
A doctoral student from mainland China, now studying in the Middle East, told me the conference felt like home. At first, I was curious what he meant. Academic conferences, he explained, are a normal part of scholarly life—necessary, useful, and often filled with important people. But in his experience, senior scholars can also feel distant, even intimidating. Everyone is simply busy doing “professional” things in a very “professional” way.
“This gathering felt different,” he said. “I felt like… I was home.”
Interestingly, I heard similar comments from many others. For younger scholars, this was a place where they found peers who sharpened and encouraged one another, as well as senior scholars willing to guide and support them. For the older generation, these younger scholars were the very flame they had long hoped to keep alive.
Yet for many scholars in the China context, this path is trickier. They often find themselves caught between academic systems, research languages, faith commitments, and real-world constraints. Sometimes, what they must discern is not only what to say, but also what not to say.
The Work Between Worlds
Throughout the gathering, another question quietly returned: how does serious scholarship travel into the life of the church?
In Chinese, one word that came close was zhuanyi—not merely translation between languages, but movement between worlds: between academic argument and pastoral discernment, between research questions and congregational life, between theological reflection and missional practice, between what can be written and what can be carried by a community.
This is at the heart of the “three-in-one” vision repeatedly discussed at the conference: academic research, theological education, and the church. The difficulty is that these three do not automatically serve one another simply because they are placed in the same room.
Kenneth Lau’s reflection shows what this looks like when the work is carried in one life. As a young scholar, church elder, and researcher of Lingnan University’s Christian history, he stands precisely at this intersection. Bridging the gap between academy and church is not simply a method. It is a vocation that has to be lived.
The pressure on pastors also matters. Especially when pastors serve congregations with many scholars, intellectuals, students, and professionals, they are not only shepherding spiritual lives. They are also receiving complex questions, discerning what can be carried by the church, and helping translate between the language of research and the language of discipleship.
The work is not merely to simplify complex ideas.
It is to make movement possible between worlds that often do not know how to speak to one another.
What Remains Unfinished
That is why Dr. Ximian Xu’s closing reflections felt important.
He affirmed the breadth of the conference, but also named areas still underrepresented: missiology, preaching and the theology of proclamation, and engagement with Eastern Orthodoxy.
These were not conclusions so much as indications of where the conversation had not yet gone. I received them not as a critique of the gathering, but as a necessary reminder of how much further the conversation still needs to go.
If this emerging field of Chinese Christian scholarship is to take shape in global perspective, this reminder is worth receiving seriously. The conversation cannot remain only within familiar Protestant categories. It will need to think beyond its usual frames and attend more carefully to the broader tradition of the Christian church, including traditions and questions that may feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or difficult to approach.
Dr. Xu also made another important distinction. The issue is not only the relationship between scholarship and the church. It is also the relationship between scholars and the church.
That distinction stayed with me.
The question is not only whether academic content can become useful for the church. It is whether the people who produce that content remain close enough to the life of the church to be shaped by its prayers, wounds, confusions, and needs.
Scholars do not all need to become pastors. But if theological research becomes too detached from worshiping communities, from the questions of ordinary believers, and from the life of the body of Christ, then even excellent scholarship may struggle to serve the church.
Theology enters the church not only when difficult ideas are made simpler or papers become sermons. It enters when scholars, pastors, teachers, and believers learn to remain in living relationship with one another.
No Longer Alone
Against this backdrop, the recurring language of “home” became especially meaningful.
As Chinese Christianity becomes increasingly transregional, multilingual, and shaped by migration and political complexity, questions of place and belonging become harder to answer. For many, home is no longer only a physical location. It is also discovered in shared calling, shared questions, and shared burdens.
Near the end of the conference, Professor Yao shared that after one of the sessions, someone sent him a message. It said simply: “No longer alone.”
That sentence captured what I had been sensing all week in private conversations, hallway exchanges, and meals. The gathering mattered not only because certain topics were discussed, but because something became visible. People who had long been carrying similar questions in scattered places discovered that they were not alone.
The closing prayer described the gathering as a kind of puzzle. Each person came from a different place, with different work, study, family, and ministry contexts. Yet in being brought together, the pieces formed an image none of us could have seen alone.
Perhaps that is the meaning of this conference.
It did not resolve the tensions around Chinese theology. It did not complete the work of bringing scholarship, theological education, and the church together. It was still incomplete, still fragile, still uneven in its representation.
But something real happened.
For a few days in Hong Kong, people who had been carrying similar questions in scattered places began to recognize one another. The work ahead remains difficult: translation between worlds, deeper rootedness in the church, and a more patient participation in the global body of Christ.
But the work no longer feels quite as solitary.
That may be the gift of this gathering.
Not that it gave us a finished map, but that it helped us see who else is walking.
And once we have seen one another, the road ahead begins to feel different.
