In mid-July 2026, Chinese Christian scholars and pastors from various denominational backgrounds in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong gathered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for the three-day Third Public Theology Conference.
What was most noteworthy about this congress was not only what it said, but also how it was experimenting with new ways to speak, lead, communicate, and understand the next generation.
After leaving Kuala Lumpur, one question stayed with me: were we, throughout the conference, actually speaking about the same thing when we used the term ‘public theology’?
Does the gospel of Christ also concern a nation's public life: justice, poverty, corruption, the environment, refugees, and people suffering in disasters? I believe the answer is yes.
For ChinaSource readers, the story invites us to remember Chinese Christianity not as a simple one-directional story of Western missionaries going to China, but as a deeply interconnected history of receiving, translating, indigenizing, and sending.
May we carefully nurture these cherry-blossom seeds in the sweet potato field until, in the love of Christ, they flower and bear fruit, becoming gospel pioneers who will help shape the future of both Taiwan and Japan.
The thought patterns formed by long-term, deeply embedded atheistic education and scientism remain a major epistemological threshold that Chinese diaspora Christians must cross in evangelism, as well as a stronghold that apologetics must address.
In the era of new media, every Christian is not only a user of media products but also a creator and distributor of content.
I hope this book introduces Nee to a new generation of readers—not as a perfect figure, and not as a saint beyond criticism, but as a serious Christian thinker whose work deserves careful attention.
We must move toward a global dialogue where the Western scholar, the African pastor, the Asian theologian, and the Latin American activist sit together as equals.
Salvation, he came to see, is not the story of human beings climbing upward by their own strength. It is the story of one who is willing to descend for the lost.
If we are to truly appreciate theology from a worldwide perspective, surely we need to engage theology in other languages.