Explore Chinese cultural traditions, values, customs, and identities, and how they shape people’s understanding of faith, community, and one another.
Chinese churches in Germany often bring together people whose paths might otherwise remain separate: migrants from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia; students and businesspeople; recent arrivals and long-term residents; people carrying very different political memories and assumptions.
Through my many travels and encounters, I have discovered that the non-fitting place is precisely where I am meant to be as a disciple of Jesus among God’s people.
Instead of being treated as an obstacle to be removed, difference becomes a prompt for inquiry and conversation, and, one hopes, for unexpected revelation.
Ghost Month sets the table to invite wandering spirits to dine and be satisfied. The gospel announces something altogether different.
Sometimes another tradition gives us language for something we have encountered in our own lives but have not yet been able to articulate clearly.
A journey into the Tibetan grasslands of Gannan brings Hugh Battye into the rhythms of nomadic family life, local religious practice, and an unexpected memory of an earlier Christian presence in the region.
Fieldwork among the Bonan in Gansu begins with stamps, permissions, and a search for somewhere to stay, revealing along the way how differently a researcher and his hosts can understand hospitality, access, and an “authentic” experience.
Drawing on fifteen years in mainland China, Hugh Battye reflects on the very different worlds he encountered—and on what can disappear when we speak of “China” as though it were a single cultural experience.
If you’ve been thinking about visiting China and wondering if you should go, I say DO IT!
How can the joy and festivity of the New Year blend with the sorrow and self-denial of Lent?
In a world trained to look for conflict and clarity, choosing to notice patience and harmony may itself be an act of faith.
The qualities often celebrated through the horse in Chinese culture—strength, perseverance, diligence, endurance—may rightly be received as genuine gifts of common grace. And yet Scripture insists on a boundary we forget at our peril: the horse cannot save.