On the first weekend of October 2026, I traveled to Milwaukee to attend the annual missions conference at the Chinese Christian Church of Milwaukee, where I spoke on diaspora mission. I had many opportunities to talk with the church’s pastors and ministry leaders. Again and again, our conversations turned to Pastor Bingcheng Feng, who had gone home to be with the Lord on July 21, 2026, and we gave thanks to God for his life.
Over the years, Pastor Feng served this church in many roles, from deacon and elder to international missions pastor. He was also an older brother in the faith and a model of ministry who encouraged and supported my work in writing and missions. As I talked with the church’s ministry leaders, we remembered his many years of faithful and humble service to the Lord. He proclaimed the gospel and addressed questions of faith through preaching and writing. Even in the final years of his life, he produced more than one hundred episodes of the video series Li Cheng Faith Q&A.1 His influence went well beyond words: he shepherded the flock, encouraged younger coworkers, and bore witness to remarkable faith and joy even amid serious illness.
The church leaders showed me the congregation’s newly purchased building. They told me that its first gathering had been Pastor Feng’s memorial service. Then they took me into a room with bookshelves lining all four walls, each filled with books. Every one of those books had been donated by Pastor Feng, they told me. The church hopes eventually to establish a memorial library in his name.
Pastor Feng graduated from the Department of Biology at Peking University. In 1978, he entered the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and received his master’s degree in 1981. He came to the United States in 1982 and earned his PhD from Michigan State University in 1987. He subsequently conducted biomedical research at Ohio University, Case Western Reserve University, and the Medical College of Wisconsin. He was baptized on Easter Sunday in 1992 and, in 1997, sensed God’s call to full-time ministry. He later received theological training and was ordained as a pastor.
Among Pastor Feng’s most significant contributions to Chinese evangelism was the influential work of apologetics he wrote under the pen name Li Cheng: Song of a Wanderer: Beckoned by Eternity.2
For the past three decades, Song of a Wanderer has been a go-to apologetics resource in many overseas Chinese churches and student fellowships seeking to share the gospel with students and scholars from China. Churches distributed it at evangelistic events, and Chinese Christians often carried copies home to give to family members and friends who had not yet come to faith. Reportedly, more than one million copies have circulated. The book was also widely printed and shared in Southeast Asia, while numerous unofficial “sharing editions” appeared in mainland China.
Song of a Wanderer is an unusual book. It is neither as brief as a typical evangelistic booklet nor as demanding as a work of biblical exegesis or academic theology. It reads more like the reflections of an older brother who has walked a little farther down the road, recording the questions he once asked, the wrong turns he took, and the answers he eventually discovered for others who are also searching for truth.
Thirty years later, Chinese international students and young intellectuals inhabit a very different world from that of the 1980s and 1990s. The reasons many Chinese born in the 1990s and 2000s reject Christianity are also quite different from those of the previous generation.
As we look back on Song of a Wanderer, several questions are worth asking: Why did this book have such a profound impact? What kind of legacy did it leave for Chinese apologetics and evangelism? And as we encounter a new generation of “wanderers” today, how should we carry that legacy forward?
The Barrier of Reason
To understand the influence of Song of a Wanderer, we first need to return to the era in which it emerged.
During the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of students, visiting scholars, and young intellectuals from mainland China came to the West. Many had grown up in an educational environment shaped by materialism, atheism, and scientism. Within that framework, science was not simply a method for understanding the natural world; at a subconscious level, it could become virtually synonymous with truth. Religion, meanwhile, was often classified as superstition or ignorance, even as something fundamentally opposed to scientific progress.
So when these young people arrived overseas and first encountered Christianity, their initial question was often not, “What does the Bible actually say?” but rather, “Why would someone educated in modern science still believe in God?”
More than thirty years ago, I was one of those Chinese students studying science and engineering overseas. Many of us had experienced deep political disillusionment before leaving China, followed by culture shock and dramatic changes in our lives after going abroad. We began attending campus Bible studies, yet many found ourselves unable to move further toward Christian faith because of one question: Would believing that God created everything mean rejecting science?
For students and scholars from mainland China in that era, the relationship between science and religion became one of the most significant obstacles to seriously considering Christianity.
This was precisely the kind of “stronghold” (2 Corinthians 10:4) that Song of a Wanderer addressed so effectively.
The book did not evade the questions intellectuals were asking about science and Christian faith. Nor did it ask readers to set reason aside and accept Christianity through an unexamined leap of “faith.” Instead, it began with the questions that mattered most to its readers and made a case for Christian faith in a calm and rational manner. In other words, it practiced apologetics.
Science and Faith
Li Cheng himself held a doctorate in biology, so when he addressed questions about science and Christianity, he could reason in ways familiar to scientifically trained intellectuals.
One of the book’s first contributions was to help Chinese intellectuals distinguish between science and scientism. Science is a method for investigating and understanding the natural world. Scientism is a broader philosophical assumption: that the scientific method is the only reliable source of knowledge and that anything incapable of scientific demonstration is therefore unworthy of belief.
When the two are not distinguished, a tool for studying nature can easily be elevated into a worldview intended to explain the whole of reality, without a person even recognizing that this shift has taken place.
Li Cheng also drew on the Christian theological idea of twofold revelation to explain the relationship between science and Christian faith. God’s creation is an unwritten “book” (general revelation), while Scripture is God’s written revelation (special revelation). Science studies the natural world God has made and helps us understand its patterns and laws. Scripture directs our attention to the Creator himself and to questions of human sin, redemption, and ultimate meaning. Within this framework, science largely addresses questions of how, while faith must also confront the deeper questions of why.
A substantial portion of Song of a Wanderer deals with evolution and creation. Drawing on his scientific background, Li Cheng questioned macroevolution and, as a separate matter, naturalistic accounts of the origin of life.
He drew on arguments about the statistical probabilities associated with information contained in DNA and on fossil evidence from the Cambrian explosion to identify what he saw as limitations in the evidence for Darwinian evolution and difficulties facing naturalistic explanations of how life began.
The Bible and History
The rational case for Christianity in Song of a Wanderer did not stop with science.
If Christianity were merely a philosophical theory about the origin of the universe, then even establishing some form of theism would not establish Christianity. At the heart of Christian faith is not an abstract proposition that “God exists,” but a historical claim: Jesus Christ entered human history, was crucified, and rose from the dead.
Li Cheng therefore extended his apologetic approach to historical arguments and legal-style reasoning. He considered the empty tomb, the transformation of the disciples from fearful followers into public witnesses willing to face martyrdom, and his argument that Jesus’ opponents had not produced a body. Alongside these arguments, he drew on biblical prophecy and archaeological evidence to argue that belief in the resurrection need not rest solely on subjective religious experience, but that the resurrection could be seriously examined as a claim about history.
The Heart of a Wanderer
Yet the enduring influence of Song of a Wanderer cannot be explained by rational argument alone.
Another distinctive quality of the book is that it never loses sight of the person behind the intellectual questions.
My generation of Chinese international students possessed a peculiar double identity as wanderers. On the one hand, we had left our homeland and entered an unfamiliar culture. We were wanderers geographically and culturally. On the other hand, many of us were drifting between the values we had grown up with and a new worldview we had not yet embraced. We were wanderers spiritually as well.
Li Cheng did not write like an apologist standing above unbelievers and dispensing answers. He wrote more like an older brother who had gone ahead and then turned around to tell others how he had searched, doubted, struggled, and gradually found his way toward faith.
The emotional power of Song of a Wanderer, then, was not something added to its apologetic arguments. It was part of the apologetic method itself.
Scientific reasoning sought to remove intellectual obstacles. Historical investigation invited readers to reconsider the factual foundations of Christian faith. But the story and sensibility of the “wanderer” brought the questions back to human life itself: meaning, sin, redemption, and ultimately the decision each person must make.
After becoming a Christian, Li Cheng realized that many of the questions he had once wrestled with were the very same questions other Chinese intellectuals were asking as they encountered the gospel. He therefore began intentionally recording the road he himself had traveled.
After Overseas Campus magazine was founded in 1992, Li Cheng began writing regularly about questions of faith under the encouragement and guidance of its founders, Rev. Edwin Su and Joanna Su. He began with his own testimony, “The Long Road to Truth,” and went on to address the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, conversion, and growth in the Christian life.
Again, with the encouragement of the Sus, he eventually reorganized these articles together with material he had previously taught in church gatherings, adding and checking evidential sources along the way. In 1996, this material was gathered and published as Song of a Wanderer.
The book, then, was not originally designed at a desk as a comprehensive apologetics volume. It grew gradually out of years of evangelism and writing, and out of one real question of faith after another.
That may be one reason it was so effective. It was not written to answer an abstract category called “intellectuals.” It was written to answer real people.
Over the next three decades, Song of a Wanderer became more than a bestseller. It became an important symbol and apologetic tool during a period when large numbers of Chinese intellectuals overseas were coming to Christian faith. Many students and scholars who were influenced by the book and eventually became Christians would later become key leaders and pillars of overseas Chinese churches.
Thirty Years Later
What, then, does the legacy of Song of a Wanderer mean for apologetics in the Chinese church today?
The mission context facing Chinese churches has changed significantly in the twenty-first century, particularly among international students and young scholars born in the 1990s and 2000s. Among the younger students I encounter, the influence of postmodern thought has become increasingly evident.
My own experience has made this change very clear.
Twenty years ago, when I traveled to preach in churches and fellowships, almost every host would specifically ask me to speak on “science and faith.” During the past decade or more, however, more and more hosts have told me explicitly that I no longer need to address that subject.
Many younger people simply do not assume that religion and science must be locked in conflict. They may say, “I’m not a believer in evolution either. I simply don’t care about the debate between evolution and creation.”
For them, scientism is no longer necessarily the greatest barrier to conversion. Loneliness, anxiety, pressure, and the sense of emptiness created by a loss of meaning may be far more immediate struggles of the heart.
Today’s younger international students and scholars also lead more globally connected lives. The issues that concern or perplex them have expanded beyond the question of how the universe and life began to include social justice, gender ethics, technological ethics such as AI, church scandals, and church history.
This does not mean that science and faith are no longer worth discussing. But for many younger people, these questions no longer occupy the same central place they once did.
If, in this changed context, our primary form of pre-evangelistic apologetics among a new generation of Chinese students and scholars remains a critique of evolution developed three or four decades ago, then we have failed to read the times. Our apologetics will lack contextual sensitivity, and our communication will miss its target.
Updating the Strategy
The gospel itself has not changed. Our apologetic strategy, however, must continue to develop.
What Chinese churches need today is not a shift from “rational apologetics” or “scientific apologetics” to some form of “emotional apologetics” or “psychological apologetics.” Rather, we need to move beyond apologetics understood purely as rational argument toward a more holistic approach to apologetics and pre-evangelism.
In the past, we could easily reduce apologetics to the task of “proving that Christianity is true.” We still need to make the case that Christianity is true. But today we must also go one step further and answer another question:
What difference does this true faith make in the life of a particular person today?
This does not mean that questions about science and Christianity have become irrelevant. Among young Chinese students and scholars today, the perception that Christianity is anti-science remains one reason some reject the faith. At the same time, voices within Chinese churches have at times been shaped by extreme forms of fundamentalism that foster an unreflective hostility toward science.
For churches serious about mission, learning to understand the relationship between scientific inquiry and Christian faith therefore remains an important task.
At the same time, we must remember that Christian apologetics and evangelism should always be highly attentive to the cultural backgrounds and actual circumstances of seekers.
If the purpose of apologetics is to tear down the “strongholds” that keep people from knowing God, then when we engage a new generation of Chinese intellectuals, we need to discern what those strongholds actually are. They include not only scientism and materialism, but also relativism, postmodernism, and nihilism.
And yet, no matter how the times change or how science develops, the human longing for love and redemption remains.
That is why the apologetics Chinese churches need today should engage reason, emotion, and life together.
We need to be able to explain, but we also need to listen. We need to make arguments, but we also need to accompany people. We need to answer the question “Why believe?” while also allowing others to see what kind of difference faith in Christ can make in a human life.
We should also recognize that science itself has changed enormously during the past thirty years. Astronomy, cosmology, genetics, and many other fields have seen continual new discoveries. Naturally, scientific arguments used in apologetics must be updated as well.
Around 2020, Pastor Feng received suggestions that Song of a Wanderer should be revised to incorporate newer scientific material. By then, because of his age and declining health, he no longer felt able to undertake such a demanding revision himself. Instead, he encouraged ReFrame Ministries to find Christian writers familiar with current scientific developments and produce a new apologetics book addressing science and Christian faith.
With Pastor Feng’s encouragement, Above All Things: The Romance and War between Christianity and Science by Jidian and Xiao Zao was published in simplified Chinese in the United States in 2022, followed by a traditional Chinese edition in Taiwan in 2023.3
Above All Things became part of ReFrame Ministries’ New Songs of Wanderers series,4 and represents one effort to carry forward Pastor Feng’s commitment to scientific rigor, truth-seeking, and rational apologetics.
Carrying the Legacy Forward
I spent many years as an editor with Overseas Campus Ministries,5 and, like Li Cheng, received spiritual and writing guidance from Rev. Edwin and Joanna Su.
The Sus often encouraged contributors to Overseas Campus and Behold magazines to follow a threefold principle: speak to the mind with reason, move the heart with feeling, and awaken the spirit.
Song of a Wanderer embodied that vision remarkably well.
It combined the rational rigor of a scientist, the apologist’s work of both dismantling objections and building a positive case, and an evangelist’s longing to see wanderers find their way home. It was writing marked by reason, feeling, and spiritual life.
Pastor Feng has now served God’s purpose in his own generation and “fallen asleep” (Acts 13:36).
But as Chinese churches encounter a new generation of seekers, we still urgently need apologetics and pre-evangelistic writing characterized by that same combination of reason, compassion, and spiritual vitality.
May God raise up a new generation of Christian apologists, writers, communicators, and digital media creators who will carry forward Pastor Feng’s passion for the gospel and his commitment to apologetics. May they engage the questions of today’s young Chinese students and scholars, help them “take captive every thought” (2 Corinthians 10:5), and point more people toward Christ.
This article was originally written in Chinese and has been translated into English for publication by ChinaSource.
- Pastor Bingcheng Feng, Li Cheng Faith Q&A, Ambassadors for Christ. View video series.
- Li Cheng, Song of a Wanderer: Beckoned by Eternity. AFC Bookstore.
- Jidian and Xiao Zao, Above All Things: The Romance and War between Christianity and Science. Publisher’s book page.
- ReFrame Ministries, New Songs of Wanderers series. Series information.
- Overseas Campus Ministries. Official website.
