It is not often that one becomes a stranger without leaving home.
From September 22 to 24, 2026, the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology held a conference titled “Churches in Global Chinese Communities: Chinese Ecclesiology in the Making” at the Faculty of Divinity, where I had recently begun a postdoctoral position, and at Selwyn College next door. I needed no map to find the rooms. In every other sense, however, I was something of a stranger. I am a Korean who studies Korean Christianity. Among scholars of Chinese Christianity, I may well have looked like an insider, at least until I introduced myself.
Being at home and yet a stranger turned out to be a useful position from which to listen. Much of what I heard over three days sounded familiar; some of it did not.
Familiar scenes, unfamiliar layers
Many of the papers and lectures described situations I regularly encounter in my own field: generational tensions in diaspora churches, migrant congregations worshiping in borrowed space, sometimes more as tenants than as partners, and the charisma of founding leaders gradually becoming the structure of a church. For someone who studies Korean Christianity, none of this felt foreign.
Yet other things were less familiar, and they made me aware of layers that are less prominent in the study of Korean Christianity. Language is one example. Korean has its dialects, but Korean speakers rarely need an interpreter to understand one another. In Chinese diaspora churches, by contrast, a single church may include Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese speakers who may not always understand one another, often with a separate congregation for each. The word “Chinese,” in other words, does not necessarily mean a shared spoken language.
How wide is “Chinese”?
I suspect I was not the only participant for whom parts of the conference felt unfamiliar. The word “Chinese” gathered a remarkably broad range. Geographically, the conference ranged from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and, through migration and diaspora, to Britain, North America, Germany, South Korea, and Indonesia. Historically, it stretched from a church in Tang China, through Manchu Bible translations in the mid-Qing period and twentieth-century figures such as Zhao Zichen (T. C. Chao) and Wang Mingdao, to Hong Kong Christians who have arrived in Britain since 2021. Ecclesially, it covered Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, and Pentecostal churches, Three-Self and house church communities, the Local Church movement associated with Watchman Nee, and even “cultural Christians” at the church’s edges. Two papers in neighboring rooms, or even in the same room, might be separated by a thousand years or half the globe, and yet both spoke of Chinese Christianity.
Tension and possibility
Encounters across such differences are not always easy. In his plenary lecture on Chinese churches in North America, Dr. Clement Wen observed that where Christians from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere worship together, some subjects, such as the politics between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, can hardly be raised at all. Such tensions are not unique to Chinese churches. In the opening plenary, Professor Brian Stanley observed that, with no single authority acknowledged across them all and with multiple Christian networks asserting their own distinctive claims, the map of global Christianity is becoming more polycentric, not less.
Yet encounter also opens new possibilities. Dr. James Xie, whose paper examined migration and the making of an “international” church in Tang China, concluded:
Migration is not simply about moving from one place to another. It means leaving one’s home. It can create a desire for homecoming—a kind of homesick community. And migration also means becoming a minority. In this sense, migration can involve a loss of power. But it also creates new possibilities. … It broadens horizons.
Loss and new horizons, in other words, often arrive together. But what keeps such diversity from simply becoming fragmentation? Part of the answer, I think, is that Christian communities have kept reaching for catholicity. Here, catholicity (with a lowercase “c”) refers to the universality of the church, confessed in ancient creeds such as the Apostles’ Creed (“the holy catholic church”): the conviction that Christians in every place and time belong together to one church in Christ. Stanley noted that every church, whether institutional or charismatic, has to find ways to “relate local Christian experience to the church universal in both space and time.”
The other plenary speakers took up the theme, each in their own way. Professor Shao Kai Tseng, recalling Jürgen Moltmann’s remark that he was “not a German Christian, but a Christian in Germany,” argued that there are, strictly speaking, Christians and churches in China rather than “Chinese Christians.” Yet oneness in Christ, he added, does not abolish difference. With J.-M.-R. Tillard, he described the church as “neither abolition nor addition, but communion of differences.” Wen located the unity of churches not in a shared task or a shared set of doctrinal statements, but in their common participation in Christ by the Spirit, a unity that frees each church to follow its own calling, toward “unity without conformity.” Dr. Renie Chow Choy’s account of the Cantonese congregation at St Martin-in-the-Fields offered a concrete example: a migrant congregation and a historic parish learning to share one church’s life, with gifts flowing in both directions. In these accounts, catholicity does not dissolve the tension of diversity. It holds tension and possibility together.
A glimpse of catholicity
The catholicity that the plenary lectures and several papers touched on could also be glimpsed in the conference itself. For three days, it brought together scholars who study churches across global Chinese communities using very different methods, and they listened to and questioned one another. Dr. Simeon Xu, co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology, reflected in his closing remarks that people working on different subjects had sat in the same room, asked one another questions, and found unexpected connections. They had begun, he suggested, to see their own research differently because of the people around them.
Each day also included a time of prayer in Selwyn College Chapel: evening prayer on the first day and morning prayer on the second and third. Scholars who spent their days discussing the church’s differences gathered there together. For those few moments, catholicity was not only discussed but, in a modest way, lived out.
None of this happened by accident. The Centre, established in 2025 with the generous support of Lux Mundi Inc., hosted the conference at the Faculty of Divinity and Selwyn College. Its organizing committee drew together colleagues from the University of Cambridge, Yale University, Boston University, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. The program included the launch of a Brill volume, Chinese Christian Witness, and journal editors in the room were quick to invite submissions. Scholarship that had already been flourishing in scattered institutions was brought together under one umbrella.
An invitation, and one more
In his closing remarks, Xu named topics that had not yet received the attention they deserve, among them the ordination and leadership of women in Chinese churches, as well as Orthodox Christianity in Chinese contexts. He described these gaps as “invitations.” Naming the gaps in this way seemed to reflect a theme that had run through the whole conference: a catholicity that does not retreat from diversity but holds its tensions and possibilities together.
In the spirit of that invitation, one more might be added: the encounters between Chinese Christianity and the other Christian communities of Asia. At the conference, Chinese Christianity’s relationships with the West—through missionaries, diaspora communities in Europe and North America, and Western scholarship—were explored in depth. Its relationships with Asian neighbors have yet to be examined as closely. The seeds were already there: Dr. Easten G. Law compared Chinese migrant churches in South Korea and the United States, and Ms. Carmia Margaret explored the making of Chinese-Indonesian ecclesiology. There is much more to discover in these connections.
If Chinese ecclesiology is, as the conference’s subtitle says, in the making, so too are the connections between the churches of Asia. I look forward to seeing where that conversation leads.
