Chinese Heritage in British Christianity book launch

This blog post was written by Centre alumna Nuam Hatzaw, and originally published on the Church Mission Society blog on 8 April 2025.

Last week, in my role with the Acts 11 Centre for Global Witness and Human Migration, I had the pleasure of hosting the launch event for the new book Chinese Heritage in British Christianity: More than Foreigners (SCM Press) edited by Alexander Chow of the University of Edinburgh.

The book responds to an important, ongoing moment in British Christianity. On the one hand, historic denominations across Britain, such as the Church of England, are recording unprecedented decline in church attendance and membership. On the other hand, British Chinese Christianity is one of the fastest growing Christian populations in the UK today, and these Christians are revitalising existing churches or starting new, vibrant congregations that challenge us to think differently about what we mean when we talk about British Christianity.

These were some of the issues explored at the launch, which was attended by 60 people and held in Hammersmith at the historic Chinese Church in London, which was founded by Stephen YT Wang in 1951 and was one of the first Chinese churches in Britain.

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Recap of Peter Phan’s Cunningham Lectures

Migration of Christianity, Christianity of Migration

Last week we had the privilege of having Professor Peter Phan, Ignacio Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University, deliver the Cunningham Lectures in the School on the topic: Migration of Christianity, Christianity of Migration. The topic of migration is quite timely in today’s political discourse. Whether we speak of Syrian refugees in Europe or Central Americans being stopped at the US-Mexican border, with parents separated from children, it is hard not to encounter news around the so-called ‘migration crisis’. Phan’s lectures, however, argued that migration should not be disregarded as the latest left-wing fad, but deeply essential to Christianity and the Christian message. Continue reading

Studies in World Christianity 23.1

Appropriations of Christianity

Studies in World Christianity

The five main articles in this issue have been selected from papers given at the 2016 meeting of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on the history of the missionary movement and world Christianity, held at New College, Edinburgh, from 23 to 25 June 2016. The theme of the conference was ‘Responses to Missions: Appropriations, Revisions, and Rejections’. Perhaps the most significant shift discernible in the historiography of the missionary movement over the last few decades has been the progressive transfer of scholarly attention from the Western missionaries themselves to indigenous hearers, receptors and agents. Responses to missions were almost always multifaceted and only rarely can be described without qualification as either ‘acceptance’ or ‘rejection’. Indigenous peoples responded selectively to both the missionaries’ presence and their message. Sometimes they welcomed the former, for a variety of instrumental reasons, while being obstinately indifferent to the latter. On other occasions – particularly in the twentieth century – they appropriated the gospel itself while being less than enthusiastic about the continued presence and claims to religious authority of those who had first brought it. Continue reading

Studies in World Christianity 22.2

Beyond the Binary of East and West

Studies in World Christianity

However hard it tries, scholarship in world Christianity does not find it easy to escape the grip of the long-standing historical binary of East and West. The Christianities of Asia, Africa, and even Latin America are still often labelled as ‘non-Western’, as if their multiple identities consist primarily in their shared departure from the implicit default setting of European or North American Christianity. The four articles in this issue of Studies in World Christianity analyse aspects of Asian Christianity Continue reading