A Look at Christianity in Taiwan

Despite tensions within and pressures from without, the church in Taiwan is growing and the people are prospering

The most frequent greeting on the lips of Chinese Christians is “Ping-an!,” the word for peace. “Ping-an!” is usually spoken with a lilt to the voice, a nod of the head, and, above all, a smile of welcome. This is the peace, not of the grave, but of genuine, warm-hearted fellowship.

The current testimony of the Chinese church in the one free province of Taiwan, off the China mainland, is that it has largely maintained peace among the brethren despite tensions within and pressures from without. Looking at the fragmented churches in South Korea, the multiplied church councils and missionary associations in Japan, and the division between some of the older and younger church groups in the Philippines, the churches of Taiwan sometimes wonder whether they can continue their mutual toleration and cooperative activity. So far, the basis for fellowship has been a conservative theological consensus, common participation in evangelism, and strictly informal interchurch relations. Certain sharp exceptions can no doubt be made, but the basic pattern is harmonious. A major factor is the absence of restrictive church councils, for these latter-day oligarchies cultivate a party spirit. If they were to develop in Taiwan, they would be a decidedly disruptive force.

One of the tensions the churches have survived is that between the Chinese who are native to the island and the refugees who fled to Taiwan from the mainland. Any who remember the wartime friction between the Szechuanese in west China and the loyalists who followed the Nationalist government to its temporary capital in Chungking have not been surprised at the difficulties that developed when the Taiwanese were subjected to a similar influx a few years later. What is remarkable is the modus vivendi the old inhabitants and the newcomers have achieved, even to the extent of partnership in Taiwan’s business prosperity and some intermarriage. In church circles it has gone beyond mere accommodation to a unified stand on issues affecting the welfare of all Christians.

A newer tension is that between the older and younger generations of Taiwanese, the former trained in the days of the Japanese occupation, the latter now the product of almost twenty years of Chinese schooling. The elders tend to meet the problem with humility and grace despite their increasing isolation, while the rising generations respond without too much impatience or belligerence.

The arrival of many new denominations in a field largely occupied for eighty years by Presbyterians could have given rise to ugly recriminations. Yet the Presbyterian Church has wisely busied itself with church extension instead of futile controversy. As a result, it has doubled its numbers and remains the largest church body on the island. Some of the new groups are cooperating with the Presbyterians at several levels.

Another significant movement among ten of the smaller denominations will, if successful, combine six of the existing Bible schools and seminaries into one strong, fully accredited biblical seminary, similar to Yeotmal Seminary in India.

An example of outside pressure is the criticism of the supposedly disproportionate number of Protestant missionaries engaged in Chinese work. Nothing much is said about the larger missionary staff which the Roman Catholic missions employ. Some of those who view with alarm the proliferation of small, evangelical churches have been silent about the inroads Catholics have made in certain former Protestant preserves, such as the tribal areas. Without question, the Catholic Church is giving high priority to its missions in Free China.

It is a disadvantage to labor under a continual lack of understanding on the part of older churches in the West. Take such a relatively small matter as the use of Taiwan’s old European name, Formosa. This should be as obsolete as the name Siam for Thailand, or Persia for Iran. Its use indicates either ignorance or insensitivity among those who should be aware of the strategic value of Christian work in this seat of the Republic of China.

Let us take a closer look at present-day Taiwan. The frenetic taxicabs, the sedate, black limousines of business tycoons, and even the more modest cars and vans of missionaries bear license plates beginning with the number 15. This is the designation which the Communications Ministry has given this island province. It is Province No. 15 of China.

When pioneer missionaries James Maxwell in the south and George Mackay in the north began preaching among the Taiwanese, they classified themselves as missionaries to China. Some visitors from overseas to the 1965 centennial of Protestant work on Taiwan were not quite so sure where they were. They had the mistaken notion that the Chinese and the Taiwanese are separate peoples.

I once picked up an old book in the library of the Tainan Theological Seminary. On the flyleaf I noticed the inscription, “Tainan, Taiwan, China, 1885.” This book had been placed in the library long before the Japanese era at a time when Taiwan was politically an integral part of the Chinese empire.

The people of Taiwan are almost entirely Chinese in speech, culture, and descent. Nevertheless, confusion still exists over their identity, and this confusion is compounded by carelessness. This year, for instance, a mission board that has had work in Free China for over a decade published a brochure describing the population as made up of 2,000,000 Chinese and the rest mostly Taiwanese. The first is the name of a nationality, but the second is derived only from the name of a province.

It makes a considerable difference to our estimate of the potential of Christian work in Taiwan whether the Chinese are a small, foreign element or the bulk of the population. As Province No. 15, Taiwan looms large in importance as an open door for witness among the world’s most numerous single people. Although only one province is free for the propagation of religious faith, our opportunity is significant in terms of the vast numbers of Chinese. Altogether, on both sides of the Bamboo Curtain, they are one-third of the world’s non-Christians and therefore one-third of the total missionary task of the Church.

The Christians in Taiwan are aware of their opportunity. Looking into a new century, they have high hopes; but they are also under pressure from rapid social change. The burgeoning population and economic progress of the last few years have drastically changed the sleepy, post-war cities. Local people who at first blamed the mainland arrivals for any disorder or inefficiency never had it so good as they do in the new business whirl. They may well ask themselves what they might have missed if the national government had not moved their way. Certainly the increased industrialization, the foreign-aid programs, the cosmopolitan touch of foreign embassies, and the tourist trade would not have come so fast under Japanese suzerainty.

Visitors are hardly aware of the new look, for they are busy taking snapshots of the quaint and the bizarre. But the people themselves are greatly impressed by the changes. They see squatters moved, streets paved, rising skylines, faster trains, more air-conditioning, new factories, television aerials, and attractive consumer goods.

What has this to do with Christian work? Much. The people are better educated and more materialistic; they could become sophisticated. They are flowing into the cities, so that at present one-fifth of the people are in the five largest cities. Right in the city of Taipei there are colonies of tribal people numbering in the thousands. This makes the teeming inner city and the growing suburban areas an acute concern.

Within the churches, the higher standard of living is reflected in more financial self-sufficiency. Some of them, of course, have been completely self-supporting from the start; others are laboring to get off subsidy. New civic pride has its counterpart in the self-assurance of the national Christian leadership. This creates highly predictable problems where missionaries are paternalistic, or when responsibility falls into the hands of unstable young Christians. In this respect the Presbyterian Church has an advantage because of its reservoir of second-, third-, and fourth-generation Christians who often have outstanding ability to conduct the inner and outer ministries of the church.

The pressure of being a minority community in the nation has helped keep the various denominational groups together. This is not to say that tempests do not build up over doctrinal and political issues. Church leaders are sometimes autocratic and fail to consult their constituencies. The tendency has been, however, for policies and programs to be modified whenever it is plain that they will endanger Christian unity. A case in point is the invitation tentatively issued to a high-ranking Catholic prelate to be a guest speaker at the centennial. When evangelicals opposed this action, the invitation was quietly canceled.

Again, when a liberal Sunday school curriculum was produced in Hong Kong with the consent and participation of several Taiwan churches, it was greeted with great disfavor at the grass-roots level in Taiwan. The church officials concerned hastened to urge revision of the material and dropped plans to push it for local use.

This year the question of the World Council of Churches’ position on Red China has plagued those churches with WCC relations. Some of their leaders were unwise enough to try to defend the council in a “white paper” distributed widely among the churches. As long as the Church of Christ in China in Red China is listed as a member organization of the WCC, it is virtually impossible for the WCC to be acceptable in Free China. I was at a luncheon for some of the foreign delegates to the centennial celebrations when one of them mentioned the World Council of Churches. “Hush!” another cautioned in mock dismay. “Don’t you know that that is a forbidden name here in Taiwan?”

What is of great interest is that conservative church groups that have no connection with the WCC have not exploited this explosive situation in order to embarrass the churches that are related to the council. They may not be sympathetic; in fact, they may even deplore the ecumenical movement. Nevertheless, they combined with these other churches in an area where they are of one mind, a Christian anti-Communist conference on October 8 and 9, just before the Chinese national holiday, the Double Tenth.

This conference emphasized the spiritual offensive Chinese Christians are waging against atheistic Communism. First of all, churches all over the island prepared with a week of prayer for mainland Christians. Then in the conference key delegates gave reports on aid to refugees in Hong Kong, Christian radio broadcasts to the mainland, chaplaincy service in the armed forces, Christian literature on Communism, and the biblical answer to Communist theories. Although the skeptic might think that this conference was engineered for political purposes, it was really a sincere effort to encounter the impression that any in the Christian community in Taiwan are soft on Communism.

This willingness to pull together wherever possible is further illustrated by Bible-translation projects, relief programs, joint preparation of Sunday school literature, city-wide evangelistic campaigns, Christian education conferences, audio-visual supply centers, pastors’ prayer conferences, radio and literature workshops, and work among leprosy patients. The two weekly Christian newspapers help communications between denominations by covering much of the church news. The picture would not be complete without reference to certain groups that are constitutionally unable to have fellowship with others. There is some of this vertical stratification in the Chinese church, but the majority are in fellowship with one another. They have liked this, and they have even made personal sacrifices to keep the peace.

Indeed, some would even go so far as to say that this harmony of spirit is a prelude to revival, a revival of God’s people in Taiwan that could bring many more of China’s millions to the feet of Jesus Christ.

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