The Evolution of the Ecumenical Vision in the Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Context

This paper focuses on the Church of Christ in China – a visible fruit of the church unity movement in early twentieth-century China – as a case study. Through examining its formation and development from 1927 to 1937, especially its progress in the advocacy of ecumenism in China, this paper aims to explore how the idea of ecumenism had been transplanted, rooted, accommodated and applied in the Chinese context during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper argues that, although the Chinese vision of ecumenism was derived from the West, it had taken a rather different path and reflected an indigenous understanding of ecumenism and ecclesiology. The case of the CCC demonstrated that national requirements played a significant role in reshaping the universal Christian message. The Christian message, in this case the vision of ecumenism, would always have to revise and incarnate itself in the local context which it encountered

Archaeology · China · Context (archaeology · Ecclesiology · Ecumenism · Indigenous · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Christian Theology and Mission · History · Law · Philosophy