Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye. China and the True Jesus

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye’s China and the True Jesus is a study of the True Jesus Church (TJC), which began in Beijing in 1917 and is still in existence today. While the headquarters of the TJC is currently in California, the focus of this study is the church in the People’s Republic of China. Inouye describes the church as “charismatic” and “Pentecostal.” Her overarching goal in the study is to “understand how charismatic claims inspire human organization and hold communities together” (4). Inouye contributes to a growing body of scholarship on “independent” Christianity in China. Beginning in the early twentieth century and expanding throughout the 1920s and 1930s, some Chinese Christians broke away from denominations introduced by foreign missionaries and began independent churches. These churches were usually characterized as “fundamentalist” and tended to reject the Social Gospel emphasis of mainstream Protestant churches in China. Daniel Bays began publishing scholarship on “independent” Christianity in the 1990s, discussing the “indigenization” of Christianity, which complicated previous scholarship that had viewed Christianity in China primarily as a foreign export. Lian Xi’s Redeemed by Fire (2010) is the most extensive English-language treatment of independent Christianity. As Inouye suggests, these and other scholars have discussed connections between this charismatic, independent Christianity and indigenous popular religious traditions in China (5). While Inouye does not dispute this, she focuses instead primarily on “the transplanted and innovative aspects of charismatic practice within the True Jesus church” (10). In contrast to a focus on “continuity” with existing traditions of popular religion, Inouye sees the TJC as a “new form of Chinese community with an exciting but durable organizational model” (13).

Charisma · Charismatic authority · China · Christianity · Gospel · Indigenization · Indigenous · Mainstream · Political science · Protestantism · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · Worship · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Tourism and Spaces · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies