EMQ » July–September 2023 » Volume 59 Issue 3
Faith in the Wilderness: Words of Exhortation from the Chinese Church
Edited by Hannah Nation and Simon Liu
Kirkdale Press, 2022
192 pages
US$16.99
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Reviewed by Richard Cook, professor of Church history and missions at Logos Evangelical Seminary in El Monte, California, and a former missionary in Taiwan.
Chinese churches, long admired for having endured suffering and persecution, may have entered a new era in 2018. Through the early 2000s, during a brief respite from suffering, Christianity experienced dynamic growth, particularly in urban areas, but now that period may be over. The twin challenges of new restrictive religious policies in 2018 and the pandemic outbreak might mark a return to suffering and persecution.
In this innovative and up-to-date volume, Hannah Nation and Simon Liu have collected sermons from nine Chinese pastors who address the current turbulence in China. The Bible accentuates the theme of the cross, as do the meditations of these nine preachers. The sermons weave together history, current events, politics, theology, biblical exposition, China, and the cross. The result is a powerful message of hope from the church in China.
The sermons were selected from presentations given at a convention held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2020. In the introduction, Hannah Nation writes that today there is an emerging systematization of various streams of house church theology and the stream represented in this book is urban, grace-centric, and theologically trained. In this tradition, she says, suffering is rooted in the doctrine of union with Christ. “These theologians pair the traditional, rural house church’s language of ‘walking the way of the cross’ with the historic, reformed doctrine of union with Christ” (3).
The nine messages are evenly divided into three parts: Meditations on Brokenness, Meditations on Redemption, and Meditations on Hope. Adding a powerful touch, the editors have included a Chinese character at the beginning of each chapter. The characters chosen include hope, eternity, brokenness, life, sin, redemption, heaven, trial, and love. (For non-Chinese readers, there is a glossary.) These rich Hanzi pictographs encompass a sweeping range of meanings and emotions, concepts that are echoed in each of the corresponding chapters.
For example, in part 1, the first chapter is represented by the character for fall. The sermon, which examines the history of suffering in China and relates it to the outbreak of the pandemic, quotes a Chinese historian who offered a terrifying view of China, “Every few dozen or few hundred years, tragedy repeats itself …. What can we do to get away from such historical patterns and curses? How can we survive these desperate situations of pestilence, sword, and famine?” (14). The author of the sermon, turning to 2 Samuel 24, replies, “The answer lies in the story of David” (15). Readers will find answers to many conundrums faced by a suffering world throughout the nine messages.
The context in China addressed in the collection is familiar to Chinese Christians throughout the world. My students, for example, at Logos Evangelical Seminary (a Mandarin-language school in Los Angeles), have been struggling with the issues for several years. But the themes of suffering and persecution are now elegantly translated into English for broader distribution. No single volume can present the variety of voices found in the house churches, but this collection effectively represents one flourishing stream arising in the country’s urban areas.
For Further Reading
Darkest Before the Dawn: A Brief History of the Rise of Christianity in China by Richard R. Cook (Pickwick, 2021).
Sorrow and Blood: Christian Mission in the Contexts of Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom edited by William D. Taylor, Antonia van der Meer, and Reg Reimer (William Carey Library, 2012).
EMQ, Volume 59, Issue 3. Copyright © 2023 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
