December 2001

Dear Friends,

Christmas is alive and well in China, but not always in the ways that I would prefer. A walk down a street in Guangzhou (Canton) in the days right before Christmas increasingly resembles a walk through a U.S. mall during the same season—lots of Santa Claus figures, plastic greenery, Christmas carols on the store PA systems ("Silent Night" incongruously followed by "Jingle Bells") and plenty of pre-Christmas sales.

The purist in me sometimes finds this growing popularity of a commercialized and secular version of Christmas in China a bit sad. But from the perspective of Chinese churches, it isn’t all a bad thing, because it helps generate curiosity about Christianity in a country where many people still only have rather vague notions about what the Christian faith is all about. And Christmas often provides the excuse for curious people to do a bit of shopping of another kind.

In the Chinese church I know best, Dong Shan Church in Guangzhou, the Christmas Eve service is a production that bears more than a passing resemblance to a Broadway musical. The church is decorated to the hilt. The choir does a concert of excerpts from Handel’s "Messiah." There are Nativity plays and performances by the children. And all of this in addition to the service itself. And the resemblance of this to a Broadway musical is probably more than accidental because every member of the church knows that Christmas Eve is the time when the church will be packed with curious
outsiders. The Christmas holiday and the church performance provide the curious with an excellent excuse to actually enter the doors of this unknown and even somewhat stigmatized place to find out a bit more about the people who go there and why they go there. And year after year, more outsiders come. In fact, a few years ago it reached the point that even in this rather large church building there wasn’t enough room for everyone who wanted to attend the Christmas Eve service, so an additional service needed to be added on Christmas Night.

The anthropologist Paul Hiebert writes about how Christians need to be present in the marketplace as well as in the church, how Christians need to have "store-windows" which allow them to present themselves as Christians in settings where non-Christians feel free to come by and look them over. The Christmas Eve service at Dong Shan Church is a store-window of that type, and for many non-Christians in the local community it is the first place for them to really see the Christian faith on display. For many it is also the first step toward coming into the store and beginning to shop around a bit. If Christmas has to be commercialized, this is probably how it should be done.

Personal notes

As many of you know, Wei Hong and I spent much of the fall in the United States giving talks in churches, colleges, and any other locations that would have us. And since we returned to Hong Kong in November we haven’t slowed down at all. I have been visiting teachers in Fujian, attending a conference, and getting ready for Amity’s winter teacher conference. Wei Hong is still working up at the Lutheran Theological Seminary Library and also working to finish her final project for her program in theological seminary librarianship. We wish God’s blessings on all of you for the coming year!

God’s peace,

Don and Wei Hong

The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 179