Canaan Hymns: Songs from the fields—A grassroots missiology of the Chinese church movement

Abstract

The 21st century is marked by the exponential growth of Christianity in the Global East beyond Christendom. In the last thirty years, Canaan Hymns ( jianan shixuan, 迦南诗选), over two thousand indigenous songs composed by a rural woman named Lü Xiaomin (吕小敏, 1970–) have spread and been sung from the underground to the world. They have become a hallmark of the Chinese church and mission movement beyond the borders of the Mainland. Coined as “God’s gift to China,” Xiaomin, a junior high school drop-out without any musical training, wrote these songs inspired by the Holy Spirit from the village fields of northern China. Despite ample video clips and documentaries of Xiaomin and Canaan Hymns being made available online, scholarship on their missiology has been underheard and underdeveloped. Drawing from the methodologies of “lived theology,” “grassroots theology,” and “biography as theology,” this article studies the formation, themes, and styles of Canaan Hymns through textual analysis, literature reviews, and interviews. In conversation with missiologists and theologians of the West and Asia such as Bosch, Moltmann, and Chan, a grassroots missiology that is contextual, pneumatological, and communal is discerned and articulated. In doing so, not only voices from the margins are heard and brought into global conversations, missio Dei is also given new meanings and significance in the context of the contemporary indigenous mission movement.