Protestant Revivals in China with Particular Reference to Shandong Province

Abstract

Revivals have been a regular feature of the missionary enterprise. The modern Catholic and Protestant missionary movements themselves emerged from major religious revivals in the Western world. On the nineteenth-century China mission fields, Protestant missionaries from the mainline denominations frequently lamented the fact that their often nominal convert communities were lacking in Christian spirit and called for reinvigoration campaigns. It was, however, in the twentieth century that several large-scale revival movements occurred, starting with the ‘Manchurian revival’ of 1907–8 and culminating in the great ‘Shandong revival’ of the 1930s. The years after 1908 saw the rise of Chinese ― as well as some foreign ― full-time revivalists engaging in evangelistic efforts to reach the native Christian as well as non-Christian populations. The Canadian Presbyterian Jonathan Goforth (1859–1936) and the Shandong evangelist Ding Limei (1871–1936) are the most prominent representatives of the early campaigns of Christian renewal. In the 1920s, in spite of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy and anti-Christian agitation by nationalist and revolutionary forces in China, revivalism actually intensified. The principal focus of this paper will be on the new currents of spiritual regeneration that came with the proliferation of mostly small and sectarian missions of Holiness or Pentecostal provenance. Pentecostal ideas, in particular, contributed to the growth of Chinese independent churches and the wave of revivalism that swept across parts of China in the early 1930s. Such ‘gifts of the spirit’ as prophecy, divine healing and speaking in tongues, as well as a strong pre-millenarian belief, energised many of the more radical indigenous revivalists at this time. Other well-known Chinese evangelists had been influenced by the Holiness movement or Plymouth Brethren ideas. The Chinese dimension, especially in the context of Shandong province, is receiving particular attention in this paper.