This past autumn I had a seven-week journey through eight provinces of China and was made aware of a serious theological threat to the unity of this country's fast-growing Church.
Since 1996 Bishop K. H. Ting (Ding Guang-xun) has been advocating with a sense of urgency a Faith Reform Movement, the teaching of which strikes at the very heart of Protestant theology. This concept was enunciated when the Three Self Patriotic Movement was formed in the early 1950s.
The three strands of this movement were Self-Support, Self-Government and Self-Propagation. The third one did not only require that the Chinese Church sends out its own pastors and preachers, but that it should remove 'the yoke' of Western theology and create a theological system uniquely its own.
