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100 years ago this month, the great missionary to China, Hudson Taylor, went to be with the Lord . . .

On June 3 1905, 30 guests from six missionary societies attended a reception at the mission house of the China Inland Mission in Changsha.

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.

Mildred Cable once observed: 'The year 1900 holds the same significance as does the Flood in Old Testament chronology. All China mission history dates before or after 1900.'

Missions in China had been going for six decades of the 19th century when the Boxer Rising took place. There were 85,000 Chinese Christians in some 60 Protestant societies, and church buildings and institutions were just beginning to reach a fraction of the population.