Quote:
Originally Posted by Gubei
They seems to try to maintain Chinese dominance even in the church life. There's been an "air" of arrogance of Chinese brothers when they were supposed to co-work with other ethnic group saints, sometimes very noticeable. Unfortunately, I have to say an insidious ethnical discrimination (or elitism) has permeated LC's inner atmosphere like the debate between Hellenistic Jew and Hebraic Jew in Acts.
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No small irony that 100 years later, a group birthed by nativist resentment to outside domination (think, Boxer Rebellion) subsequently imposed itself as an alien culture upon others. It cannot be overstressed that there's nothing wrong with Chinese culture per se, and in fact it has much to recommend it. But the church leadership that insists that there be "No culture" insinuates its own [Chinese] value systems and enables their dominance.
In my old "locality" the original church group has shrunk and the children are almost all gone - a few were captured by "the ministry" and are off serving somewhere, but most are through with the Christian religion in any form. The Sunday meeting is about 1/2 the size of the one I knew 30 years ago. But in the meantime a separate "Chinese-speaking meeting" has flourished. I suspect that in their eyes it's the Normal Christian Church Life, to use the title of a WN book. To Chinese it's as 'normal' as Anglican church practices were to Western missionaries in 19th-century China.