Chinese Independent Churches - Within Mission Churches

Within Mission Churches

One category of independence was that pursued within the general structure of the foreign mission churches in China. This had a slogan: the "three-self" aim of Chinese Christians being responsible for "self-management, self-support and self-propagation" in the churches. Many foreign missionaries, and Chinese Christian leaders working within the mission-related structures of the day, promoted this goal.

From the early 1910s and the formation of the China Continuation Committee after the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910, this goal was pursued gradually, reaching a watershed in the National Christian Conference (NCC) of 1922, out of which came the ecumenical Church of Christ in China, a sino-foreign body with a significant degree of Chinese leadership and responsibility. The National Christian Council, a national Protestant coordinating and liaison body, was also a product of the conference and was operating by the mid 1920s.

Not all denominations or mission groups joined the Church of Christ in China and/or the NCC. Some of them, like the Anglicans and Lutherans, pursued their own forms of Sino-foreign unity and nurturing of Chinese leadership. Others, like the China Inland Mission, continued basically a foreign-dominated operation at the top but tried to promote sensitivity to and encouragement of Chinese Christians' aspirations to responsibility and autonomy at the local level.