A study of an emerging missions movement in urban China: from the perspective of four Beijing pastors

This dissertation is a study of the missiology, characteristics, factors, and trajectory of a new missions phenomenon in the unregistered house churches of urban China called Missions China (originally Mission China 2030). This research seeks to uncover the distinctiveness of the Mission China phenomenon from the perspective of four Beijing house church leaders this movement. Following a series of revivals in rural and urban China, a house church overseas cross-cultural missions movement has emerged within the context of intense persecution and both economic and geopolitical rise.

The research methodology combines a case study approach regarding four Beijing pastors, supplemented with qualitative, semi-structured interviews with forty house church leaders. Several missiological concepts have emerged within a persecution context, including the ‘positivity of suffering’, ‘cross missiology’, ‘creative sending’, ‘City on a Hill’, ‘Back to Jerusalem’, and the recovery of the Great Commission mandate.

This thesis has been analysed from a theoretical framework called the 'Missionisation Cycle' adopted by Las Ekström. In his research on the Newer Sending missionary movements from the Global South, Ekström builds on Andrew Walls’ ‘translatability’ and ‘contextualisation’ principles by introducing ‘self-missionisation’ as the final phase of an indigenous missions development. Several of these missiological concepts will be compared with the writings of contemporary missiologists Paul Fiddes, Karan Kilby, Jürgen Moltmann, and Kosuke Koyman for further theological reflection.

The concluding chapter includes key findings about the emergence of Mission China, a general trajectory of the movement, and a possible new missionary paradigm with vestiges of the past coming from the Global East.