Convert on Conversion

In a letter to St. Augustine of Canterbury* in 601, Pope Gregory the Great laid down a general principle of conversion that overzealous missionaries have often forgotten. Its gist: adapt much, change little. Speaking of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, Gregory sagely observed: "If they can go to their old temples . . . they will feel more at home in the worship of the true God. . . . We must act as those climbing a high hill, proceeding by small steps rather than by long leaps."

This week a suave, slight Chinese Protestant prescribed the same rule for the conversion of his enormous and absorbent country. Dr. Francis Cho Min Wei knows what he is talking about. In China he is a college president--of Hua Chung College (Christian) in Wuchang. In the U.S. (this year) he is Henry W. Luce Visiting Professor of World Christianity at Union Theological Seminary. In both countries he is a recognized authority on Chinese conversion, who says of himself: "My whole study and research has been directed to discovering how to Christianize the Chinese culture."

This week scholarly, debonair Dr. Wei delivered the last of the six Hewett Lectures, founded in 1923 to provide speakers on "the truths of Christianity" to Union, Andover-Newton, and Episcopal Theological Seminaries. After highlighting the background of Chinese culture, he went on in his hesitant, pleasantly gurgling English to impress his students with the importance of adapting organized Christianity to Chinese usages.

For the future success of all mission work in China he drew on his own longtime experience to recommend four basic precepts:

1) The fundamental Christian community should be small, since the Chinese work best as part of a small group. Dr. We suggests a "cell" with no more than too-odd people, without paid clergy or any formal church building.

2) Interdenominational social service centers should be set up and supported by small groups of "cells."

3) China's Christian colleges should be integrated as closely as possible with the whole Christian movement.

4) Christianity should take advantage of the Oriental love of pilgrimage to holy places by setting up shrines in the countryside around populous cities, equipping them with a church, hotel (nonprofit-making), religious library, and museum of Christian relics.

As to Christianity's future in his country, smiling convert Wei is an optimist, though a long-range one. "I have no hope," he says, "of China becoming Christian within a century. At present, only half of 1% of the Chinese population is nominally Christian, and only a tenth of 1% is Protestant."

* Not to be confused with St. Augustine (354-430), Bishop of Hippo in North Africa and author of the famed Confessions, The City of God, etc.

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