The Ecumenical China Study Liaison Group (ECSLG) is a group of mostly European China watchers who met intermittently in the 1970s and 1980s. Key members represented the Roman Catholic Church and mainline Protestant denominations, including state churches. Members gathered every one to two years to share research and consider developments in Christianity in China starting from the latter part of the Cultural Revolution through the death of Mao Zedong, the opening up of China under the Four Modernizations Policy of Deng Xiaoping, the reestablishment of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and the persecution of the so-called "Shouters sect" in 1983.
Key Member Organizations
Membership in the ECSLG was fluid, but the following organizations played key roles:
Background
The origins of the ECSLG lie in the struggle to make sense of the expulsion of missionaries from China during the Denunciation Movement and what appeared to be the suppression of Christianity in China. Members of the ECSLG were greatly influenced by a book written by a former missionary to China who argued that God was judging the Christian church through anti-Christian, particular communist, movements. Some ECSLG members were admirers of Mao, and a number embraced "liberation theology."
In 1972 Johannes Aagaard, a Danish missiologist and countercultist, chaired a gathering titled "The Nordic Consultation on China" at the Ecumenical Study Centre in Aarhus, Denmark, to discuss "The Missiological Implications of the Rise of China." The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Department of Studies and its chair, Dr. Arne Søvik, a former missionary to China who had launched a "Marxism and China Study Programme" a year earlier, collaborated. Aagaard, who described himself as "active in leftist politics" endorsed a Norwegian missionary's statement that "China is more important for God than the church in China."
The LWF and Pro Munda Vita (PMV) agreed to merge their efforts and brought together a group in Bastad, Sweden, from January 29 through February 2, 1974, in preparation for a larger gathering in Louvain, Belgium later in the year. The Louvain Colloquium, which was held on September 9 through 14, took as its theme "Christian Faith and the Chinese Experience." Participants spoke glowingly of "the new China" and in his summation of the gathering LWF's Jonas Jonson spoke of "the Chinese revolution as one stage in the fulfillment of God's salvific plan for the world," "the theology of liberation," and a "new understanding of the revolutionary process and a commitment to it based on Christian faith." The workshop reports of the Louvain Colloquium were published in English, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish and were widely disseminated. Evangelicals criticized the reports coming out of Bastad and Louvain, including Jonathan Chao, the prospective dean of the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong and a Louvain participant; Andrew Chiu, dean of the Lutheran Bible Institute in Hong Kong; and Gustav Weth, a former China missionary and author of a book on Christianity in China and the impact of the Communist Revolution. A later assessment by Richard Madsen, also a Louvain participant, argued that the colloquium's reports reflected tension caused by the growth of evangelical Christianity in the West and corresponding decline in mainline denominations. Madsen concluded, "The Louvain colloquium's positive view of China was thus driven more by the institutional demands of Western liberal Christianity—especially by its theological rivalry with evangelical Christianity—than by any particular contact with Chinese realities."
History
In February 1976 PMV and the LWF convened a smaller group of people in Arnoldshain, Germany. At that meeting the group adopted the name Ecumenical China Study Liaison Group and agreed that PMV and LWF would continue as the group's co-sponsors. Arne Søvik was chosen as the group's principal contact. In the LWF's report, Søvik asked whether a consultation was needed to counteract Love China '75, a gathering of over four hundred people in Manila, the Philippines, whose attendees, observing the waning of the Cultural Revolution, discussed ways to spread the Christian gospel in China, a sentiment ECSLG members shared with the TSPM.