Search China Travel News:

The Nanjing Union Theological Seminary yesterday held a 50th-birthday celebration in the capital of East China's Jiangsu Province. Hundreds of alumni from different parts of China and the world attended the ceremony. The seminary's achievements were reviewed by seminary president Bishop K. H. Ting (Ding Guangxun), who is also honorary chairman of the National Committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and honorary president of the China Christian Council. Ting expressed his heartfelt thanks to the Communist Party of China and the Chinese Government for their continuous support. Ting emphasized that the seminary would not have developed so quickly and successfully had it not been for China's "policy of total freedom of religious belief." The Chinese Government has always supported Protestants and other religious groups in their activities, offering various forms of help, such as building churches and organizing academic and personnel exchanges with churches in other countries, Ting said. There are 3,200 churches and meeting places for Protestants in China, 80 per cent of which have been built in the past 20 years, partly funded by local governments. The number of Protestants in the country has surged from 700,000 in the early 1950s to about 17 million at present. To further develop theological education and train the pastors that the churches badly need, recruitment has been stepped up for China's 18 Protestant theological seminaries and teaching conditions have been improved. The local government in Nanjing has allocated 10 million yuan (US$1.2 million) to help Ting's seminary build a new campus at Nanjing University in the city's eastern suburbs. The founding of the seminary 50 years ago reflected Chinese Protestants' desire for independence and self-improvement as well as their wish to develop China's own theological education, said Ye Xiaowen, head of the State Administration for Religious Affairs. Ye urged the staff and students of the seminary to further the reconstruction of Chinese theological thinking and make progress in line with China's development. Representatives of seminaries and churches from other countries and regions, including Hong Kong, Switzerland and the United States, joined the celebration and offered their congratulations. Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in the US city of Pasadena in California, highly praised the work done by the seminary and by Chinese Protestants as a whole. He noted that many Protestants in the United States were not well informed about the situation of Protestants in China. However, most of those who have visited the country were very impressed by the things happening in Chinese churches, he said. "We are impressed by not only so many people coming to worship here, so many churches and meeting places, but also by the positive co-operation between Protestants and the government, and the way that Protestants are doing very important things, such as serving the needs of the larger society, helping the poor and providing medical care to rural people," he said. The Nanjing Union Theological Seminary was founded via a union of 12 Protestant theological seminaries in eastern China in 1952, under the sponsorship and leadership of the National Committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. It merged with the Beijing-based Yanjing Union Theological Seminary in the summer of 1962 and became the sole national Protestant seminary in China.