Taylor dresses as a Chinese man
Inculturation in 19th-century China
James Hudson Taylor arrives in Shanghai in 1854 as a twenty-one-year-old missionary from a Yorkshire working-class family. He has taught himself Chinese before leaving England — learning from a missionary handbook and correspondence, without a teacher, while working as a medical assistant.
He immediately sees what the established missionaries in Shanghai do not want to see: that the Western missionaries living in foreign concessions, wearing Western clothes, eating Western food, socializing primarily with other Europeans, are unreachable to most Chinese people.
He does something that makes him an outcast in the missionary community: he shaves the front of his head in the Chinese fashion, grows a queue, and begins wearing Chinese clothes. He moves out of the European concession into the Chinese quarter of the city.
The reaction from other missionaries ranges from bewilderment to contempt. He is accused of going native. He is told that presenting himself as Chinese is dishonest, that it blurs the distinction between the Christian missionary and the Chinese population.
Taylor's response: the gospel is not a Western religion. The Christ who speaks to the Chinese heart does not need to arrive wearing a Victorian suit and speaking through an interpreter about British customs.
His model — the missionary who adapts to the culture rather than requiring the culture to adapt to the missionary — becomes the standard for the China Inland Mission and eventually for most evangelical mission in the twentieth century.
“If I could become a Chinaman in all but sin in order to save Chinamen, I would do it.”
— J. Hudson Taylor, c. 1853 AD
“For though I was free from all, I brought myself under bondage to all, that I might gain the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain those who are under the law;”
Taylor's colleagues accused him of going native. He was doing what Paul did.
I became as a Jew to win Jews. To the weak I became weak. I have become all things to all people that by all means I might save some.
The principle is not compromise. It is love — the willingness to set aside the preferences and customs and conveniences of your own background in order to be receivable to the people you are trying to reach.
The gospel arrives in every culture in a cultural package. The question is whether you are delivering the gospel or the package — and whether you can tell the difference.
What cultural package are you presenting as the gospel to people who cannot receive the package? And what would the gospel look like, stripped of it?