Conservative Evangelicalism in Afro-Asian Relations: Calvin Chao and the Africa Inland Church
On Sunday 18th April 1965 two unfamiliar faces could be seen at the pulpit of an Africa Inland Church (AIC) service in Nairobi. Zhao Junying, better known as Calvin Chao, and his daughter Ruth were the honoured guests. Western missionaries from the AIC’s founding mission, the Africa Inland Mission (AIM), and Kenyan AIC leaders alike had gathered to hear Chao speak passionately of his work, his vision and of his experience as part of a week-long visit. The presence of a Chinese pastor in Kenya in 1965 underlines how conservative evangelicalism during decolonization and the Cold War was a vehicle for constructing Afro-Asian transnational connections which have for the most part been overlooked in scholarship. This case can thereby be used to challenge assumptions regarding the overarching secularity of Afro-Asian exchange, opening up new fields for enquiry.
Pastor Calvin Chao has been described as a ‘leading light’ in Asian evangelicalism, particularly amongst Chinese adherents. In 1945 Chao had founded the Chinese Inter-Varsity movement, a conservative evangelical student ministry which far outstripped its liberal Christian counterparts in terms of membership and impetus. Having left China in 1948 due to the communist emergence, in 1952 he was named as the inaugural president of Singapore Bible College (SBC), a position he held for four years, albeit in an acting capacity. In 1956 he and his family moved to America where he established a collection of churches and a missionary enterprise under the moniker Chinese for Christ (CFC), as Chao evangelised across both Asia and the US. Like Chao’s work in China, CFC focused upon student ministry amongst the Chinese diaspora.
Chao’s visit to Kenya in April 1965, therefore, was somewhat of an anomaly for him and his missionary work, which mostly focused on Chinese ministry in the vernacular. At face value it was merely a stopover on a return to the USA from an evangelistic tour in Southeast Asia. Yet the reasons why he chose to arrange his travel through Kenya and paused there to preach for several days are unclear. Certainly, his connections in the conservative evangelical missionary community had forged links between himself and the AIM. It was the AIM who hosted Chao during his time in Kenya and they were keen to hear from him. Their Kenya Field Director at the time, Erik Barnett, excitedly reported Chao’s presence and impact amongst Kenyan Christians, and urged the mission to ‘follow up on any interest [Chao] shows in terms of support’.
One explanation is that Chao’s vehement anti-communism made East Africa an area of interest to him as nations such as Kenya and Tanzania gained independence in the early 1960s. It was in the mid-1960s, around the same time as Chao’s trip to Kenya, that Tanzanian links with Maoist China were beginning to gain real traction. In Kenya, whilst the early years of the new Kenyatta regime had allayed initial fears about the emergence of communism, it was less than a decade previously that Kenyatta himself had been accused of Marxist sympathies due to his time in Moscow, and in the Cold War context rumours abounded of communist infiltration across the new nation.[1] Whilst communist links with Tanzania have been subject to a good deal of focus (as in George Roberts’ and Ruodi Duan’s pieces on this blog) other Sino-East African connections in this period have not attracted a great deal of attention, let alone in the religious sphere.
The character of global conservative evangelicalism was subject to complex negotiations in the post-war decades as it emerged as a non-state factor in global governance, exerting influence over the political and socio-cultural arenas. For the most part however its anti-communist disposition was without question, a trait which further reinforces the relevance of Afro-Asian evangelical solidarities during the Cold War. For Chao politics and religion were intimately intertwined, and his experiences in China had left him convinced of communism’s threat to Christianity and the world. In 1961 he had even spoken out against communism on American television as part of Project Alert. Whilst Chao himself never gave a reason for his Kenyan layover, other conservative evangelicals, including many in the AIM, saw communism as a force competing with Christianity for the ‘loyalty of Africa’.
The visit was clearly more than a pitstop for Chao. His time in Kenya was spent meeting AIC pastors and giving his testimony, a task for which he reportedly showed great enthusiasm. Hindered by a lack of time and linguistic differences Chao was unable to proselytize amongst unconverted Kenyans, and instead focused his efforts towards providing guidance to AIC ministers and Church leaders. Chao’s zeal for these encounters was underlined when he floated the notion of sending Chinese missionaries to work in Kenya, an offer which was gleefully accepted although which failed to later materialise due to a lack of resources in the CFC. As one onlooker noted, ‘[Chao] does have a real heart burden for the work in Africa’.
Chao struck up a rapport with the President of the AIC, Andrew Wambari Gichuha, in particular. For almost a year after Chao’s departure the two continued to correspond, as Chao asserted his desire ‘to assist in the work’ of the AIC. Ultimately, no material or missionary help was forthcoming, yet Chao persisted in praying for the Kenyan Church. The importance of this sort of prayer network is often overlooked in historical analysis, yet they held, and continue to hold, great significance. Prayer was constantly championed as a critical force capable of channelling spiritual power, in doing so facilitating the transmission of information as subjects for prayer were communicated across borders and groups. For instance, in February of 1966 Chao informed Gichuha that he was praying for the AIC’s proposed Evangelical Fellowship of Kenya. Not only did solidarities exist between Chinese and Kenyan evangelicals then, but they were sharing information and ideas outside of the established global missionary networks which are too often seen as the primary arbiters of Christian worldwide interconnectivity in the mid-twentieth century.
Calvin Chao’s time in Kenya may have been brief, yet it demonstrates that Afro-Asian solidarities were being created in spheres other than the explicitly political. By virtue of their shared evangelicalism Chao and the AIC leadership were able to exchange understandings and construct connections within the global evangelical communion outside of established frameworks which were dominated for the most part by Western Christians. Whilst the lack of documentation regarding the minutiae of Chao’s trip hinders a more thorough analysis, it demonstrates the value of examining Christianity for transnational connections Afro-Asian or otherwise. As a religion with a universal scope in an age of globalization, Christian interconnections were a vehicle for the transmission of socio-cultural and political concepts, and as such these networks should be more strongly considered in our narratives of societal construction in the post-war decades.
[1] ‘Kenyatta Gets Full Freedom; Asks British for Political Rights: KENYATTA GIVEN FREEDOM IN KENYA’, The Associated Press, New York Times, Aug 22, 1961
Erik Barnett to Rev. Sidney Langford, 19/12/64, Billy Graham Center Archives, Africa Inland Mission Papers, Collection 81, Box 88, Folder 2
