Cheng Jingyi

Cheng Jingyi (誠靜怡 September 22, 1881, Beijing – Nov 15, 1939, Shanghai) was a Chinese Protestant Christian leader who worked for an independent, unified Chinese Christian Church and a nondenominational unity of Christians in China. He received honorary doctorates from Knox College, Toronto, Canada (1916); the College of Wooster, Ohio, USA (1923); and St. John's University, Shanghai (1929). He died in Shanghai after his visit to the mission work in southwest China and Guizhou in 1939.

Born to a Manchu pastor who had been converted to Christianity by a pastor of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in Beijing, Cheng was educated first at home in the Chinese classics, then attended the Anglo-Chinese Institute of the LMS, graduating in 1896. Less than a month before the outbreak of the Boxer Uprising Cheng finished four years of studies in theology in Tianjin, one of the hotspots of fighting during the Allied Intervention. Cheng volunteered an interpreter and stretcher-bearer for the Allied forces.

Cheng used his training in Classical Chinese to help George Owen of the LMS revise his translation of the New Testament before continuing his theological training at the Bible Institute in Glasgow, Scotland. He returned to China after his graduation in 1908. After his ordination in his home church, he was pastor to a newly independent church, the Mishi Hutung Church in the East City of Beijing, which was attended by a number of Chinese academics and professionals.

The World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 was a turning point in Cheng's career. The international mission movement had begun to recognize the need for "indigenization," that is, for developing native leadership. In an address that lasted only seven minutes, which one attendee called the best of the conference, Cheng called for a united Christian church with no denominational divisions and for missionaries to turn control over to national church leaders. Cheng's challenging words impressed John R. Mott, who had been pushing world leaders to give more importance to the "younger churches" and equal representation in their leadership. Mott had paid special attention to China, which he first visited in 1896. Cheng was the only Chinese member of the thirty-five member international Continuation Committee formed to carry out the Conference's mandates and was appointed secretary of the continuation committee of the National Missionary Conference in China, formed after John R. Mott's visit to China in 1913. Cheng, at that time not yet 30 years old, thus became an important member of what historian Daniel Bays calls the "Sino-Foreign Protestant Establishment," the mainstream missionary and Chinese church leadership.

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