Leaving China, Discovering Asia: Ex-China Missionaries and Singapore as Cold War “Christian Hub”

By Joshua Tan

In evangelical Christian circles, the trope of Singapore as the “Antioch of Asia” has routinely been deployed in triumph to describe the city-state’s unique role in spreading the Christian gospel across Asia in the 20th and 21st centuries. (The Roman city of Antioch played a central role in the spread of Christianity in the 4th century CE).¹ This idea of Singapore as a “Christian Capital,” as Robbie Goh argues, is not simply one of financial capital flows, but equally about how Christian agencies strategically cultivate transnational influences to produce an international “brand” of Singapore Christianity.

Historians of religious flows in colonial Southeast Asia have noted how Singapore, as a maritime Asian port, was, at least since the 19th century, equally a hub for missionary and religious movements in Asia.² Whereas sociologists of religion have focused on how the globalisation of Christianity in the 1980s – with the rise of evangelical megachurches, charismatic leaders and aggressive social services – shaped this identity as a Christian hub, historical scholarship has pointed towards the colonial era as another moment where British imperialism, colonial port networks and modernity, were crucial to shaping Singapore as a hub of Christian missions.³

Comparatively, the mid-century geopolitical transformations of Singapore’s decolonisation and role in the Cold War have been overlooked, even though its influence has been keenly felt in local Christian communities. Works of local church history like Bobby Sng’s In His Good Time, note the unmistakable role of “China-oriented (missionary) organizations,” which left China after the communist revolution of 1949, and sought to continue their work among the “10 million people of Chinese origin in Southeast Asia”.⁴

As Sng notes, this missionary mass migration – comprising mission organisations completely new to Singapore – indelibly shaped the trajectory of a new generation of churches in Singapore by staffing their leadership and providing financial support at a crucial time. However, despite their subsequent contributions to nation-building, these former China missionaries never saw their role in Singapore initially as solely supporting the local church. The expansion of their work into Singapore in the 1950s was closely tied with attempts to cultivate a hub to expand influence across the region as one node within a broader regional network.

This essay draws attention to how Protestant missionaries exiled from China after 1949 envisioned and cultivated Singapore as a “Chinese Christian Hub” in Cold War Asia, where they could sponsor new institutions to continue their missions. On one level, it attempts to answer the question – how did the missionary exodus from China shape Christianity in Singapore? At the same time, it also reveals how missionaries who arrived in Singapore were less concerned with local conditions and politics than they were looking for a “hub” in Free Asia where they could continue their work – chiefly among the overseas Chinese, whom they believed to share a particular cultural affinity.

Drawing on published resources held at the National Library Singapore’s Lee Kong Chian Research Library and the microfilm archives of the Conference for British Missionary Societies and International Missionary Council held at the National Archives of Singapore (NAS), this essay reveals the interactions between local Christians and ex-China missionaries in Singapore during the 1950s, and explores the extent to which missionaries reshaped the trajectories of local institutions, even as local elites leveraged missionary resources for their own agendas.

In answering these questions, this essay focuses on the establishment of two Christian Colleges: Singapore’s Trinity College (later Trinity Theological College, TTC) and Singapore Theological Seminary (later Singapore Bible College, SBC), both of which were sites for reproducing and cultivating clergy and lay-leadership for the church. Although subsequently memorialised as local institutions, these two colleges were initially intended as regional hubs for missionary work in the region and were enabled by a transnational web of affiliated institutions and personnel with American missionaries exiled from China.

In addition, they reveal divisions between two key groups of Christian elites – Western ecumenical missionaries and Chinese evangelicals – whose debates reveal multiple visions for Christian futures in postwar Singapore. Existing writings on the role of ex-China missionaries in 1950s Singapore and Malaya have focused extensively on the context of the Malayan Emergency, the anticommunist war, and the “Malayan New Villages,” which relied on the clandestine recruitment of a huge network of ex-China missionaries to staff the colonial government’s resettlement and development work among the rural Chinese.⁵ (During the Malayan Emergency (1948-60), colonial authorities resettled half a million rural dwellers in Malaya, mainly Chinese, to cut them off from the activities of the Malayan Communist Party.⁶) However, given the role of Singapore as a coordination center for this missionary activity and the emergence of both colleges as a site for reproducing Asian Christian elites, I argue that the education and clergy-training was a significant but overlooked site of Christian missions in Singapore.

From the outset, it is necessary to clarify the distinctions between the Christian College and Christian higher education, which has myriad meanings, including universities established by Christian missionaries, Christians engaging in academic or religious activities within secular institutions, and seminaries offering advanced degrees for clergy training.⁷ In this essay, I follow Joel Carpenter’s definition of “Christian Colleges” as institutions acknowledging or embracing a Christian identity and purpose in their mission and shaping aspects of their governance, curriculum, staffing, student body and campus life while acknowledging that both Trinity College and the Singapore Bible College, by the mid-1950s, were predominantly offering theological studies, with a stated mission of training clergy and lay-leaders for the church.

In this essay, I first situate the Cold War missionary exodus from China as part of a longer trajectory of religious mobilities and circulations between maritime South China and Southeast Asia, where Chinese Christianity was a significant part. Next, I introduce the process through which multiple Christian mission boards and Chinese Christian elites converged on Singapore as a space to found new institutions with commitments to cultivating a new generation of Christian clergy in postcolonial and Cold War Asia.

While this missionary exodus was trans-denominational and affected a whole range of actors from Seventh Day Adventists, Pentecostals, nondenominational fundamentalists and evangelicals, I focus chiefly on Trinity College and Singapore Theological Seminary to reveal tensions between Western ecumenical missionaries and Chinese evangelicals in 1950s Singapore, and the possibilities of Singapore as a Christian hub in Asia.

Both institutions were products of the 1950s, inseparable from the mass migrations of Christian missionaries out of China following the 1949 Chinese revolution and attendant interest in the Chinese diaspora in Free Asia as a counterweight to communist China. In addition, both relied heavily on U.S. funding and institutional relationships with American and British mission boards in their initial years, although those ties came separately from ecumenical Protestants (at Trinity College) and evangelicals (at Singapore Bible College).

Setting the Stage: Chinese Religious Circulations in Maritime South China and Cold War Ruptures

There is now extensive literature on the ways in which religion has been integral to the social and cultural lives of diasporic Chinese communities circulating across maritime South China. Seminal scholarship by anthropologist Kenneth Dean on the transregional networks of Daoist ritual communities across maritime South China, and Tan Chee Beng’s Chinese Religions in Malaysia, have provided important insights in a field of overseas Chinese history characterised by the dominance of secular elite, male, merchant and trade communities.⁸

Although the experiences of Chinese Christians have not always been represented in the writings of Chinese religious networks – a field distinct from church history – in recent times, scholars keenly interested in Chinese place-based identities, dialect-group and native place affiliations have made great strides in situating Christianity as a “Chinese religion”, and of significance in understanding the South Seas Chinese networks.⁹ Historical works such as Chris White’s Social Networks of Minnan Protestants, Joseph Tse-Hei Lee’s edited volume on Chaozhou Protestants and Jean DeBernardi’s long-term research on Christian brethren in Singapore and Penang have been exemplary works that have re-centered the Chinese Christian experience. Rhythms of Nanyang Chinese mobilities, tied to religious communities and networks, nourished these long-distance movements.

The massive ruptures to these transregional, maritime circulations in the middle of the 20th century can best be understood through a framework of the Cold War in Asia. Generally understood to refer to U.S.-Soviet rivalries and competing internationalisms of capitalism and communism, recent scholarship by Odd Arne Westad argues for a closer look at the geopolitical struggle for the future of the decolonising Third World, which “profoundly shaped the context in which regional and national change unfolded” in the Third World, particularly the U.S. led attempts to contain or isolate China by creating a new Cold War geography of Free Asia.¹⁰ As historians Michael Szonyi and Liu Hong argue, if the Cold War had ramifications “well beyond decisions about diplomatic and geopolitical orientation” of the new nation-states of Asia and implicated every aspect of culture and society (nationalism, revolution, independence, ethnic integration, and nation-building), religious life certainly was not left unscathed.¹¹

Chinese religious communities – both in China and the Chinese diaspora – were directly implicated because of the Chinese communist revolution, as multiple religious elites and leaders left China in the great exodus following the 1949 revolution, the U.S. economic embargo on China following the outbreak of the Korean War, and the Chinese communist leadership’s major criticisms of Christian missions as cultural imperialism. As historian Jack Chia argues in his path-breaking monograph on the Buddhist monastics on the Cold War “periphery” outside the People’s Republic of China, the “periphery became the center for Chinese Buddhism” at a moment when Buddhist elites feared persecution from the communist state.¹² Joshua Dao-Wei Sim, in a recent dissertation on transnational Chinese evangelicals, further reveals a de-territorialisation process of expansion where itinerant Chinese evangelists had already been experimenting with multiple nodes, extending their evangelistic work from China to the South Seas and even North America between the 1940s to 60s.

This abrupt rupture of links among Chinese Christians and South Seas communities, and the conflation of evangelical Christianity with virulent anticommunism in North America and many other U.S.-allied states in Asia led historian and theologian Philip Wickeri to describe Protestantism in East Asia as a “Cold War Religion”, which requires a process of de-Cold War to fully account for this “unfinished history” of Protestantism in East Asia that was shaped by the partitioned states and impenetrable borders across the Taiwan Straits, the divided Koreas and Vietnams.¹³ However, this re-territorialisation of “China missions” among the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia was also a generative process that saw new connections where there was previously none. In this regard, what Robbie Goh regards as the Christian hubs of Asia – Manila, Seoul, Hong Kong and Singapore – were largely enabled by religious flows that were products of the Cold War.¹⁴

The Missionary Exodus from China and Christian Higher Education in Singapore

The missionary exodus to Singapore following the 1949 Chinese revolution was reminiscent of earlier historical moments – such as in the late Qing dynasty – when Western missionaries, prevented from operating freely in China, simply redirected their resources to the diasporic periphery.¹⁵ And yet, the mid-20th century saw a much larger, diverse and well-integrated contingent of missionaries who already had multiple generations of experience in China, many of whom were, in fact, China-born and possessed the linguistic and cultural affinity with China. At the same time, the exodus also comprised Chinese Christian evangelists and pastors, who had left China alongside the Western missionaries in the same period. Finally, in the diaspora, they encountered already thriving Chinese-speaking churches, which had been well-established in the prior decades. For instance, in Singapore in 1950, there were already 150,000 Chinese Protestants, with an active organisation and unity around a Chinese Inter-Church Union founded in 1931 to coordinate the Chinese-speaking Protestant community.¹⁶

A precise estimate of the total number of missionaries who arrived in Singapore and Malaya is unavailable, but from statistics compiled surrounding New Village work, at least 400 missionaries from all mission boards had been working in over 333 New Villages in the Malayan Federation, of which 111 ex-China missionaries were from British missionary boards (compiled by the Conference for British Missionary Societies). Most others were American Protestants with no collective governing body, and European missionaries representing the various Catholic orders. 130 missionaries from the British evangelical China Inland Mission (CIM), one of the largest groups to relocate their headquarters from Shanghai to Singapore, arrived in 1952, although many remained only briefly in the colony and were scattered across other missionary “fields”, including Thailand, the Philippines, Malaya and Taiwan.¹⁷

Beyond the New Villages, these ex-China missionary personnel and resources, in fact, enabled the founding of numerous educational, student and/or youth-oriented institutions in postwar Singapore, which subsequently became an integral part of the city’s postwar religious and educational landscape. Given ongoing anxieties about “overseas Chinese students” returning to China to contribute to rebuilding a “new China” and the socialist revolution, much of this missionary presence was concerned with youth and educational initiatives, with the aim of expanding higher educational facilities to retain the Chinese youth within Free Asia.

In Singapore, the Chinese YMCA, the Jesuit Hostel (Kingsmead Hall, founded by the Irish Jesuits as a hostel for students at the government founded Teachers’ Training College), Trinity College (which included a Chinese department since 1952), the Catholic Central Bureau (close to Catholic High School), were all products of this missionary exodus. In fact, the landmark announcement of the inauguration of Chinese-language Nanyang University also sparked interest among ex-China missionaries. Among the teaching staff in Nanyang University’s Department of Modern Languages were Paul and Maida Contento of the CIM and the German Franciscan Fr. Guido Goerdes, all of whom joined the inaugural faculty of Nanyang University and lived on the campus, as part of their clandestine agenda to check communism and spread Christianity.¹⁸

Attempts among missionaries to affiliate or participate in intellectual life within the secular universities never materialised. Fearing reprisal from Muslim leaders in the Federation, university leadership eschewed recruitment of any missionary professors when faced with initial interest among mission boards to recruit professors from among the ex-China missionaries.¹⁹ A short-lived Christian hostel at the University of Malaya was an ultimately futile attempt to create some sort of synthesis and was only approved conditionally because of a large capital grant from the United Board for Christian Higher Education in China.

However, the various mission boards were much more successful in sponsoring theological colleges. Two major institutions, Trinity College and Singapore Theological Seminary, were products of this overall ferment, although they were largely separate institutions, tied to the worlds of ecumenical Protestantism and Chinese evangelicalism respectively. Although scholars have pointed to language differences (English/Chinese) or theological differences (liberals/conservatives) between the two institutions, theologian Michael Nai-Chiu Poon posits that it was, more significantly, the anticolonial sentiments among the local Chinese that thoroughly discredited Trinity College as an educational venture that was led exclusively by a Western missionary leadership.²⁰ And yet, the Chinese evangelical Singapore Theological Seminary was also largely U.S. funded and backed by Western missionaries, but it was Chinese evangelicals who were at the forefront of leading the institution.

Trinity College and the Limits of an Ecumenical Intellectual Hub

Arguably, the most prominent institution that captured the energies of the locally based Western missionaries and church leaders was the foundation of Trinity College in 1948. Institutional histories of Trinity Theological College will have already been recounted elsewhere, and so a brief summary here will suffice.²¹

The college traces its roots to pre-war American Methodist educational work in Singapore and Malaya; its direct predecessor was pre-war plans for a Methodist Theological College (old grounds of Eveland seminary at 8 Mt. Sophia), which was energised by wartime ecumenical cooperation among incarcerated British and American missionaries at the Changi internment camp. Founded in 1948 as a “Union College and Training School” – with American Methodist personnel and funding, and nominal representation from the Anglicans and English Presbyterians – the early cohorts of students were taught by a small group of missionary teachers and engaged in a variety of religious and secular education.²²

From the outset, Trinity College as an ecumenical union college was also closely connected with the Malayan Christian Council (MCC), an ecumenical interdenominational body aimed at promoting Christian unity among multiple Christian denominations and organisations in Singapore and Malaya. That many of the missionary leaders of the MCC were also faculty at Trinity College and residing on its premises, further consolidated this close relationship. Interestingly, among the early cohorts of Trinity graduates, the identity of a Christian vocational training school was still strong, and the first graduating cohort of four students in 1951, for instance, saw only two studying for the licentiate in theology, while other two studied Kindergarten Sciences and Home Economics respectively; a balance which was increasingly skewed in favour of the training in secular subjects or preparation to being middle school teachers.²³

In this initial period, it was not uncommon for Trinity College students to claim their “purpose to enter the ministry” as teaching in a middle school, Christian or government, might offer as great a field for Christian service as did the ministry”.²⁴ That many of the Trinity College students – both in theological and training college – were concurrently serving as middle school teachers while studying at the college, was evidence of this.²⁵ In fact, to discourage the independent founding of a theologically conservative Chinese college by the Chinese Inter-Church Union, a Chinese Department was founded within Trinity College in 1951 with 27 students. However, only six were registered in regular courses in theology, the rest studied secular subjects and were on track to teaching careers as middle school teachers.²⁶

In its first decade, Trinity College was dominated by Western missionary leadership, who, despite rhetorical claims to cultivating an Asian leadership, largely shaped the trajectory of the institution. Initially, there were considerable debates among missionaries in Britain and the U.S. surrounding the question of whether Trinity College should be cultivated for training ministers for Malaya or as a “first-class Theological Training School of high grade for Southeast Asia which would operate for the benefit of more than one country.” Both strategic objectives were deserving of attention and action.²⁷ However, by September 1951, in soliciting support from the U.S., Archdeacon Woods (Chairman of the Trinity College Board in Singapore) had affirmed the latter in his “urgent appeal” for British and American missionary aid to provide Trinity College with personnel and funding for accommodation for staff, students, classrooms and a student bursary. Making a case for Trinity College’s strategic importance, he noted that “a Union College in Singapore would also be in a position to serve all the churches in [Southeast] Asia”, while cultivating future leaders of the Chinese Churches at a moment when mission boards were cut off from their sponsored institutions in China.²⁸

This vision resonated most directly with the Nanking Theological Seminary Board of Founders, an American mission board that was, at that time, deliberating how to redirect income from Nanking Seminary to carry out the purposes of the Board for Chinese churches and large Chinese populations elsewhere in Asia. Between 1951 and 1952, they had appointed ex-China missionaries C. Stanley Smith and Sidney Anderson to undertake an extensive mission, traveling across India, Burma, Hong Kong, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Tokyo and Formosa, to identify sites of aid. Singapore – as they identified – was a useful hub for the Mission Board, given the high density of Chinese people and the willingness of governing authorities to receive U.S. financial aid. The commitments of the Board of Founders, however, were geared toward theological education and clergy training rather than broader social and developmental needs – they were foremost concerned with staffing the church. In addition, as Smith would recall in his report to the Board in New York, where the students at Trinity College saw a demand for middle school teachers, Smith argued that the “crying need” was for trained leadership in Southeast Asia’s Chinese churches, which were in danger of being overrun by “divisive sects” dominated by independent Chinese evangelicals.²⁹

The major windfall for Singapore’s Trinity College ultimately came in 1952, when the Nanking Board of Founders voted to provide financial support. The American board’s affirmation of the institution, and the permanent move of missionary C. Stanley Smith (between 1954–56) to Singapore as the College’s principal, placed the College on surer footing. The influence of American funding and personnel also re-shaped the institution and its trajectory considerably. Already, since the college’s inauguration, American Methodists had dwarfed Anglicans and English Presbyterians; by 1952, the one-time grant of $4,000 from the British Christian Universities Board for the salary of one professor (Frank Balachin of the London Missionary Society) had been completely eclipsed by the American Nanking Board of Founders’ $50,000 capital grant for the renovation of the College’s Chinese Department (6 Sophia Road), as well as continued support for student scholarships, faculty aid, and more.³⁰ Subsequently, what acting principal Runyan described in 1952 as an “affiliated relationship” with the Nanking Board, helped Trinity College realise the possibilities of its strategic location in Southeast Asia.³¹

By 1954, the educational offerings at Trinity College had both expanded and contracted considerably. Affirming its role as a Theological School rather than a Training College, the institution was renamed Trinity Theological College, an important regional coordination center among the Nanking Founders’ network of sponsored institutions in Asia. Academic programmes in non-theological subjects were phased out by 1956, while two degree tracks in theological studies were offered instead, in both English and Chinese. Students were drawn from across the region, and this role as a regional “hub” would later be consolidated by TTC’s prominent role in the Association for Theological Education in Southeast Asia (ATSSEA), the regional coordinating body of theological education in Asia – from the drafting of its constitution in 1957, hosting its summer theological institutes (1957–63), publishing its flagship publication South East Asia Journal of Theology (1959–82), to being the headquarters of ATSSEA (1959–74, 1981–98).³² John Fleming, inaugural head of the MCC, who was also on the Trinity College faculty and later head of the ATSSEA, no doubt played a major role in establishing these connections with ecumenical Protestantism in Asia.

Furthermore, by the mid-1950s, professors from the distinguished ranks of ex-China missionaries who had long careers in education in Chinese institutions, such as F. Olin Stockwell, started arriving in Singapore, bringing with them longtime professional and personal connections to the world of ecumenical Protestantism. Indeed, this first postwar generation of faculty was largely staffed by the generation of distinguished ex-China missionaries, such as English Presbyterian John Fleming. This missionary influx, in turn, stimulated a wave of reconnection between missionary educators and graduates of their sponsored institutions in China. For example, Anna Ling Yueh-Hsi, a graduate of Nanking Theological Seminary, and Enid Liu (Liu Bao-Ying), a graduate of Ginling Women’s College, who were likewise new arrivals to Malaya and Singapore in the early 1950s, reconnected with their missionary teachers from decades back in China, and were invited to join the faculty of Trinity College.³³ This eventually paved the way towards Asian leadership of the church and college, with its first Asian principal, Reverend Timothy Chow, theologian and pastor from Hong Kong, appointed in 1968.³⁴

Singapore Theological Seminary (Bible College) and a Chinese Evangelical Hub

The case of the Singapore Theological Seminary (later renamed Singapore Bible College) and its solicitation of British and American missionary sponsorship represents a variation on the same theme. The crucial difference, however, lies in the major protagonists in the institution-building project, which, in this case, was the conservative evangelical Chinese Inter-Church Union. As previously mentioned, the Chinese Inter-Church Union, which had been founded in 1931 on Double Tenth (the anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China on 10 October 1911), had, in parallel to the founding of Trinity College, been seeking to establish a conservative school for the Chinese-speaking churches.³⁵ In the 1930s, following their successful hosting of the evangelistic rallies by the itinerant Chinese revivalist John Sung, the Chinese Inter-Church Union successfully founded the Chin Lien Bible Seminary and were keen to expand their educational offerings.³⁶ Although it would be too simplistic to map liberal-conservative theological cleavages onto the Chinese and English-speaking divide, the Chinese Inter-Church Union was very critical of the liberalism of some Western missionaries and did not support the ecumenical Trinity College or the MCC, even though some member churches were still affiliated individually.

The leadership of the Chinese Inter-Church Union, nevertheless, also sought to benefit from the missionary exodus from China, cultivating missionary ties across evangelical/fundamentalist groups that were likewise in the process of searching for new mission fields beyond China. Two examples that emerged as an active presence in 1950s Singapore were the China Inland Mission (CIM) and the Chinese Native Evangelical Crusade (CNEC), both actively seeking to continue their mission work among the Chinese diaspora. In 1951, they sent representatives across Asia – including Singapore – to explore new possibilities. The Chinese Inter-Church Union, faced with the challenge of the more liberal, Western-led Trinity College, sought to leverage CIM/CNEC aid for their own independent seminary. In a letter to Leslie Lyall and Steed, the two CIM missionaries on a survey of Malaya, the Chinese Inter-Church Union’s President Quek Keng Hoon wrote enthusiastically of a possible partnership:

“Since the door for the gospel is closed in China, and Chinese overseas have opened the door for missionaries, is this not an indication of the Will of God that He wants your mission to work in [Southeast] Asia? There are about 3,000,000 Chinese in Malaya, but the Christian community is not even one percent, and there are still 70 or 80 percent who have not yet heard the gospel... This is enough to challenge your Mission, who love the Chinese so much, to turn your work at once to Malaya, of which Singapore is the center, and to send several teams of workers who know Chinese to cope with the need...”.³⁷

Despite his well-known anti-foreign, anti-Western sentiments, Quek was not uniformly opposed to missionary aid but instead sought to strategically leverage financial and personnel support from Western evangelicals. For instance, the British evangelical CIM already had a long history of conflict with ecumenical missionaries in China, and Quek, in his correspondence to the CIM, even slightly modified the name of the “Church of Christ in China 中华基督教会” because of its prior affiliations with ecumenism in China, instead renaming it “overseas Chinese” (or Huaqiao 华侨基督教会 in Chinese) Church of Christ to mark a distinction.

It is uncertain to what extent local Chinese church elites convinced CIM leadership of Singapore’s promise as a new missionary hub in Asia, but by late 1951, following lengthy deliberations, CIM had voted to relocate its entire mission organisation to Singapore. Their promise not to be involved in college administration as long as they were united in a shared confessional statement of faith made the CIM a fortuitous source of assistance to the Seminary.

From its arrival in Singapore in 1952 with an initial contingent of 130 missionaries (33 of whom were permanently based in Singapore and Malaya), CIM provided the Seminary with a seemingly limitless supply of teaching staff. The most prominent were E.N. Poulson, who arrived from the U.S. to head its English Department, and Paul Contento, who lived at Nanyang University as a part-time teacher of English but also taught at the Seminary.

More importantly, with its missionary headquarters in Singapore, CIM missionaries on furlough or passing through Singapore would teach at the Seminary (later renamed the Singapore Bible College, or SBC, in 1955) on an ad hoc basis. In fondly recalling the contributions of missionary Arnold J. Lea, Assistant General Director of the CIM (later renamed the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, or OMF) and Board Member of the Singapore Theological Seminary/ Singapore Bible College (1952–69), the College’s 25th anniversary publication would recall that the majority of full-time teaching staff in both the English and Mandarin Sections over 19 years had come from OMF. “The loan of so many teachers for whom OMF has been completely responsible over 19 years, [was] no small contribution to the college”.³⁸

The SBC’s solicitation of support from the CNEC further illustrates the ways in which transnational Chinese evangelical networks converged at the College. An American missionary organisation founded in 1943 by Christian business elites and missionaries with prior experience in China, founding members of the CNEC had been closely affiliated with CIM’s work in China but emphasised a heavier use of itinerant Chinese evangelists rather than Western missionaries, seeing themselves as proponents of a localised Christianity.³⁹

Calvin Chao, a representative of the CNEC who arrived in Singapore in 1951 alongside Victor Savage, ingratiated himself into the Chinese Inter-Church Union and was immediately appointed its spiritual director, responsible for “deepening its evangelistic and spiritual life”.⁴⁰ As Peter Lim and So Wui Ying’s research has noted, Chao was already a well-known, charismatic evangelist who had a vision of education as core to Christian evangelism, previously eschewing church building in favor of a Bible School, which could “train tens of thousands of pastors for the church” rather than simply profiting one local church.⁴¹

In institutional histories of the SBC, it was Chao’s vision of Singapore as “the center of culture and commerce in South East Asia, [and] where the Truth of God is preserved and propagated” that made a strong case for a new college. As an evangelist with deep ties to American evangelical missionary circles in Republican China, Chao’s personal networks in turn, enabled him to solicit funding in the U.S., securing a US$5,000 ($15,000 Malayan dollars) grant from the Crowell Trust for evangelical education in 1953, which allowed them to purchase a permanent campus at No. 1 Barker Road.⁴²

American missionaries C. Stanley Smith and Sidney Anderson of the Nanking Seminary Board of Founders, who were visiting Singapore just as the SBC had formed its board of directors in February 1952, no doubt had individuals like Chao in mind when they pointed out the presence of “foot-loose, freelance Chinese evangelists who [had] come to regard this part of Asia as their happy hunting ground, whose influence has been in many cases, pernicious”.⁴³ Smith and Anderson disliked the conservatism of these Chinese evangelists, given their literalistist view of the Bible, what they regarded as an emphasis on peripheral aspects of Biblical teaching rather than the great central themes, aggressive evangelistic programmes, all divisive forces within the church.⁴⁴

To be sure, the theological and ecclesiastical divides hampered any meaningful cooperation between these groups. Conservative evangelicals like Calvin Chao may have produced divisions along evangelical-ecumenical lines but also produced new regional networks which are worth noting, where their Singapore institutions were merely one node in broader interconnected evangelistic circuits. Chao, who was Acting Principal of the Singapore Bible College (SBC) from 1952–56, was also in the process of founding a Chinese Christian student center in the Philippines, as well as a “Chinese for Christ” student movement in the U.S. In this regard, his transnational mobilities were flexible, as he was able to leverage multiple missionary connections to expand his influence and network across Asia and the Pacific. Although he left Singapore in 1957, representing Chinese for Christ Inc., he continued to be listed on the Honorary Board Directors of the College until 1969.⁴⁵

What is interesting about the institutional memory of the SBC – usually recalled as an exemplary case of Chinese Christian initiative for the Chinese-speaking churches – is that it was also led by foreign leadership, funded by U.S. capital, while providing an outlet for clergy training to staff the Chinese churches in Singapore, at a moment when it was no longer possible to recruit clergy from China. The SBC’s final point of “rootedness” was the purchase of its 9-11 Adam Road site, where the College still stands today.⁴⁶ Yet, despite strong support from local Chinese churches, there were few attempts to articulate contextual theology commensurate with decolonisation. Instead, the SBC’s faculty and curricular offerings remained increasingly wedded to the worlds of American evangelicalism/fundamentalism, as evidenced by the evangelical intellectual networks within which they participated.⁴⁷

In this regard, SBC emerged as one node within an interconnected Chinese evangelical world – with hubs across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and especially the U.S. – while the gap between the secular University of Malaya across the road and the ecumenical seminary was simply insurmountable. Ironically, by the 1970s, when Trinity College was shoring off Western missionary leadership and articulating contextual Asian theologies, it was SBC further consolidating its relationship with CIM (now renamed the Overseas Missionary Fellowship) to establish a graduate department in the form of a discipleship training center to produce missionaries.

Conclusion

In the over seven decades since their founding, both institutions have become well integrated into Christian community life in Singapore and have educated multiple generations of leadership for various local and regional churches. Indeed, Trinity Theological College now identifies fully as a “Singaporean theological institution” with a predominantly Singaporean faculty, student body and donor base, and a fully Singaporean Board of Governors as of 2016.⁴⁸ Singapore Bible College, while retaining the representation of OMF and CNEC on its Board of Directors, is headed by an illustrious cast of Singaporean Chinese Christian men.

Produced and enabled by the post-1949 missionary exodus from China, neither institution ultimately emerged as the promised intellectual, theological, Christian hub of Free Asia. (Although by the 1990s, Trinity Theological College’s sponsorship from the Nanking Seminary Board of Founders led it back to China in an institutional relationship with Nanking Theological Seminary and a postgraduate programme for seminarians and faculty in China.)⁴⁹ This “symbolic reuniting of two separated siblings” as Bishop John Chew noted in October 1993 while hosting Nanking Theological Seminary delegates in Singapore, marked a high-point in the “returns” of these China missionary resources – via Singapore – back to serving the church on the mainland.

And yet, the myriad of impacts and legacies of the missionary exodus from China can still be felt not only by the presence of College graduates in public life but, more importantly, in the institutional and intellectual connections established in the 1950s. Attempting to explain the failure of ecumenical Protestantism to gain support from the large and influential Chinese-speaking Christian community in the 1950s, Michael Poon notes that the Chinese Inter-Church Union was, in fact, an alternative iteration of ecumenism – albeit from an ethnic (Chinese) nationalist perspective that was revivalist, evangelical, and not always legible to Western missionary observers.⁵⁰ Thus, we might see the tension between the two colleges as one iteration of this rivalry. And yet, I propose that a more important commonality was the cultivation of Transpacific (particularly American) networks, which indelibly shaped Protestantism in postwar Singapore.

Tracing the transition of the 1950s, where the theological resources of British missionaries in the crown colony of Singapore were completely eclipsed by American influence, Poon notes that the Chinese evangelicals were better positioned to leverage this aid and represent local Chinese anticolonialism than the ecumenical missionaries at Trinity College.⁵¹ With the accelerating influence of American capitalism in post-independence Singapore and its attendant cultural and human flows – evangelical Christianity became one of its most visible exports, as evidenced by the religious resurgence and growth of Pentecostal Christianity in 1990s Singapore.⁵² In that regard, we might see the institutional connections established in the 1950s as an important but overlooked backdrop to this subsequent phenomenon.

About the Author
Joshua Tan is a historian of modern China and the Chinese diaspora, with an interest in the religious and educational politics in Cold War Asia. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the department of history at the National University of Singapore and is working on a book about American-Asian educational partnerships during the Cold War.