Bread of Life Church

The Bread of Life Church (simplified Chinese: 灵粮堂; traditional Chinese: 靈糧堂; pinyin: Ling Liang Tang), is an independent Chinese church that was founded in Shanghai, Republic of China in 1942, which churches today in different parts of Asia, Australia, and North America.[1]

History

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the International Settlement in Shanghai was seized by Japanese troops in December 1941, putting a stop to Western missions in the region. The next year, in June 1942, the Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor Timothy Dzao (Chinese: 趙世光; pinyin: Zhao Shiguang; 1908-1973) established the Bread of Life Church in Shanghai.[2] It aspired to be an indigenous church which followed the three-self principle.[1]

By the time of the communist victory in mainland China, Dzao moved his headquarters first to Hong Kong in 1949,[1] before moving it to Taipei, Taiwan in 1954. When Nathaniel Chow (Chinese: 周神助; pinyin: Zhou Shenzhu; born 1941) became the senior pastor of the Bread of Life Church in Taipei (1977-2011), the church began have a stronger emphasis on a charismatic infilling of the Holy Spirit.[3]

The church eventually started a seminary in 1990 and, in 2005, the church was reported to have 33,132 members in Taiwan and 134 churches have been planted all around the world.[4]

Today there are currently 306 churches all over the world.

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gollark: What? No. Search engines are hard.
gollark: osmarks.net™ search engine™ plus™ will of course:- have working crawler logic probably- be faster somehow, as opposed to slower- use postgres FTS instead of a homegrown and not very good inverted index
gollark: So the crawler got links slightly wrong in certain situations and also it took 60 seconds to search anything.

References
  1. Tiedemann, R. G. (2009). "Ling Liang Church". Reference Guide to Christian Missionary Societies in China: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. New York: Routledge. p. 245. ISBN 9781315497327.
  2. Lian Xi (2010). Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. p. 194. ISBN 978-0-300-12339-5.
  3. Synan, Vinson; Yong, Amos, eds. (2016). Global Renewal Christianity: Asia and Oceania Spirit-Empowered Movement: Past, Present, and Future. Charisma Media. pp. 135–136. ISBN 978-1-62998-688-3.
  4. Lo Lung-Kwong (2011). "Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau". In Peter C. Phan (ed.). Christianities in Asia. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 178–179. ISBN 978-1-4443-9260-9.
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