About Christian Weekly

Christian Weekly

A Chinese-language church newspaper published in Hong Kong since 1964

Christian Weekly (Chinese: 基督教週報; pinyin: Jidujiao Zhoubao) is a Chinese-language weekly newspaper published in Hong Kong by the Hong Kong Chinese Christian Churches Union (HKCCCU). Founded on 30 August 1964, it is one of the oldest Christian publications in Hong Kong and, together with the Christian Times, one of the two Chinese Christian newspapers in the territory. The Yale Divinity Library describes it as a newspaper that documents the activities of Christian churches and organisations in Hong Kong, including schools and social welfare services institutes, and that also carries articles on Christian life and education, theology and faith, and information on Christian activities in Taiwan and mainland China. Its official website is christianweekly.net, where the issue current at the time of research was numbered 3244, a running total that reflects more than six decades of weekly publication.

The newspaper's stated purposes are threefold: to report Christian news, to cultivate Christian spirituality, and to promote Christian truth. In practice that has made it a representative voice of the Hong Kong church — a shared platform on which congregations of many denominations publish their news and express their views, rather than the house organ of a single denomination. Its writers, according to the Yale Divinity Library's description, include laypeople as well as prominent evangelists and pastors.

Founding on 30 August 1964 and the calligraphed title

The Christian Weekly was founded by the Hong Kong Chinese Christian Churches Union on 30 August 1964. Its masthead title was written in the inscription of Liang Hancao (梁寒操), described in the newspaper's own jubilee history as a talented scholar of Guangdong. The founding purpose, as recorded in the Union's history, was to promote the spreading of the Gospel through written texts and to give the churches a platform on which to express their views — a publishing ministry that sat alongside the Union's other common ministries in literature, medicine, education and charitable welfare.

From its establishment the newspaper appeared every Sunday, a rhythm it sustained for fifty years by the time of its golden jubilee and continues today. A Sunday weekly fits the life of its readership: it is read in the context of congregational worship, carries the news of the churches for the week ahead, and gives pastors and lay writers a regular dated forum. The continuity of that Sunday cycle is visible in the newspaper's numbering — from issue no. 1 in 1964, through issue no. 2572 in 2013 at the end of the digitised run described below, to issue no. 3244 on its official website in October 2026.

The publisher: the Hong Kong Chinese Christian Churches Union

The publisher, the Hong Kong Chinese Christian Churches Union (香港華人基督教聯會), is an inter-denominational organisation of Chinese Christian churches in Hong Kong. It was founded in 1915 by seven Protestant churches and traditions: the Anglican Church, the London Missionary Society (whose work continued in the Church of Christ in China), the Basel Mission (the Tsung Tsin Mission), the Methodist Church, the Rhenish Mission, the Congregational Church and the Baptist Church. In 1948 the Union was registered as a legal organisation, under Hong Kong Register of Societies No. 1025. It is regarded, alongside the Hong Kong Christian Council (formed in 1954), as one of the two largest Christian organisations in Hong Kong.

The Union has grown steadily from its seven founding traditions. The Yale Divinity Library's collection page lists 354 member churches from different denominations, while the Union's own church directory, as displayed on its official website in September 2025, listed 414 member churches, with a total of more than 400,000 believers. All member churches, regardless of denomination or size, enjoy equal rights and obligations, and apart from the regulations in its constitution the Union does not interfere in the internal administration of member churches. Its highest body is the Member Churches Representative Assembly, which meets annually in April and October; below it sits a Board of Directors meeting every two months, and below that an Executive Board.

The Union's stated missions explain why a newspaper sits at the centre of its work. They are to spread the Gospel; to connect the Chinese Christian churches in Hong Kong; to promote a spirit of mutual assistance among church members; to carry out the common ministries of the churches, such as literature, medicine, education and other charitable welfare ministries; and to manage cemeteries, non-profit nursing homes, schools, camps, clinics, hospitals and medical ministries. Publishing — the ministry embodied by Christian Weekly — is named first among those common ministries, under literature.

What the newspaper publishes

Christian Weekly reports Hong Kong church news and publishes articles on spiritual cultivation, sharing, Bible study, theological analysis, faith and daily life, responses to current affairs, and family counselling. The Yale Divinity Library's fuller description of its content areas adds church news and activities from member congregations; Christian education and theological reflection; social welfare and community service initiatives; the educational institutions operated by Christian organisations; medical missions and healthcare services; evangelism and missionary work; Christian responses to contemporary social issues; and news from Christian communities in Taiwan and mainland China.

The balance of that contents list is distinctive. This is not a general newspaper with a religion page, nor a purely devotional magazine. It is a church newspaper in the full sense: the institutional record of a large Protestant community — its congregations, schools, welfare agencies and hospitals — combined with teaching and reflection intended to cultivate the faith of individual readers. Its coverage of church activities in mainland China and Taiwan also gives it a wider Chinese Christian horizon than a purely local bulletin would have, a feature researchers single out when using it as a source.

The current online edition shows the same architecture in digital form. The official site presents each issue with headline news stories, a section of church and institutional notices, recommended features, and a wide range of signed columns — including columns on the voice of the church, biblical exposition and preaching, urban spirituality, church history in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, and the stories of earlier generations of Hong Kong Christians associated with the Union's cemeteries. The column structure confirms, in present-day form, the mix of news, teaching, history and reflection documented for the print newspaper.

One of two Chinese Christian newspapers in Hong Kong

Hong Kong's Protestant community is served by exactly two Chinese-language Christian weekly newspapers: Christian Weekly and the Christian Times. The Hong Kong Yearbook, the Hong Kong government's annual survey, lists the two together among the Protestant community's media, audio-visual production and art groups, noting that they present news and comments from a Christian perspective. The Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong publishes its own separate pair of weekly newspapers, the Chinese-language Kung Kao Po and the English-language Sunday Examiner, which makes the Christian Weekly and Christian Times pair specifically the Protestant Chinese-language church press.

The wider community the newspaper serves is substantial. Christianity has been present in Hong Kong since 1841, and by 2022 there were about 1.3 million Christians in Hong Kong, most of them Protestant (around 900,000) alongside around 401,000 Catholics. The Protestant community recorded in the Hong Kong Yearbook runs more than 630 schools, over 35 theological schools, dozens of Christian publishing houses and more than a hundred Christian bookstores — institutions whose activities, appointments, anniversaries and appeals form a large part of the raw material of a church newspaper. Within that ecology, Christian Weekly, as the Union's own paper, is the newspaper most directly tied to the congregational life of the Chinese churches themselves.

Jubilees: fifty years in 2014 and sixty years in 2024

The newspaper's longevity has been marked publicly by its publisher. On 30 August 2014, the Golden Jubilee Thanksgiving Service and Essay Competition Award Ceremony for the Christian Weekly was held at the Hong Kong Chinese Christian Churches Union Hall. The event brought together church leaders and pastoral workers from various denominations, the winners of the essay competition, and other spectators, and it marked the fact that the newspaper had by then been published every Sunday for fifty years since its establishment.

A decade later, on 7 September 2024, the Thanksgiving Service Celebrating the 60th Diamond Jubilee of the Christian Weekly was held at Tsim Sha Tsui Baptist Church, at 31 Cameron Road, Tsim Sha Tsui. The service was combined with the dedication of Hong Kong Church Figures (Volume 2), a biographical publication on figures of the Hong Kong church — a fitting pairing for a newspaper whose pages have carried the names, ministries and obituaries of Hong Kong church life for six decades, and whose own historical columns continue to retell the stories of earlier Hong Kong Christians.

The Union's wider ministries reflected in its pages

Because its publisher's work spans welfare, burial, education and health, the Christian Weekly documents far more than Sunday worship. The Union manages Christian cemeteries in Hong Kong, including the Hong Kong Chinese Christian Churches Union Pok Fu Lam Road Cemetery in Pok Fu Lam, built in 1882 on the slopes between Pok Fu Lam Road and Victoria Road and the burial place of many notable Hong Kong figures, among them the author Xu Dishan and Tse Tsan-tai, a revolutionary and co-founder of the South China Morning Post. The newspaper's columns on the pioneers buried in the Union's cemeteries connect that custodial ministry directly to its journalism.

In elderly welfare, the Union took over the Kwong Yum Home in 1918 — a home founded in 1902 by the Reverend Matthew Kwong Yat Shau of Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui to serve poor and helpless elders — and later established the Diamond Hill Kwong Yum Home for the Aged in 1965 and the Kwun Tong Kwong Yum Home for the Aged in 1982, merging the two homes in 2014 into what is now the Kwong Yum Care Home. In education, the Union marked its 85th anniversary in 2000 by resolving to create its first school; the result, Logos Academy, was founded under the Direct Subsidy Scheme in September 2002 as a through-train school combining primary and secondary education in an eleven-year curriculum founded on the truth of the Bible. Schools, care homes and cemeteries of this kind are standing subjects for the Union's newspaper, which reports their work to the member churches that sustain them.

The digitised archive: Yale and Hong Kong Baptist University, 1964–2013

The Christian Weekly's historical importance is formally recognised in one of the largest digitisation projects devoted to Chinese Christianity. The Documentation of Chinese Christianity programme was established by the Yale Divinity Library in 2012 as a collaborative effort with the Hong Kong Baptist University Library, funded through the Latourette Initiative for the Documentation of World Christianity, to preserve and make accessible books, periodicals, reports and archival materials documenting Chinese Christianity.

Within that programme, the digitised version of the Christian Weekly covers issue no. 1 (1964) to issue no. 2572 (2013) — nearly fifty years of continuous publication, documenting five decades of Hong Kong Christian life and witness. Digital copies are requested through the Yale Divinity Library's Special Collections. The Hong Kong Baptist University Library runs the same preservation programme on the Hong Kong side, as part of its Archives on the History of Christianity in China, so the newspaper's back run is preserved by the two institutions jointly rather than left to the survival of paper copies in church offices.

Research value as a record of Hong Kong Christianity

Yale's assessment of the collection sets out why scholars use this newspaper. The digitised run provides resources for studying the history and development of Christianity in Hong Kong from 1964 to 2013; ecumenical cooperation among Chinese churches across denominational lines; Christian responses to Hong Kong's social, political and cultural changes; the role of Christian institutions in education, healthcare and social welfare; Christian perspectives on developments in mainland China and Taiwan; Chinese Christian journalism and religious publishing; and theological discussions and pastoral concerns in the Chinese church context.

That list captures the newspaper's double character as a source. On one side it is a primary record — dated, weekly and attributable — of what Hong Kong's Chinese churches did, announced and debated across half a century that included the territory's late colonial decades and its return to China in 1997. On the other side it is evidence of how that community understood itself: its preaching, Bible study, family counselling and responses to current affairs, written by its own pastors, evangelists and laypeople rather than by outside observers. Few Hong Kong publications of any kind offer so continuous a run, which is why a church weekly was selected for preservation alongside denominational periodicals and institutional archives.

Christian Weekly today

Christian Weekly continues to appear weekly, published by the Hong Kong Chinese Christian Churches Union from Hong Kong and presented online at christianweekly.net, where issue no. 3244 was the current issue when this profile was researched in October 2026. The online edition carries the newspaper's headline news, church and institutional notices, recommended features and signed columns, and links the title to its social media channels. More than sixty years after its founding on 30 August 1964, it remains what its publisher created it to be: the shared newspaper of Hong Kong's Chinese Christian churches, one of the two Chinese Christian newspapers in Hong Kong, and — through the Yale and Hong Kong Baptist University digitisation of its first 2,572 issues — one of the best-preserved documentary records of Hong Kong Christian life in existence.

Christian Weekly at a glance

Christian Weekly (基督教週報) is a Chinese-language weekly newspaper published in Hong Kong by the Hong Kong Chinese Christian Churches Union (HKCCCU), the inter-denominational union founded in 1915 by seven Protestant traditions and registered in 1948. The newspaper was founded on 30 August 1964, its title inscribed by the Guangdong scholar Liang Hancao, and it has been published every Sunday since; it celebrated its golden jubilee in 2014 and its 60th diamond jubilee in 2024. Its purposes are to report Christian news, cultivate Christian spirituality and promote Christian truth. Its official website is christianweekly.net. Issues no. 1 (1964) to no. 2572 (2013) have been digitised by the Yale Divinity Library and Hong Kong Baptist University under the Documentation of Chinese Christianity programme established in 2012. It is one of the two Chinese Christian newspapers in Hong Kong, the other being the Christian Times.