Unprecedented Downswing in Hong Kong’s Churches

By Carlos Escueta
HKU Journalism and Media Studies Centre

On a summery Sunday morning in late April, devoted churchgoers gathered in the dozens near an industrial district on the outskirts of Hong Kong’s bustling city center to witness the ceremonial first service of their church in its new location.  

Children, families, and congregants young and old frantically arranged chairs, readied musical instruments, and installed the pulpit in excitement, as church leaders began preparations to illuminate the front podium with the white-colored cross mounted behind it. 

And as the church band played amid scenes of jubilation, so began the eruption in earnest applause as the crucifix lit up the wall of the elevated stage, ending months of uncertainty and bringing a sense of relief and hope of what was to come.  

“This didn’t happen overnight,” said John Malcolm, lead pastor of Calvary Church Hong Kong. “It wasn’t without our own set of challenges – but it feels like a blessing for us, that we can still be of help.”

Calvary Church is just one of many churches across Hong Kong that were forced to relocate, downsize, or even shut down after three years of stringent COVID-19 restrictions, lockdowns, and seemingly endless uncertainties over border reopenings that gripped the city during the course of the pandemic, according to the Hong Kong Christian Council.

The subsequent wave of emigration, along with still stubbornly high  rent prices, and far lower congregant attendance are just some of the factors that fueled this unprecedented trend of church closures and relocations in post-pandemic Hong Kong.    

“If you look at churches in Hong Kong – both local and the international, there definitely has been a decline in churchgoers due to COVID-19 and the migratory wave that followed,” said Tobias Brandner, a professor of theology at the Divinity School of Chung Chi College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of the 2023 book Christians in the City of Hong Kong.   

“Based on my estimation, there has been a 20 to 30 percent decrease in church membership,” he said, adding that the past few years have proven to have a detrimental effect on churches, pastors and congregants alike. 

Official figures from the Hong Kong Home and Youth Affairs Bureau in 2022 estimate 1.3 million people identify as part of the city’s Christian community, and more than 300,000 of them attend church services on a regular basis. 

But a significant number of Christians are believed to have left Hong Kong in the past few years. Data from a Hong Kong Church Renewal Movement report released in 2021 revealed that 60,000 congregants are believed to have emigrated.

Many felt optimistic that the post-pandemic wave of emigration would subside in the past year, but it’s unclear whether it has, as more updated numbers are not available.

With people leaving Hong Kong and fewer people attending churches, the number of congregations in the city gradually declined, according to estimates from the Hong Kong Christian Council.

Government data from July 2022 indicated there were a total of 1,450 Protestant congregations in the city, but the latest numbers from last year showed that the number of congregations has dipped to 1,300 – suggesting  at least 150 churches may have shuttered within the past two years alone. 

But it remains unclear if the 2023 figure excluded non-Chinese speaking churches. The Home and Youth Affairs Bureau did not explain whether it did and the difference between the two sets of figures.

Some churchgoers in hopes of seeking spiritual guidance through church services during the pandemic – and even as far back as the city’s 2019 political unrest – were left without a place to go. 

Others instead chose to find a new congregation near their own home, or in some cases, emigrated overseas.     

Even as churches across Hong Kong have re-opened their doors, attendance is far lower than pre-pandemic levels, with some losing as many as half of their congregants, according to church leaders.  

Many congregations don’t qualify for government subsidies or assistance they need to stay afloat, unlike other sectors such as the tourism industry, because churches usually rely on private donations.

But while restaurant and other business closures made the headlines almost daily during the Covid years, church closures have seen minimal to no coverage in the city’s media. 

The churches that closed

Trevor Zaccheus, former pastor of Calvary Church Tuen Mun – a smaller sub-branch of Calvary Church’s overall operations in the city, made the tough decision of closing its congregation’s doors late last year after 16 years of faithfulness in ministry. 

He and his wife now reside in Red Deer, a small city in central Alberta, Canada, after emigrating from Hong Kong in the summer of 2023.  

Like pastor Malcolm, the couple also faced rising financial burdens for their longtime church venue as well as low attendance rates and empty chairs, all while trying to maintain hopes of staying afloat.  

But for Zaccheus, the decision was something that was felt on a much more personal level. 

“In addition to leaving our jobs, it was more about the church and the family we’ve built over the past 16 years,” Zaccheus said, speaking via Zoom from Canada. “You build a relationship and connection with them, and they become like family. That was the hardest part of leaving Hong Kong.”

While breaking the news to their nearly 30-member congregation was by no means an easy feat, the couple ensured that members were equipped with a steady channel of communication and another congregation to go to in the wake of their departure from the city.   

“So what we tried to do,  before we could make the move to Canada, is make sure that everyone was rooted and plugged into a church elsewhere – local or non-local,” said Zaccheus.

As a result, many longtime attendees of Zaccheus’ congregation found a sense of peace in the midst of the sudden loss, allowing them to remain active in a spiritual community through encouraging messages and sermons held via pre-recorded videos on Zoom.  

Despite their church’s closure, the couple says their bond with members of their congregation remains strong. Zaccheus said that he and his wife actively communicate with many congregation members through a WhatsApp group chat where counseling, daily devotions, and much-needed prayers are shared on a near daily basis.     

“We still keep that group on,” Zaccheus explained. “There are many members who I’m still in touch with.”

For one church, it was a story of survival 

Some churches like the main Calvary, however, managed to stay open, but had to make a tough decision to relocate to cheaper quarters.

As Hong Kong’s soaring rent and sky-high demand for housing supply continue to exacerbate businesses, eateries, and other major establishments post-pandemic, churches also have been caught in the crossfire. 

Hong Kong consistently ranks as the second-most expensive place in the world to live in after New York City. And as local inflation increased, rent rose to multi-year highs. 

Despite it being a culmination of several factors, it was the fluctuating financial situation of Calvary Church that played one of the more obvious roles in Malcolm’s decision to relocate it to a cheaper location. 

“From an individual standpoint, the personal finances of some of our congregation members were down 40 to 60 percent,” Malcolm recalled. “[That meant that] in 2022, the overall income of our church itself declined by at least 30 percent.”  

He cited rent costs, mass emigration, job losses, and the lack of enthusiasm in tithing – the Christian practice of congregants giving back 10 percent of their annual earnings to the church – as the major causes of the church’s unprecedented monetary woes in the post-pandemic era.  

As an international church in Hong Kong, the main Calvary Church had grown exponentially since its founding in October 1989 – going on to plant several ministries across almost every part of the city, from areas surrounded by crowded streets to more bucolic neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city center.  

Its success in expanding over the years made it all the more devastating for Malcolm to have to give up the prime location their church was situated at, in the bustling Tsim Sha Tsui district.

A pastor’s dilemma

The stress of staying afloat despite financial woes put a lot of mental burden on pastors and church leaders who struggled to hold their congregation together during such trying times.

For over 20 years, pastor Malcolm has faithfully led his nearly 100-member flock at Calvary Church – an international, English-speaking Pentecostal congregation where many members of the city’s local and ethnic minority communities gather every week.  

Since taking over as pastor in 2003, the now 50-year-old Malcolm – like many other faithfuls in the city, remained steadfast in adhering to the principles of ministry – giving back to the local community, fellow parishioners, families, and newcomers of the faith through much-needed spiritual guidance, emotional support, and financial assistance through challenging times.     

But all that came to a head earlier this year after he made the difficult decision to move his congregation from its longtime location of 34 years in the heart of the city center, opting instead to relocate across town to the suburban area of Austin – a quieter, more industrial part of Kowloon. 

For Malcolm, it was a feeling of being at a crossroads – facing an unwanted dilemma of shifting to a cheaper, yet more distant location that was rather inconvenient to some congregants, or staying put in the same place despite growing financial difficulties.   

The stress was taking a toll on the pastor himself.

 “Mentally, everything piled up rather fast,” Malcolm said. “I don’t know if it was depression or anything like that – but it was just heavy. You end up kind of getting clueless after a while. We kept asking, what do we do? And nobody had an answer – not even the most experienced.”

It wasn’t until a mid-2022 family trip to the United Kingdom – at the height of Hong Kong’s rigid quarantine restrictions, when pastor Malcolm began to feel the burden of a mental weight slowly crash down on him. 

To him, the world was opening up after the pandemic – and Hong Kong was merely catching up. And from the outside looking in, Malcolm wasn’t all that eager to return to Hong Kong.  

“I felt like I didn’t want to come back to Hong Kong,” said Malcolm, his head bowing slightly. “Being out of the city forced me to realize that in my mind, that’s where the heaviness was.” 

Instead of staying overseas, however, he decided to return to Hong Kong because he wanted to keep his congregation together – despite the many uncertainties over COVID-19 travel restrictions and the financial burdens the church faced.

Once he and his family had made up their mind to return to Hong Kong, it was Malcolm’s said he reinvigorated motivation to press on in spiritually encouraging his congregation, that kept him going. 

“You kind of feed off of people,” said Malcolm. “Many people I know personally were already contemplating leaving the city – but for me, I didn’t want to be stuck in a bubble of helplessness.”

What encouraged him to finally stay together as a congregation were people’s willingness to be involved in the process of finding a new location for the church. 

According to him, many church members – particularly the youth – were constantly on the lookout for any potential locations whenever the opportunity arose. 

Eventually, Calvary Church found a suitable location in Austin, a smaller, quieter neighborhood in the poorer areas of Kowloon a little farther away from the old church building near Tsim Sha Tsui, but within an hour’s travel time for most congregants, meaning it’s not too inconvenient for them to make the trip. 

In light of all that has transpired, pastor Malcolm chooses to remain optimistic about what the future holds – not only for his church, but for others who have faced similar situations in the past few years. 

To illustrate his congregation’s past and current situation, Malcolm likened it to an analogy within the world of professional, competitive sports. 

And it was an analogy that resonated with his congregants at the first service at the church’s new location.

“Looking back at the pandemic’s aftermath on churches in Hong Kong specifically, I always remind myself that everybody reaches the peak,” Malcolm explained. “In sports, for instance, the best of the best reach the peak at the prime of their careers. That’s why they’re invincible. Nobody can touch them, and they can do that because they have reached the peak.”

“But nobody lives on the peak. Nobody lives up there,” Malcolm went on to say, a smile slowly rippling across his face. “You can stay there for a while, but at some point – you have to come down.” 

A glimmering light at the end of the tunnel 

Amid grueling setbacks, the main Calvary Church stood tall and remained one of the more fortunate ones. 

Most of its members still willingly go to the new church, despite it being in a place a bit farther away than they may be used to. 

And just like the way its newly located church began its service, so did a fresh sense of hope and normalcy after years of setbacks and uncertainty.

One young congregant described the sense of excitement he felt on the day of the church’s first service at its new location.

“Being in a new, permanent location gives us more flexibility in how we can utilize the space going forward,” said Tom Sicuan, a 25-year-old Hong Konger of Filipino heritage and a longtime attendee of the church. 

He said despite the many uncertainties in the past three years, what helped was everyone getting involved in finding an appropriate new location and keeping the congregation together. 

“It really does feel like a place we can call home,” Sicuan said.

Advisor: Cindy Sui