Bryan K. M. Mok is Research Associate of the Centre for the Study of Religious Ethics and Chinese Culture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Lay Preacher of Hub Church (Hong Kong). He has published several journal articles and book chapters exploring the intersection of religion and society. His forthcoming book examines the role of Christian theology in the political deliberation of climate change from a Chinese perspective. His research interests include public theology, comparative theology, and environmental ethics.
Examining Mutual Recognition through Hong Kong’s Lens: A Practical Critique of Kärkkäinen's Paradigm
As both a theologian in a university setting and a lay preacher in Hub Church—an emerging ecumenical, international congregation in Hong Kong established in 2021, the issue of mutual recognition is not merely an abstract concept for me but a pressing practical concern. Hub Church warmly welcomes people of all races, religions, gender identities, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Guided by a vision of nurturing all to participate in God’s ecumenical plan for justice and peace, Hub Church strives to build an inclusive faith community where spiritual seekers can heal, question, mature, and live out their faith through worship, community building, faith development, and service.
Owing to its unique history and geographical location, Hong Kong is often described as embodying cultural hybridity. However, since the imposition of the National Security Law in 2020, the city has increasingly moved toward political homogeneity. This shift inevitably affects Hong Kong’s social and cultural spheres, though its full impact has yet to be realized. Additionally, evangelicalism has profoundly influenced local Protestant churches and fostered a deep-seated culture of exclusivity and intolerance within Hong Kong Christianity. This has produced a general lack of appreciation for, and acceptance of, those who differ—not only in religious traditions, but also across Christian denominations, theological perspectives, political opinions, sexual identities, and so on. In such a context, an ecumenical congregation committed to inclusivity and diversity faces significant challenges, as it must navigate the growing polarization and dogmatism within both the religious and sociopolitical landscapes.
Kärkkäinen’s Recognition Paradigm
Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s article explores how a multidisciplinary study of ‘recognition’ can illuminate interfaith engagement and dialogue. According to Kärkkäinen, ‘recognition’ essentially refers to the acceptance of the Other without compromising one’s own identity. Hegel conceptualizes recognition as fundamentally a mutual process, where one acquires their sense of self through interaction with the Other. Contemporary thinkers have expanded on this by exploring the emotional, psychological, and sociopolitical dimensions of recognition and identifying respect, esteem, and love as central components.
A primary obstacle to ecumenism, Kärkkäinen argues, is the lack of mutual recognition of other churches as legitimate expressions of the Christian faith. This stands in contrast to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which professes belief in the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” Thus, instead of asking what the Other can learn from us, ecumenism should focus on what we can learn from them. This requires not only theological reconsideration but also engagement with psychological and sociological factors, such as social categorization, social comparison, social identification, shared social cognitions, and group conformity.
In the context of interreligious engagement, Kärkkäinen suggests that recognition involves renewing our own self-understanding by assessing and evaluating the religious Other. This process initiates a reciprocal and intersubjective dialogue that starts from our own perspective of the Other but challenges and reshapes that perception throughout the encounter. Both parties must remain open to the possibility of being transformed by the dialogue. Kärkkäinen proposes that a comparative reading of sacred texts from different traditions is a crucial practice for fostering mutual recognition, as it enables us to gain insight into ourselves through engagement with the Other’s texts.
Kärkkäinen concludes his article with ten theses on mutual recognition in interfaith relations, which advocate for a reciprocal approach to learning, acknowledge the role of non-religious factors in recognition, and emphasize the importance of understanding the perspectives of marginalized groups, particularly those at risk of non-recognition. In his final remarks, Kärkkäinen acknowledges that these principles are abstract and general. Nevertheless, he contends that they offer a foundation for scholars and practitioners across traditions to refine and develop together. This response aims to build on and advance the discussion by drawing on my real-world experiences as an ecumenical scholar-pastor in Hong Kong.
Facing the Challenges of Non-Recognition and Power Imbalance
The features of group dynamics that Kärkkäinen identifies offer valuable insights into understanding the obstacles to recognition. However, people in Hong Kong are confronting more immediate and tangible forms of non-recognition. Ecumenical Christians in the city, in particular, face threefold challenges in mutual recognition. Within Christian circles, evangelicals—who constitute the majority of Hong Kong Protestantism—often perceive ecumenical Christianity as theologically liberal or ambiguous and fail to recognize its commitment to Christian unity, social justice, and interreligious dialogue. It is not uncommon for evangelicals to misinterpret the core concerns of ecumenism, accusing it of promoting a progressive agenda at the expense of biblical truths.
At the same time, ecumenical Christianity is under increasing political pressure that is often manifested subtly in ways that align with the strategy of a united front. For example, the Hong Kong Christian Council (HKCC), a member of the World Council of Churches (WCC), has recently felt pressure to Sinicize Christianity and decouple from its Western heritage. The HKCC’s cooperative stance toward the authorities has led to further misrecognition of ecumenical Christianity, sometimes viewed as complicit with or even a part of the pro-Beijing establishment by both Christians and non-Christians alike. These power imbalances threaten the feasibility of recognizing each other on equal footing and must be addressed, lest the quest for mutual recognition becomes overly idealistic.
While these external challenges—rooted in political power and religious misunderstanding—significantly hinder mutual recognition, they also highlight the importance of self-recognition as a necessary first step. Without a strong sense of identity and purpose, ecumenical communities such as Hub Church risk being overwhelmed by external pressures or misinterpretation. Thus, in the face of non-recognition, self-recognition becomes an essential foundation on which mutual recognition can be built.
Self-Recognition as a Path to Mutual Recognition
As an emerging church of the ecumenical tradition with a congregation of around 30 people, Hub Church has adopted a practical approach to self-recognition as a means of achieving mutual recognition. As a young and theologically open congregation, we are constantly at risk of being marginalized as a sectarian or even heretical group. Aware of the forces of non-recognition and misrecognition that surround us, we use them as motivation in our struggle for mutual recognition by focusing on our own vision and mission. While dialogue is essential to mutual recognition, genuine conversations cannot occur without a firm commitment to one’s own beliefs and positions. Therefore, our goal is not to persuade others—whether evangelicals, non-believers, or political authorities—to agree with or accept us, but to actualize our vision that all are nurtured to engage in God’s ecumenical plan for justice and peace. What matters is our agency in creating a diverse and inclusive faith community that questions, matures, and lives out its faith through worship, community building, faith development, and service.
For example, rather than engaging in unproductive arguments with evangelicals over issues of gender and sexuality, we have conveyed our ecumenical perspective by organizing public courses and film screenings on the subject. We have also established close ties with Rainbow Stream, a Bangkok-based affirming Christian community, and invited their leaders to Hong Kong for public talks and sharing sessions in April 2024. Through these educational efforts, we have consolidated our identity as a diverse and inclusive church and empowered like-minded believers, including LGBTQ+ Christians, to recognize their own identity and power. We believe that this process of self-recognition is a crucial starting point for overturning multiple layers of power asymmetry and gaining autonomy, which is the foundation of genuine reciprocal recognition, as illustrated by Hegel’s slave-master dialectic.
Toward a Dialogic Faith
While Hub Church is firmly rooted in biblical and creedal tradition, it embraces religious fluidity and hybridity. The latter is particularly significant in Hong Kong, where faith and secularism, Western and Eastern religious practices, and traditional and contemporary spiritualities coexist and intersect. This internal complexity of cultural and religious identities does not emerge in Kärkkäinen’s article, where religious traditions are largely treated as monolithic entities. Mutual recognition takes place not only between distinct religious traditions but also within a tradition or even within a specific community.
Hub Church comprises individuals from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, including asylum seekers, 'Hong Kong drifters' (educated Mandarin-speakers who have left mainland China for Hong Kong), expatriates, and locals.
This diversity extends beyond cultural and ethnic lines to include a wide range of sexual identities and religious expressions. The congregation includes both LGBTQ+ and straight Christians, with some members openly expressing hybrid religious identities, identifying as Christian atheists, Christian witches, or fully Buddhist and fully Christian simultaneously. Such diversity is reflected in the church's broader identity and structure. Moreover, the church itself is independent of any denominational affiliation, though it explicitly identifies as ecumenical. This ecumenical identity is further expressed through the church's theological inclusivity and recognition of diverse Christian traditions.
It incorporates both the evangelical’s capacity for action and the charismatic pursuit of the visible power of the Holy Spirit. Additionally, it acknowledges all Christian communities that affirm either the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as churches in the fullest sense. These diverse theological and spiritual convictions naturally foster an environment where dialogue thrives. Both the community as a whole and its individual members embody fluid and hybrid identities, making dialogue a norm at Hub Church, where interreligious and other forms of dialogue occur as part of its routine.
In his article, Kärkkäinen suggests that comparative reading and study of religious texts is a means of seeing, remembering, and rediscovering oneself in the other. This exercise is certainly a valuable way to challenge prejudices and create space for distinctions between traditions. However, it constitutes only one part of a broader process of mutual recognition that requires concrete encounters with others through shared practices and lived experiences.
Thus far, Hub Church has engaged primarily with Buddhism and New Age spiritualities as its main dialogue partners—an improvised response to the actual needs of the congregation rather than a choice born of intellectual reflection. There is a growing need to extend this dialogue to atheism, secularism, and Chinese folk religious practices. Earlier in 2024, we offered a public course on reinterpreting Christian soteriology through the lens of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths. The course attracted admirers of Buddhist teachings and practitioners of New Age spiritualities and led to fruitful discussions on the interaction between Christian beliefs and their spiritual practices.
The church is also planning an upcoming session in which one of our members, a lifelong Christian gradually becoming more atheistic, will share her spiritual journey with the congregation. We believe that conversations and comparisons of religious and spiritual practices and worldviews are more fundamental than textual studies in the process of self-recognition and mutual recognition, as they allow individuals to see themselves in the other in a more embodied, personal, and lived way.
Critical Engagement with Recognition from an East Asian Perspective
Finally, from an East Asian perspective, it is important to recognize that mutual recognition can sometimes reinforce existing power inequalities rather than dismantle them. Consequently, it is problematic to assume that recognition—even mutual recognition—is inherently emancipatory. In Hong Kong, these patterns of power inequality are reinforced through both overt political control and more covert forms of postcolonial Eurocentrism. Without consciously addressing and deconstructing these power dynamics, mutual recognition could easily become a naïve and misleading slogan in our context.
Recognition is not a simple act of mutual acknowledgment; it is a dialectical process that involves repudiating the Other’s power to define oneself. This is especially true for marginalized or underrepresented groups and individuals. Therefore, recognition and repudiation are two sides of the same coin in the dialectical process of self-consciousness and freedom. For Hub Church, this means carefully rejecting the dualistic framing of local politics to align with either pro-government or so-called ‘pro-democracy’ stances. This autonomy is essential to the church’s engagement with social justice issues. A similar strategy of repudiation applies to secularism, Eurocentrism, and other Christian denominations. Only through this repudiation can the church define its unique role in Hong Kong’s complex religious and social landscape and reach a position from which to seek mutual recognition.
Perhaps Hub Church and Hong Kong theologians can approach this dialectic by exploring East Asian relational ontology through concepts such as ren (benevolence) in Confucianism and the four infinite minds in Buddhism. However, the key is not to simply replace Western ideas with East Asian concepts but to deeply engage with our own social, political, cultural, and religious contexts. Only with this critical consciousness can local Christians engage meaningfully with the recognition paradigm and seek practical ways to achieve mutual recognition.