For over 60 years, Christ’s College Taipei in Taiwan has worked toward its strategic mission: expanding Christ’s kingdom through educating Mandarin-speaking students. The college is the only known Mandarin-speaking Christian liberal arts college in Asia, and it draws students from several Asian countries. 

Tim Mountfort, Mission to the World’s regional director of East Asia and a member of the CCT board, said CCT is “more strategic than our liberal arts schools in the United States because so few liberal arts institutions exist in Asia. It’s in our best interest as those who are seeking to expand the kingdom to keep this institution alive and to make sure that it thrives.”  

James Graham founded the college in 1959. After Graham, a missionary in China, was expelled from China in the 1950s, he moved to Taiwan with the hope of reaching a variety of Mandarin-speakers through Christian education.

At the PCA’s second General Assembly in 1974, the aging Graham entrusted CCT to the PCA. It has since been a ministry under MTW, though a variety of evangelical Christians work there, not just PCA missionaries. Local Taiwanese Christians, in fact, comprise much of the staff. 

As Mountfort recounted, Graham did not initially pursue recognition of the school through Taiwan’s Ministry of Education because he worried that the school would have to make too many compromises, such as cutting or cloaking its Bible courses. But Graham was a friend of Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of Taiwan’s nationalist government, and because of this friendship Graham was able to get the Taiwanese Ministry of Interior to recognize the school instead. 

The college operated under the Ministry of the Interior until 2012, when the school was recognized by the Ministry of Education under a newly-created category for religious schools. Under the Ministry of Education, Christ’s College became Christ’s College Taipei.  

The first missionary that MTW sent to CCT was David White, who took over Graham’s role as president and lived with his family in Taiwan for nearly 40 years. His daughter, Becky White, currently works at CCT as a missionary through MTW. The White family moved to Taiwan when Becky was 13. After finishing high school in Taiwan, she returned to the states to study at Covenant College, and then returned to CCT, where she has been teaching English for 35 years. 

Throughout MTW’s involvement with CCT, the school has seen both prosperous and challenging periods. According to Mountfort, CCT had over 900 students in its heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Over the past decade, CCT’s enrollment has dwindled drastically, largely due to Taiwan’s low birth rate. The college currently has less than 100 students. 

Taiwan’s birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1983 and is currently about 4.49 live births per 1,000 people. In 2024, the estimated fertility rate — the average number of live births a woman has — was 0.89. 

“For a couple of decades, Taiwan had the lowest birth rate in the world. Even today, people would rather have doggies and kitties in their prams as opposed to children. What they say is, ‘Children are expensive,’” White said.

Her comments ring true: in 2023, there were more registered pets than children under 10 in Taiwan. 

Ann Lyle and her husband, Joe, were MTW missionaries at CCT from 1991 until 2021. Ann Lyle says the population of college-age students began to drop in Taiwan around 2012, around the same time that more colleges were opening. Hence, more colleges had to compete for a shrinking student population. 

For several years, low enrollment negatively impacted the school’s finances and kept the college from meeting the Ministry of Education’s required quota for the student body. Mountfort said CCT was able to meet the quota this year.

However, CCT’s enrollment challenges negatively affected its spiritual environment; what Joe Lyle termed the “dynamic spiritual life on campus” has declined as enrollment has declined. 

White maintained that CCT’s students are “perhaps mercifully under-aware of the spiritual battle that we’re truly in. It’s a 24-7 kind of battle.” Yet White also held that the prayers of the church and the work of short-term missions teams can be profoundly encouraging in the midst of such spiritual battle.  

As the Taiwanese student population has declined in the past decade, CCT has seen an influx of Mandarin-speaking students from other Asian countries. 

“We can be a kind of stepping stone for them, a place where they can get out into some freedom and beef up their social skills, as well as their academic skills,” White said. 

In other Asian countries, there are, according to Mountfort, “millions of Christians who don’t want to put their kids through the public education system because it’s so thoroughly atheistic. And then when they do that, they’re not able to get their kids into colleges because they’re out of the system … .”

If students have strong English skills, they can study abroad, he said. “But a lot of these kids don’t have good English skills, so if they go to Christ’s College, it provides them the opportunity to do higher education in Mandarin.”

CCT’s unique position and biblical focus allow the college to welcome and disciple Christian students from cultures even more hostile to Christianity than Taiwan, where Christians comprise a mere 3-5% of the population. 

While CCT’s curriculum and culture are very different from many Asian colleges, the curriculum resembles an American Christian liberal arts college. The school holds multiple chapel services each week, and its core curriculum involves 61 credits of Bible, history, art, and other similar courses. Students may choose music, English, or mass communications as their majors, though the college hopes to add a major combining the fields of environmental studies, sustainability, and government next year. Most of the English major courses are taught in English, while most other classes are taught in Mandarin. 

Excepting special circumstances, students live on campus all four years. Many staff members live in on-campus apartments, which, together with CCT’s small class sizes, creates a familiarity between students and teachers. Staff members often spend time with students outside of class: the Lyles regularly hosted students in their home for chapel sessions or game nights. 

Such familiarity was one of Graham’s emphases: Graham “really wanted to form a community where people are not just learning in class, but also in community, learning from one another, iron sharpening iron,” Mountfort said. 

Mountfort estimated that around 80% of CCT’s students are Christians. As both White and the Lyles testified, many students also come to Christ or deepen their faith during their time at CCT.

Joe Lyle told of an autistic student who came to the school: at first, the student would not speak or make eye contact. But a few Christian young men requested him as a roommate. 

“They mentored him and loved him. They got him to go on a mission trip — twice a year, the students would go on mission trips around the island. It really impacted him. He ended up being the top student. He had to give a speech [as the valedictorian], and he spoke about how the students truly impacted him,” Joe said. 

The Lyles both told of multiple students who, after being committed to spiritual growth in college, went to seminary, married, and traveled to closed countries in Asia or the Middle East as missionaries. 

White told of one student who had experienced a “pretty horrid childhood” in the foster care system. She knew nothing about God until her late teenage years when she interacted with a Southern Baptist missionary who was handing out tracts on the street. Curious, she took a tract. 

“That missionary led her to Christ and discipled her,” White said. “The next place she went to work, they said, ‘You should go to Christ’s College! When you go there, look for the Whites!’ [The student] has just become a very dear member of the family.”

She married an American missionary who is now pastoring a church in Ohio. 

Joe Lyle said, “Graduates have spread around the world as missionaries, pastors, and business people.”

“If you go to almost any Chinese church in America – and there are a lot of those – you will meet somebody from Christ’s College, or their uncle was at Christ’s College, or they’ve been at Christ’s College on a summer retreat,” Ann Lyle said. 

White reflected on her many years of ministry with a similar sentiment: “I’ve loved seeing the ripple effect. We just see the tip of the iceberg, a little seed planted. We don’t see the ripple effect of those seeds across the world.”

White, Mountfort, and the Lyles all maintained that only God’s grace has allowed such a ripple effect and has sustained CCT through its recent challenges. 

“Christ’s College has had a lot of difficulties, but God is at work. Christ’s College is there because God has his hand on it. There’s no way you could run our school with a hundred students [without him],” Ann Lyle said.