Constructing sacred space under the forces of the market: A study of an ‘upper-floor’ Protestant church in Hong Kong

Abstract

In Hong Kong, over half of the Protestant churches are located in the upper-floor units in commercial and residential buildings. Because of their physical locations, these churches are sometimes dubbed ‘upper-floor churches’. Unlike those that occupy stand-alone religious buildings or dwell in church-run schools and social service centres, these are often invisible in the landscapes of the city. Through analysis of a case study, this paper aims to explore the spatial practices that a Protestant community has adopted in acquiring, representing, and ritualising a business unit in a residential high-rise for building up their church. Our analysis of the case study shows that in a metropolis like contemporary Hong Kong, the construction of sacred space is full of tensions between utilitarian calculations and concerns of human relations and religious values. While the congregation had been very creative in transforming a commercial unit into a religious site, it did not show much awareness of the oppressive powers of the capitalist market and had a strong tendency to represent its spatial practices as commodities for consumption.

Keywords:

• Christianity
• sacred space
• spatial practice
• capitalist market
• Hong Kong

Notes

1. The research reported that an average white-collar staff in Hong Kong has to pay HK$8154 per square feet (around US$10,450 per square metre) for a flat, which is 50 and 67% higher than in New York and Moscow respectively (Liu and Leung 2011). As can be expected, the actual price of a property depends on many factors. I do not have the statistics of the property prices of ‘upper-floor’ churches in Hong Kong. I may use the case of the church studied in this paper as a reference. Its present church site of around 300 square metres was bought at a price of around HK$6.4 million (around US$0.82 million) in 2004. Given the surge in property price in the past few years, this property may worth double today.

2. Real estate has played a very important role in the economy and hence the everyday life of people. For example, statistical figures show that from 1983 to 1992, an average of 61% of capital investment of Hong Kong was in real estate. Real estate and construction-related items account for more than 33% of government revenues (Renaud, Pretorius and Pasadilla 1997, 17–23).

3. Because of the influx of refugees in the early 1950s, the Hong Kong government was unable to build schools to provide education to the newly arrived children. The government then decided to make use of the open space in the rooftops of the newly constructed resettlement estates for running schools (Chung and Ngan 2002). Most of these rooftop schools were run by the Protestant Church (Ying 2004, 160).

4. The popularity of using the space of the church for reading centres was probably triggered by the increase of full-time students as a result of the implementation of universal primary education and junior secondary education policies in the 1970s. For the development of Hong Kong education in this period and the post-war period in general, see Sweeting (2004, Part Three).