The Bird Garden District — Jeuk Tsai Yuen in Cantonese — takes its name from a neighborhood tradition of keeping songbirds, and it occupies a quiet corner of the Macau Peninsula away from the colonial grandeur of Senado Square and the tourist circuits around the Ruins of St. Paul's. The church that community built in 1906 was deliberately modest: a cottage-style structure suited to a congregation finding its feet. Early community leaders included Wang Yu, Fung Fu, and elders from the Heqin Po District, who shepherded the congregation through its early years. By 1918, growth had outpaced the original hall, and a new building was completed on Minister Macedo Street — the address the church still occupies today, at 5 Rua De Henrique De Macedo. The congregation expanded the building in 1932 and again in 1964 as membership continued to grow.

Like many Protestant churches in early 20th-century China, Ji Dou Church understood education as an extension of its purpose. A kindergarten opened in 1919, part of a broader push into community services that eventually included schools for women and evening classes. The educational mission deepened over the following decades. By 1949, the church was running a high school — a significant institutional commitment for a congregation operating in a small colonial territory. The schools drew students from across the local Chinese community, and through the 1930s and into the 1940s the combination of religious outreach and educational services gave Ji Dou Church a presence in Macau's Chinese community that extended well beyond its Sunday congregation.

The postwar years brought complications the church had not anticipated. After Japan's defeat in 1945, a wave of refugees altered the demographic and economic landscape of Macau, and the congregation's resources were stretched. Then came the political turbulence of 1966 — the 1-2-3 incident, in which leftist agitation swept through Macau's Chinese community following unrest sparked by a construction dispute. Under pressure from that moment, the church's school was transferred to Anglican management: the Anglican mission had diplomatic protection through the British government, which meant its schools could not be forced into alignment with the political left. It was a pragmatic arrangement born of a difficult period, and it removed an institution the church had spent decades building.

By the 1980s, the congregation turned back toward what it had once been. In 1988, Morrison Building Memorial School opened — named for Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China — beginning as a kindergarten and growing into a primary school. For another sixteen years the school ran, until declining enrollment and the movement of families to other districts made it unsustainable. The last class of sixth-grade students graduated in 2004, and the church's educational chapter closed. What remained was the congregation itself: 60 to 70 members on any given Sunday, a fellowship explicitly oriented toward younger people — secondary students, university students, those at the beginning of their adult lives. In a city of over 70 churches serving roughly 4,000 registered Protestant Christians, that is a medium-sized congregation. It is also, in its own way, a continuity: a community that began meeting in private homes in 1898, built halls and schools and a century of institutional life, and returned at last to something resembling its beginning.