An earlier Anglican church had been built on the premises of the British consulate in Dalian in the early 20th century, when the city was still known as Dairen under Japanese control. By the late 1920s, a more permanent structure was needed. In 1928, the Church of England and the Anglican-Episcopal Church of Japan pooled resources to build the second-generation church, naming it the Dalian Anglican Church. Services were held in both English and Japanese, reflecting the congregation's binational character. The church belonged to the North China Diocese of the Anglican-Episcopal Province of China, known formally as the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui. It was a rare example of British and Japanese institutions collaborating in a region where their geopolitical interests were increasingly divergent.

When World War II ended in 1945, the Chinese government confiscated all Japanese-owned buildings in Dalian. Religious buildings seized in this way were never returned to religious use. But Yuguang Street Church survived because of a legal technicality rooted in its binational origins: Britain owned half of the church. This shared ownership protected the building from being repurposed, and it was simply renamed Yuguang Street Church and allowed to continue functioning as a Christian place of worship. It was a narrow escape, and a consequence that neither the Church of England nor the Japanese Anglican Church could have foreseen when they divided the construction costs decades earlier.

The Cultural Revolution, which convulsed China from 1966 to 1977, spared no religious institution. At Yuguang Street Church, the stained glass windows were smashed and all religious activities were suppressed. The building was converted into a children's activity center, its sanctuary repurposed for secular gatherings. It was not until the early 1980s, as China began to relax restrictions on religious practice, that Christian services resumed. The church came under the post-denominational China Christian Council, the state-sanctioned body that oversees Protestant Christianity in China, erasing the Anglican identity that had defined the congregation for half a century.

In 2001, Yuguang Street Church was designated one of approximately 100 Protected Historical Buildings in Dalian, a recognition of its architectural and cultural significance to a city whose built environment reflects layer upon layer of foreign influence. The church stands near Zhongshan Square, with the Dalian World Trade Center Building visible in the background, a juxtaposition of colonial-era architecture against modern commercial development. The cornerstone remains in place beside the entrance, its bilingual inscription now a historical artifact rather than a statement of living partnership. The building endures as a working church, its congregation worshipping in Mandarin in a space designed for English and Japanese services, in a city that has been Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Soviet, and Chinese again.