The Gospel in China

Monday. Time to analyze, with the weekend’s successes and failures fresh in the mind. First of all, praise the Lord, our attendance has been steadily growing since our return from the States. We’re still not quite at full strength, but we’re moving in the right direction. Lots of new visitors – just missing quite a […]

Quite the holiday weekend so far. Still got one service to go tonight. We spent Thanksgiving with about 20 or so of our closest Chinese friends at our new house. Had a Chinese food banquet with American desserts galore. One of the best Thanksgivings I’ve ever had, to tell the truth. We did the same […]

Deserts and swamps – neither very useful, both have water issues. One doesn’t have enough, the other has too much in all the wrong places. Good luck growing anything, building anything, or having much of a life in either one of these miserable locales.   A little like relationships as they relate to discipleship. Some […]

One of the great dangers of cross-cultural ministry is subliminal racism. That is, a prejudice based on race that operates under the threshold of our consciousness. Even people with the most color-blind of hearts are not impervious to this kind of influence, as horrible as it is. How does something like this happen, even to […]

Kind of a lopsided weekend. Really exciting service Saturday night, less so last night. Momentum is still building, praise the Lord. Probably the biggest reason for the difference in the services is that we’ve put a lot of emphasis on going out and meeting new people from that university. Plus the other university had a […]

Culture is a community measure. So you can’t really blame everything someone does on their culture. And contrary to popular opinion, some cultures are better than others. Culture can’t be a neutral thing – sin permeates every aspect of our life in some way – how could culture be any different? Do you really think […]

What a mess. Busy week hasn’t let me post. You know what they say – the road to an out-of-date blog is paved with good intentions. My wife and I moved to a different part of town this week. Several reasons. First, it’s right next to the new church building, so I should be able […]

Really an exciting weekend. Had good services both nights, best attendance we’ve had since we’ve been back – really feels like we’re starting to build back some of the momentum we’ve lost. Third week of “Man vs. God” – talked about the consequence of sin. Hardly a popular belief of Christianity, but it really generated […]

The crew is back together again! T. just returned from his tour of some of the most famous cities and sites in China. The tour was some special offer for students with his major – about a hundred of them all traveling together. Last night, the five us got together for our first meeting with […]

Just a couple more steps and we will have ourselves an official, completely legal business here in China. We have a few main reasons for doing this. First of all, having a student visa is alright, but it costs plenty of money and time every year that I would just as soon put towards something […]