The Gospel in China

Busy week – never really got around to sitting down and writing about it. The true curse of blogging – if you’ve got things really worth writing about, you’re probably way too busy to write them. That’s been this past week for us. We’re leaving for Beijing this morning, though – so I thought I’d […]

Sunday was S. and T.’s second time to preach for the whole service. One of them kind of had an emotional, couldn’t-go-on kind of premature ending. The other one went over on his time and would have kept on going if I hadn’t started tapping my invisible wristwatch like I was in a triangle choke. […]

Progress report: Tuesday I went with four guys to the realtor guy. I figured if every time I came with more guys, we might eventually scare him into giving us a good deal. But, alas, he said the owner couldn’t give us a lower price for the bigger house. We were all pretty disappointed, because […]

Guy named Luke came to church last night with a friend that’s been coming for a long time. This girl’s been bringing a bunch of friends lately, so that’s pretty exciting in and of itself. Luke’s a real nice guy, and he listened in real intently. Actually our second service attendance was majorly down – […]

Sunday morning here. Another hectic week. Pretty maddening, actually. Really tested my limits as a sane person. Ever had one of those days with a lot on your plate to accomplish, and though you tried as hard as you could, you couldn’t put a single thing in the “done” pile? Ever had three of those […]

Sunday we had a great number of first-time visitors – a few students showed up from the English classes that Ashley started last week, and some other regular attenders brought some friends for the first time. In light of the earthquake a couple weeks ago, we took a break from Philippians and I preached on […]

Packed week. I’ve been trying to catch up on my characters study – I missed a couple weeks of class, and the class moves at a good pace – about forty or so new characters a class, twice a week. There’s only so fast you can do that kind of work, so I’ve been trying […]

I think we had a couple of really good services last night. The services are finally starting to balance out, which is something I’ve really hoped to see. In the past, it’s kind of felt like a waste of energy to have the two services – a lot of people came to the first and […]

Had some stranger-than-usual drama this week. At our second service on Sunday, a Chinese guy and a Russian guy came into church late. One of our regulars had told me before the service started that he was waiting on a couple Christian friends to show up. After the service, I went back to say hi […]

Since I haven’t really written about any church news for a couple weeks, I’ll try to do a brief rundown of recent happenings. A few weeks ago we had a really good week, arguably our strongest ever – both services packed and my Chinese didn’t fall completely flat. We had 75-80 in attendance that week, […]