The Gospel in China

I read a little book yesterday called, “The Basic Purpose of Following the Buddha.” Buddhism isn’t as hip and groovy here as you might think. Most of the temples are tourist sites, and I think I’ve only seen monks once or twice (once at the airport). But there are some devout – mostly older people, […]

S., T., and me spend a lot of time every week talking about our church, studying the Bible model for the church, and making plans to try to bring those two pictures a little closer together. For example, they’re both preaching next Sunday, so yesterday we spent about half our time working on their messages […]

Well, I’m doing a terrible job of keeping up on blog entries. It’s partly because we’re busier now, since we’re up and running again now that winter break is over. And partly because not a lot of new “worth writing about” stuff has happened lately (more on that tomorrow, maybe). I thought the Lord really […]

Since S. is going to be giving up his major at school, he’s moving into the extra room at the church building. We got it mostly set up for him on Monday – we’ve got students coming this summer to work with us, and we’ll need to add a few more beds at that time. […]

Pretty good service last night – not sure how many we had, but we were close to full. Lots of first-time visitors. We’re still in “first-class” seating mode, and we can still add more chairs to make our “economy” seating arrangement before we go back to two services. I’d like to go back to two […]

Turned out to be a pretty fun week, even though I had to go to school twice. It’s actually not that bad – characters are naturally more fun to study than the spoken language, which is partly why most people focus on it. It’s not too hard so far, I’ve got a lot of familiarity […]

Started our university class today. Just meets a couple times a week, so it really won’t hurt our regular schedule much. Small price to pay… So I guess I officially started studying writing today. Not nearly as scary as it was when we first got here. By now, we’re really familiar with lots of characters […]

Worship service last night. Best group we’ve had yet this year, and their arrival times were pretty much as varied as the night before. About a quarter of the people got there right after I got up to preach (about half an hour into the service). Our music went really well tonight, I thought. They’re […]

Finished our Gospel class last night. A bunch of students are back, but they apparently don’t really remember when we start. Last semester we had two services on Saturday, 5 and 7, so that might have something to do with it. People trickled in from 4:50-6:30! Good to see some old faces. This is our […]

Last night we had a meeting with another church’s pastor. They’re probably the closest church to us, and they’ve done as good as any other church in town at getting students to come to church. Their location is also right outside a university. This is the church that I’ve mentioned before – started by a […]