A young Chinese church planter shares how an indigenous mission to migrant workers grew over several years. The group has taught and commissioned other young workers who move to satellite towns and cities around Beijing, and other major cities, to plant churches that focus on migrants.
Wong tells us how she started holding camps in villages for China’s “left-behind” children—those whose parents work in cities while relatives care for them. These children face serious challenges but are strengthened by faith in Christ and attending holiday camps.
Partnership is for a limited time as the national church learns to tap into previously unnoticed local resources. A successful partnership takes time and trust.
The experiences of the few remaining expatriate cross-cultural workers in China suggest that while we are not at the end of Christian development work in China, we are confronted with a substantially different ministry context.
China’s Ambassadors of Christ to the Nations by Tabor Laughlin was published in 2020 by Pickwick Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock, as part of their Evangelical Missiological Society Monograph series.
The book is based on Laughlin’s PhD dissertation analyzing the experiences of missionaries sent out from mainland China and delves into the cross-cultural challenges they face and other issues affecting their ability to remain on the mission field.
A Chinese translation of the original dissertation is now available.
Ever wonder how cross-cultural workers from China evaluate themselves or their fellow workers? Would the issues be the same as workers from other locations?
The author gives examples of students who became involved with missions and how this occurred; she looks at mission mobilization events and considers some of the challenges faced as students move into cross-cultural situations to present the gospel.
There is a Chinese saying 《十年树木，百年树人》 which means, “It takes ten years to grow a tree but a hundred to cultivate a person.”
Those partnering with China’s emerging missions movement would do well to consider what they may be passing on without even realizing it. Careful filtering of concepts and methods—but more importantly, values and unspoken assumptions—could help guard China’s future mission leaders from replicating painful mistakes.
I encourage you to read every word of “Doing Missions with Chinese Characteristics,” pray, and ponder both what God wants to teach you, as well as how you might apply it to your service to the world.
Fulton analyzes the “Wenzhou Model” of missions for how it might be used in twenty-first century missions. He points out some of its strengths, liabilities, and aspects that can be replicated in today’s world and others that cannot.
With the Chinese church’s increasing interest in missions, the authors look at factors that have encouraged this interest and made mission endeavors increasingly possible. They point out fifteen lessons already learned from their involvement in mission.