Beginning in 1993 and running into the first decade of the twenty-first century many other Pentecostal believers in the villages of Wu Ding County left their TSPM churches and established their own Pentecostal house churches due to opposition. Now there are over 40 Pentecostal churches in Wu Ding that network together.
The author looks at two lives, that of Samuel Pollard and her own, to help us understand how faithful stewardship of time, abilities, and finances can be used to joyfully serve our Master, Jesus Christ. Pollard, an English missionary who loved the Big Flowery Miao people of southwest China, gave his life to introduce the Miao to Christ and uplift their society. The author is active in the arts and has been used by God to influence many lives in a variety of ways.
It is easy for the church to lose sight of her purpose in the face of today’s challenges. During a recent commemoration of Samuel Pollard, a missionary whose life dramatically impacted large pockets of southern Yunnan, Pastor Gai of Kunming preached on the nature of the church and the calling we must not lose sight of.
In addition to church leaders and ordinary Christians using online forums to discuss matters of faith, academics are joining the conversation as well. On his blog, Professor Liu Peng recently wrote about the relationship between poverty and “spiritual backwardness,” which refers to a spiritual void, or lack of spiritual beliefs. Writing from the perspective of sociology, Professor Peng argues that the most serious type of poverty in China is the “poverty of faith,” and unless that is addressed the problem of material poverty cannot be solved.
All our favorite stories this week are about people or communities that are on the margins of Chinese society, either culturally or geographically: Orthodox Christians, Uighur factory workers, Hong Kong taxi drivers, and Miao villagers in Guizhou.
This article, translated from the Mainland based website Christian Times, is a testimony to the power of the Gospel among the Miao people of Yunnan Province.
An overview of the ethnic minorities of China and the background of how they have been categorized by the Chinese government.
Daniel Wright spent two years in Guizhou, China on a fellowship that allowed him to study the people and societies of inland China. As he spoke with people, they expressed to him, in a variety of ways, the crisis of faith that has come with the erosion of belief in communism. The following is the account of his visit to Shimenkan, a township of the Big Flowery Miao.