A Weekly Meditation of Pastor Chang (August 9, 2009)

<Reflections over This Mission Trip> (2) 

If we count those who live in China and in the overseas, the entire Chinese population on the surface of this earth could be over 1.8 billions. This is the largest people-group in the world. I always wonder: Why does God create so many Chinese? What is His purpose for His glory and Kingdom?  

I believe that the Chinese culture and civilization already offer a lot of contributions to the entire human race and history. But are Chinese people beneficial to the Kingdom of God? Especially in the future, what kind of expectation that the Lord has in His mind? This is a kind of serious matter that I am always pondering about. 

Frankly, the Chinese churches both in China and in overseas are just beginning to launch on a new stage of revival, and their mission works are the same, just start to take the step to move on. The revival and mission work are as two sides of the same coin. They go along hand in hand together. We constantly hear that the rising-up Chinese church is part of God’s plan that the Chinese Christians will take the last torch of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world and bring it back to Jerusalem before the second coming of Christ. If that is the case, I would like to see it happens soon. And probably it is one of the reasons that God creates so many Chinese for His Kingdom’s purpose.  

Two thousand years ago, when the gospel was originally spread out from the Central Asia to Africa and Europe, then, by God’s grace, the European churches as the center of the gospel, they preserved well, reinterpreted well, and brought it out to the world. These European churches were predominately Caucasians. They did good job to keep the Bible and gospel in good shape until World War II, the Liberal Theology took off and swift over the entire Europe and North America. Because of that that crumbled the orthodox Christian faith and the mission works.  Now, the entire Europe almost loses the spiritual vitality and power to protect herself from the invasion of the Muslims. The mainline denominations in North America are likewise, just following the track of European churches to become crippled. And because of that, the mainline denominations lose a lot of young and new generation because they cannot compete with the temptation of the secular world. 

But if one takes a look to the so called, “the third world” – Africa and Asia. The churches are just like the church in the Book of Acts – vital and strongly growing. Many young people are drawn to church to become Christians and even become pastors. Why? This is a very clear biblical principle – anyone who loves the Lord and pursues for God will never be put to shame. However, if anyone who rejects God will be rejected by God too.  

Each time when I visit China, I see the growth of the church everywhere. For example, the church that I just visited and preached is a church of 5000 members. Recently they are going to develop another big church in their city. The reason was: not long ago, the Religious Bureau of the City Government just released a piece of land for religious purpose – it can be used for Christianity or other religious group to develop. If the church gave it up, it could be given to either Buddhism or Taoism, or any folk religion to develop. I know the pastor of this church, when no one dared to take the opportunity she did. She told me, she did not have money, but she has faith in Christ. And because of faith, she dares to take a risk. Step by step, one can see the hand of God is guiding and moving on very well. Now, the blueprint of the new church construction has been done, soon the actual ground-breaking will take place. They plan to complete this project in 5 years. And the cost is about $40 millions Chinese Yuan. When this project is completed, it will be the largest Christian church building in the City. 5000 seats will be provided for each Sunday service. 

The pastor’s husband is my very good friend. He told me, “The growth of Chinese church is because of the movement of the Holy Spirit. No one can stop it. And when we see the work of the Holy Spirit we need to follow His path to move. After welcoming more people into the Kingdom of God, we need to feed them with the Word of God, then, shape their life to become good Christians, then, send them out for Christ.”  

Although the churches in China so far grow well, still need to become mature so that God can use them in the future to advance His Kingdom. The Chinese Christians also need to grow both inwardly and outwardly so that the Christian faith may mingle with the blood of Chinese culture. In other words, Chinese Christians need to live out their real Christian faith in China soil so that they can become influential to the society.  

Now what are we going to do with our church, GCC? Now we stay in the USA, but most of us are overseas Chinese, we have two folds of missions: one, to pray for the USA and keep good fighting for upholding the biblical principles; another one is to join the call of God with other Chinese churches to do the mission work for the Kingdom of God.