China blog post July 23

Had a great talk this morning at breakfast with the lady who is the leader of the local congregation here. We noticed that there are many female leaders here, even as pastors of local churches.  Se shared how that in most of these churches with women pastors, they long to give the leadership of these churches to men, but there is a real shortage of godly men in their churches.  Sounds like somewhere else I know . . . 

 

It's after lunch time now and we are having rest time.  It's their habit to have about an hour of rest after lunch,  we were going to leave after lunch, but they don't like to travel with foreigners during the day light hours.  It's easy to forget about the reality that the government doesn't want us here.

I'm sad to leave our new friends here when we are just getting to know them a little bit.  There are quite a few young coupes here, Lacy & Jed, David and his wife, and a few others who are just so incredibly joyful and full of life,  and what servants!  They always are so ready to wait on us hand and foot . . .

What has been surprising about the students here is the number of older adults.  John McCall said that by far this is the oldest group he's ever had.

After lunch we got to hear the testimony of a young pastor whose mother owns the facility we are meeting at.  He shared of how he was raised by Christian parents, but walked away from God as a youth.   He later came back to Christ and now is the pastor at a local church.  The university campus ministries really seem to be doing an incredible work in bringing the Chinese to Jesus.  This pastor, named Enoch, told of a time when they were meeting in a room at the university they had rented to have Bible study and the police came and took them to the police station and even beat some of the brothers.  Thankfully, this is becoming more rare.

In talking with him about his challenges as a pastor, it was like talking with one of my pastor friends in the states:  difficulty balancing church and family, inter generational challenges in his church, and a lack of influence in the community.  Those are all problems I can identify with.  

. . . So after an interesting nearly two hour van ride we arrived at our second training center.  Beautiful mountainous country we travelled through.  As we travelled at dusk and after sunset, we noticed many people in the forest with flashlights searching the trees.  I'll show you in the next post what they were looking for.

We are hosted by Abraham, his wife Sarah, and (no joke) their son Isaac.  Most of the Chinese here have adopted English names out of consideration for us poor Westerners who simply cannot pronounce their Chinese names correctly.  Sarah said they choose these names because they were good examples to follow from the scriptures.  They certainly did exemplify the hospitality of Abraham to us!

Looking out the door at the farmland at training center #2  (we couldn't leave the center)

 

The woman who owned the training center #1 facility