Thursday, November 02, 2006
Determination nation
There is one image from my time in China that has stuck in my mind that puzzles me. Why should it keep nagging away, not least because it isn’t strongly personal and nor does it relate to the reason I was there? Anyway, for what it’s worth, I’ll share it with you.
As we sat rushing down breakfast in the 26th floor restaurant of our hotel we could survey the surrounding area which had mostly been demolished for rebuilding. Almost all had been flattened except for a building of about sixteen stories and there on its flat roof something remarkable was happening. Two men were attacking it with sledgehammers.
By the time I had worked my way though some coffee and a few odds and ends – and recovered from the shock that the ‘milk’ put on my cornflakes was a kind of yoghurt – they had made two modest holes. As I went off to face the day I left wondering what they had in mind. They couldn’t possibly be intending to demolish this huge building by hand, could they? It would be much like trying to melt an iceberg with a blowtorch.
I thought no more about the image until a few days later when we were driving along a road that, we learned, had been designated for widening. All along the left hand side were buildings in various stages of being demolished and with not a piece of machinery in site. No ball and chain. No nothing. Just masses of people doing much what the two men on the roof had done.
Of all the unexpected experiences in China this seems one of the most unexpected. Yet it seems to speak volumes about the heart of the nation. They are prepared to stick doggedly at the task in hand until it is done. Come to that, it was equally true of the Christians we had met.
And for an inspiring example of what that cam mean let me take you back to the two young women working on HIV/Aids education and care. They had started their presentation by telling us how they and their co-workers had just completed a seventy two and a half-hour marathon read through of the Bible in one go. Seventy-two hours - round a table reading, eating and sleeping - with only loo breaks allowed to interrupt.
They were as determined to get the big picture of the Bible as a background to all they were doing as were the men on that roof to achieve their goal.
Then we learned the two others who were also sharing their story with us – former addicts now involved in an impressive initiative among addicts – had much the same approach as part of their induction programme. Getting the Bible’s big picture was a foundation – and they were prepared to ‘go for it’ to get it.
They have something here that we could do with putting jump leads on.
As we sat rushing down breakfast in the 26th floor restaurant of our hotel we could survey the surrounding area which had mostly been demolished for rebuilding. Almost all had been flattened except for a building of about sixteen stories and there on its flat roof something remarkable was happening. Two men were attacking it with sledgehammers.
By the time I had worked my way though some coffee and a few odds and ends – and recovered from the shock that the ‘milk’ put on my cornflakes was a kind of yoghurt – they had made two modest holes. As I went off to face the day I left wondering what they had in mind. They couldn’t possibly be intending to demolish this huge building by hand, could they? It would be much like trying to melt an iceberg with a blowtorch.
I thought no more about the image until a few days later when we were driving along a road that, we learned, had been designated for widening. All along the left hand side were buildings in various stages of being demolished and with not a piece of machinery in site. No ball and chain. No nothing. Just masses of people doing much what the two men on the roof had done.
Of all the unexpected experiences in China this seems one of the most unexpected. Yet it seems to speak volumes about the heart of the nation. They are prepared to stick doggedly at the task in hand until it is done. Come to that, it was equally true of the Christians we had met.
And for an inspiring example of what that cam mean let me take you back to the two young women working on HIV/Aids education and care. They had started their presentation by telling us how they and their co-workers had just completed a seventy two and a half-hour marathon read through of the Bible in one go. Seventy-two hours - round a table reading, eating and sleeping - with only loo breaks allowed to interrupt.
They were as determined to get the big picture of the Bible as a background to all they were doing as were the men on that roof to achieve their goal.
Then we learned the two others who were also sharing their story with us – former addicts now involved in an impressive initiative among addicts – had much the same approach as part of their induction programme. Getting the Bible’s big picture was a foundation – and they were prepared to ‘go for it’ to get it.
They have something here that we could do with putting jump leads on.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Paving paradise
Oh the joy of getting my hands on an English newspaper after eleven days in deprivation. It hasn’t just been the Su Duko I’ve been pining for but a sense of what is going on in ‘my world’. It was with that taste in my mouth I attacked the weekend papers.
As I read a constant theme kept shaking its stick at me; that it’s time to get religion out of public and even private life. The subject matter was very ‘the veil or not the veil’ and ‘faith schools good or bad’. But these were too often the excuse for some religion bashing.
The Sundays were particularly clear, and one readers’ letters page shouted the loudest with more than a few contributions more or less saying the same thing, ‘We don’t want faith anywhere near life as it has nothing valuable to offer.’
Yet, as I read, some words from the Beijing Review I’d picked up only a day or so earlier leapt to mind. ‘Recently, the Chinese Government has been promoting the establishment of a harmonious society and has been specially stressing the positive role that religion can play’. And those words came from someone who should know, Rev Cao Shengjie the President of China Christian Council.
The same feature in the Beijing Review showed that some money is being put where that mouth is. Last year, for example, the Chinese Government gave one theological seminary the equivalent of $85,000 to support its students, some of the future leaders of the Church in China.
And this stacks up in the light of the many conversations we had with senior Government officials from China’s Religious Affairs Bureau. All had consistently told the same story; that their role was to help the church. To protect it and, where appropriate, help resource it.
One Religious Affairs Bureau official was quite specific, telling us, ‘We are the servants of God. Our role is to ensure religious freedom in China. The Government gives lots of help with translation, printing and publishing the Bible’. Perhaps he had in mind the fact that some of the first Bibles to be printed after the end of the Cultural Revolution had been on the Government owned presses of the People’s Liberation Army – some three thousand copies.
Another such official, who had seen what church could be like during a visit to Australia, told us of his concern that the church in his city is ‘so traditional it will not attract the young’. And that he has not been shy at making the point.
So there you are. It’s amazing when you think of it. At a time when a nation – ours – is busy working hard to bury its Christian heritage, another nation – China – is busy burying its previous vehement opposition to Christianity and now even helping it to grow. There are those who know what they are missing and are doing something about it. Meanwhile, to quote a song I never much liked, ‘You never know what you’ve lost ‘till it’s gone’.
And today it was Cuppa Soup – for the second day running.
As I read a constant theme kept shaking its stick at me; that it’s time to get religion out of public and even private life. The subject matter was very ‘the veil or not the veil’ and ‘faith schools good or bad’. But these were too often the excuse for some religion bashing.
The Sundays were particularly clear, and one readers’ letters page shouted the loudest with more than a few contributions more or less saying the same thing, ‘We don’t want faith anywhere near life as it has nothing valuable to offer.’
Yet, as I read, some words from the Beijing Review I’d picked up only a day or so earlier leapt to mind. ‘Recently, the Chinese Government has been promoting the establishment of a harmonious society and has been specially stressing the positive role that religion can play’. And those words came from someone who should know, Rev Cao Shengjie the President of China Christian Council.
The same feature in the Beijing Review showed that some money is being put where that mouth is. Last year, for example, the Chinese Government gave one theological seminary the equivalent of $85,000 to support its students, some of the future leaders of the Church in China.
And this stacks up in the light of the many conversations we had with senior Government officials from China’s Religious Affairs Bureau. All had consistently told the same story; that their role was to help the church. To protect it and, where appropriate, help resource it.
One Religious Affairs Bureau official was quite specific, telling us, ‘We are the servants of God. Our role is to ensure religious freedom in China. The Government gives lots of help with translation, printing and publishing the Bible’. Perhaps he had in mind the fact that some of the first Bibles to be printed after the end of the Cultural Revolution had been on the Government owned presses of the People’s Liberation Army – some three thousand copies.
Another such official, who had seen what church could be like during a visit to Australia, told us of his concern that the church in his city is ‘so traditional it will not attract the young’. And that he has not been shy at making the point.
So there you are. It’s amazing when you think of it. At a time when a nation – ours – is busy working hard to bury its Christian heritage, another nation – China – is busy burying its previous vehement opposition to Christianity and now even helping it to grow. There are those who know what they are missing and are doing something about it. Meanwhile, to quote a song I never much liked, ‘You never know what you’ve lost ‘till it’s gone’.
And today it was Cuppa Soup – for the second day running.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Back home
Blogging, I’ve discovered, is not an exact science. The plan to deliver reflections on a daily basis can be far too easily torpedoed by non-complient hotel internet providers, sheer bone-weariness, or not being near a computer in the first place. Today, for instance, follows a three day period involving all the above and more. Which is frustrating seeing how much of the past eleven days continues to bounce round my head.
On the way to the airport two of us mulled on the key themes that seem to underlie our experience. As we did so I was reminded of the story one of our Chinese hosts had recounted. He’d been a guest in America where they had given him a treat – by laying on a Chinese banquet of the highest order. At the end his hosts had asked, with more than a little pride under the surface, ‘So be honest, what do you think of the Chinese food?’
Having gained their permission to tell it as it was he explained, ‘Only two dishes were authentic. The rice. And the spring rolls – which had been imported from China.’ What the West had figured was the ‘real China’ was nothing of the sort. And that’s how we were feeling after all we had seen and experienced.
Three distinct and unanticipated contrasts seemed to sum up what we had seen. There’s the contrast between the stylish wealth seen in the cities and the rural poverty that holds so much of China in its grip. There’s the contrast between the elderly and predominantly female church congregations and the sparky young leadership in training and, in some measure, already in place. And the contrast between the oppression and persecution experienced by the churches during the Cultural Revolution and the freedom they now enjoy – even getting some Government money and help at times.
Even then, one thought somewhat haunted me. Our visit as international representatives had been to see the way the Bible is being made available in vast quantities and in imaginative formats to meet the needs of the growing church. But could we have been mistaken in what we saw? China is vast. So could our impressions have all been down to seeing what, in our hearts, we wanted to see – it’s something physiatrists call ‘selected recognition’. Plan to buy a specific make of car, for example, and you find yourself noticing it on the road far more often than it actually exists. Could something of that order have happened to us?
Waiting for our ride to the airport I browsed the hotel lobby for something to read. On a rack was a supply of the June 1st edition of the Beijing Review – China’s ‘official’ English language equivalent of Newsweek. The cover said it all, ‘Christians Arise – the Bible’s influence on the Chinese faithful’. Inside were no less than twelve well researched and highly positive pages – on the churches, the Bible, the history of Christianity in China, the training of church leaders. What we had seen had been seen too by the unbiased and objective eyes of the media.
Of course, they were reporting only the facts. Yet, even so, the coverage was littered with the personal stories of those whose lives had been impacted by the Bible and were now part of the growing church.
So here I am with the grimace of dead pigeons now replaced by roast pork and some of Aunt Bessie’s best. But there is still so much more to say than the nine blogs delivered to date have allowed. Many more thoughts keep coming down the pipeline. So, interruptions permitting, I’ll give them my best shot over the next few days, including the relevance of that computer game I’m now reliably informed is simply called Frog.
Meanwhile, thanks British Airways for the lasagne – which I took instead of the Chinese pork. Enough is enough. Thanks too for letting me at last see The Constant Gardener – every bit as good as promised and an added delight having walked among those Nairobi slums and longed for the vibrant faces of their children to be captured on film.
We’ll that’s it. Off to church, which will be somewhat different to this time last week. Perhaps it’s not jet lag I am feeling but withdrawal symptoms.
On the way to the airport two of us mulled on the key themes that seem to underlie our experience. As we did so I was reminded of the story one of our Chinese hosts had recounted. He’d been a guest in America where they had given him a treat – by laying on a Chinese banquet of the highest order. At the end his hosts had asked, with more than a little pride under the surface, ‘So be honest, what do you think of the Chinese food?’
Having gained their permission to tell it as it was he explained, ‘Only two dishes were authentic. The rice. And the spring rolls – which had been imported from China.’ What the West had figured was the ‘real China’ was nothing of the sort. And that’s how we were feeling after all we had seen and experienced.
Three distinct and unanticipated contrasts seemed to sum up what we had seen. There’s the contrast between the stylish wealth seen in the cities and the rural poverty that holds so much of China in its grip. There’s the contrast between the elderly and predominantly female church congregations and the sparky young leadership in training and, in some measure, already in place. And the contrast between the oppression and persecution experienced by the churches during the Cultural Revolution and the freedom they now enjoy – even getting some Government money and help at times.
Even then, one thought somewhat haunted me. Our visit as international representatives had been to see the way the Bible is being made available in vast quantities and in imaginative formats to meet the needs of the growing church. But could we have been mistaken in what we saw? China is vast. So could our impressions have all been down to seeing what, in our hearts, we wanted to see – it’s something physiatrists call ‘selected recognition’. Plan to buy a specific make of car, for example, and you find yourself noticing it on the road far more often than it actually exists. Could something of that order have happened to us?
Waiting for our ride to the airport I browsed the hotel lobby for something to read. On a rack was a supply of the June 1st edition of the Beijing Review – China’s ‘official’ English language equivalent of Newsweek. The cover said it all, ‘Christians Arise – the Bible’s influence on the Chinese faithful’. Inside were no less than twelve well researched and highly positive pages – on the churches, the Bible, the history of Christianity in China, the training of church leaders. What we had seen had been seen too by the unbiased and objective eyes of the media.
Of course, they were reporting only the facts. Yet, even so, the coverage was littered with the personal stories of those whose lives had been impacted by the Bible and were now part of the growing church.
So here I am with the grimace of dead pigeons now replaced by roast pork and some of Aunt Bessie’s best. But there is still so much more to say than the nine blogs delivered to date have allowed. Many more thoughts keep coming down the pipeline. So, interruptions permitting, I’ll give them my best shot over the next few days, including the relevance of that computer game I’m now reliably informed is simply called Frog.
Meanwhile, thanks British Airways for the lasagne – which I took instead of the Chinese pork. Enough is enough. Thanks too for letting me at last see The Constant Gardener – every bit as good as promised and an added delight having walked among those Nairobi slums and longed for the vibrant faces of their children to be captured on film.
We’ll that’s it. Off to church, which will be somewhat different to this time last week. Perhaps it’s not jet lag I am feeling but withdrawal symptoms.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Heaven come early
I missed a trick yesterday when banging on about youth. I should have thrown in a plug for Liu Yanhui. As the crowds had tugged and jostled us at the end of the church service last Sunday I came face to somewhat nervous face with young Liu – courtesy of his mother having her hand firmly at his back.
All white shirt and somewhat shy, this probably fifteen-year-old read from a small pre-prepared card – ‘This site have a Christian Digital Magazine you can download’. And he handed me the card with the web address www.crossmap.ca
Check it out –I hope you will – and you’ll find, as I did, it is all in Chinese. But don’t let that put you off. Be inspired by young Liu Yanluu who has created a Christian portal right there in mainland China. And pray for him and the tens of thousands like him who want to be authentic followers of Jesus.
Today, we had a glimpse of a very different kind of pressure on one particular set of Chinese young adults. We’d made a three hour trip over some of the world’s finest potholes to see, among other things, a Bible Training Centre for future Christian leaders among China’s minority people groups. We were not at all ready for what we encountered.
As we trod the several flights of outside stairs the singing grew ever louder. And what singing. Suddenly we were at the front of a desk filled room with forty students each dressed in their distinctive ‘minority people group' costume – blues, pinks, greens, yellows, gold and more – plus smiles to match. It looked like heaven – a segment of that ‘every nation, tribe and tongue’ we'll one day be part of. And we were getting a slice of it now.
And it also sounded like a sample of the same place. Two young men to my left had bass voices powered by the kind of lungs needed to inflate a car tire by mouth.
The students are on a one year training programme – basic doctrine, Gospels and Acts, and a bit more. They come from six of the minority groups but hardly any of the languages their people use has a workable translation of the Bible. Work is in hand on new translations and some to replace existing ones that, if I understood the underlying message of the translators we’d met earlier that day, ‘suck’. Some are over eighty years old and of dubious value for today’s reader.
The only answer is to use Today’s Chinese Version of the Bible, in Mandarin, alongside what is to hand in their own language. Our privilege was to personally place a copy of that very volume into the hands of each beaming student.
We did so and then came the speeches and the new realisation of ‘pressure’. A senior local church pastor put it this way, ‘The Cultural Revolution robbed us of a whole generation of leaders and pastors for our churches. These are those who must take the responsibly to fill the gap. Please pray for them’.
So there’s more pressure. On them – but also on us.
Oh, and a food footnote. Between meeting those Bible translators and seeing the students we had lunch. Not one of the usual ‘local restaurant’ revolving food jobs – great but slightly manufactured.
This had clearly been rustled up in the kitchens that also feed the students. Which meant cheep and cheerful - so rice at last. And bean sprouts for the first time on the trip. And the most wonderful sliced beef that seemed to have been cooked in a kind of dark treacle. Here was real Chinese cooking and had come at almost the end of the trip – but worth waiting for.
So now its time to pack and begin the long journey home via Shanghai – and with lots of time to reflect on some of the big picture issues we’ve encountered here, and all worth a bit of blogging, hotel internet permitting.
All white shirt and somewhat shy, this probably fifteen-year-old read from a small pre-prepared card – ‘This site have a Christian Digital Magazine you can download’. And he handed me the card with the web address www.crossmap.ca
Check it out –I hope you will – and you’ll find, as I did, it is all in Chinese. But don’t let that put you off. Be inspired by young Liu Yanluu who has created a Christian portal right there in mainland China. And pray for him and the tens of thousands like him who want to be authentic followers of Jesus.
Today, we had a glimpse of a very different kind of pressure on one particular set of Chinese young adults. We’d made a three hour trip over some of the world’s finest potholes to see, among other things, a Bible Training Centre for future Christian leaders among China’s minority people groups. We were not at all ready for what we encountered.
As we trod the several flights of outside stairs the singing grew ever louder. And what singing. Suddenly we were at the front of a desk filled room with forty students each dressed in their distinctive ‘minority people group' costume – blues, pinks, greens, yellows, gold and more – plus smiles to match. It looked like heaven – a segment of that ‘every nation, tribe and tongue’ we'll one day be part of. And we were getting a slice of it now.
And it also sounded like a sample of the same place. Two young men to my left had bass voices powered by the kind of lungs needed to inflate a car tire by mouth.
The students are on a one year training programme – basic doctrine, Gospels and Acts, and a bit more. They come from six of the minority groups but hardly any of the languages their people use has a workable translation of the Bible. Work is in hand on new translations and some to replace existing ones that, if I understood the underlying message of the translators we’d met earlier that day, ‘suck’. Some are over eighty years old and of dubious value for today’s reader.
The only answer is to use Today’s Chinese Version of the Bible, in Mandarin, alongside what is to hand in their own language. Our privilege was to personally place a copy of that very volume into the hands of each beaming student.
We did so and then came the speeches and the new realisation of ‘pressure’. A senior local church pastor put it this way, ‘The Cultural Revolution robbed us of a whole generation of leaders and pastors for our churches. These are those who must take the responsibly to fill the gap. Please pray for them’.
So there’s more pressure. On them – but also on us.
Oh, and a food footnote. Between meeting those Bible translators and seeing the students we had lunch. Not one of the usual ‘local restaurant’ revolving food jobs – great but slightly manufactured.
This had clearly been rustled up in the kitchens that also feed the students. Which meant cheep and cheerful - so rice at last. And bean sprouts for the first time on the trip. And the most wonderful sliced beef that seemed to have been cooked in a kind of dark treacle. Here was real Chinese cooking and had come at almost the end of the trip – but worth waiting for.
So now its time to pack and begin the long journey home via Shanghai – and with lots of time to reflect on some of the big picture issues we’ve encountered here, and all worth a bit of blogging, hotel internet permitting.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
One shall tell another
A few days ago I asked a 33-year old theology student what it was like to be young and growing up in China. ‘It’s tough,’ he’d said with a wry smile. ‘Very tough. Because of all the expectations and pressures on you’.
The Chinese Government limit families to only one child. This, he explained, means all the hopes and dreams are focussed on just the one offspring. And not only from the parents but grandparents and even the wider family. It all spelled pressure to achieve and succeed.
Listening was one of my colleagues who put it perfectly. ‘Every child is expected to become a Leonardo Di Vinci.’ The young student nodded ‘Yes,’ he’d said, ‘That’s how tough it can be to be growing up in China.
This morning the issue went full circle as we meet with two young women in their late 20s. We were with them to hear of their roll at the heart of an imaginative initiative to fight the HIV/Aids pandemic. They are training and mobilising a tight knit team which uses the Bible and its teaching to promote responsibility and behaviour change.
But over lunch – not dead birds but some nice spicy beef – we dug for their personal story. They told how they’d felt exactly the pressure the theological student had described while studying – one medicine, the other hotel management. But it was worse than that. They had also felt entirely without hope. No matter what they achieved, so what!
But both had friends who told them about Jesus, made sure they had a Bible and began praying for them. One had quickly joined a fellowship group and become a Christian. The other took longer but was finally baptised. Neither of their families were happy as they were the first to become Christians. But the mother of one of them was baptised four years later because she could see the impact on her daughter’s life.
So here we were with two things coming together. A growing sense of pressure among those growing up and an abundance of those who will tell their friends about Jesus. No wonder the church is growing so fast.
Just isolated examples? Well our first stop this morning had been a tiny Bible bookshop in the church where we were meeting. There we bumped into the first two customers of the day. One a 20-year old engineering student who’d become a Christian four months ago through the influence of his friends. He was buying a Bible for one of his own friends who he was praying for.
The second was a woman whose 39th birthday was today and whose eyes filled up when we sang her Happy Birthday. The lines on her face suggested a lot could be read between them. This very urban woman – pointed shoes, frayed jeans, purple jacket – had become a Christian a year ago and was buying Bibles for her friends. How could she afford to do so? ‘The Bible is so valuable,’ she’d responded. ‘It is worth the price’.
That’s the kind of story we keep hearing. People coming to faith through their friends, who then show the same kind of concern for friends of their own. The number of Christians in China has grown by three hundred per cent in the past twenty years. In the light of what we've been hearng it is not hard to figure out why.
On another subject entirely, can anyone remember the name of that early computer game where you had to get a frog across a road before it got squashed? No one here can. And I don’t think Googleing ‘squashed frog’ will do much good – though it might come up with a recipe for something that may well have spun round our meal table the other lunch time.
The Chinese Government limit families to only one child. This, he explained, means all the hopes and dreams are focussed on just the one offspring. And not only from the parents but grandparents and even the wider family. It all spelled pressure to achieve and succeed.
Listening was one of my colleagues who put it perfectly. ‘Every child is expected to become a Leonardo Di Vinci.’ The young student nodded ‘Yes,’ he’d said, ‘That’s how tough it can be to be growing up in China.
This morning the issue went full circle as we meet with two young women in their late 20s. We were with them to hear of their roll at the heart of an imaginative initiative to fight the HIV/Aids pandemic. They are training and mobilising a tight knit team which uses the Bible and its teaching to promote responsibility and behaviour change.
But over lunch – not dead birds but some nice spicy beef – we dug for their personal story. They told how they’d felt exactly the pressure the theological student had described while studying – one medicine, the other hotel management. But it was worse than that. They had also felt entirely without hope. No matter what they achieved, so what!
But both had friends who told them about Jesus, made sure they had a Bible and began praying for them. One had quickly joined a fellowship group and become a Christian. The other took longer but was finally baptised. Neither of their families were happy as they were the first to become Christians. But the mother of one of them was baptised four years later because she could see the impact on her daughter’s life.
So here we were with two things coming together. A growing sense of pressure among those growing up and an abundance of those who will tell their friends about Jesus. No wonder the church is growing so fast.
Just isolated examples? Well our first stop this morning had been a tiny Bible bookshop in the church where we were meeting. There we bumped into the first two customers of the day. One a 20-year old engineering student who’d become a Christian four months ago through the influence of his friends. He was buying a Bible for one of his own friends who he was praying for.
The second was a woman whose 39th birthday was today and whose eyes filled up when we sang her Happy Birthday. The lines on her face suggested a lot could be read between them. This very urban woman – pointed shoes, frayed jeans, purple jacket – had become a Christian a year ago and was buying Bibles for her friends. How could she afford to do so? ‘The Bible is so valuable,’ she’d responded. ‘It is worth the price’.
That’s the kind of story we keep hearing. People coming to faith through their friends, who then show the same kind of concern for friends of their own. The number of Christians in China has grown by three hundred per cent in the past twenty years. In the light of what we've been hearng it is not hard to figure out why.
On another subject entirely, can anyone remember the name of that early computer game where you had to get a frog across a road before it got squashed? No one here can. And I don’t think Googleing ‘squashed frog’ will do much good – though it might come up with a recipe for something that may well have spun round our meal table the other lunch time.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Words of life
This morning I heard the bigger picture about the remarkable woman who’d made the seven hour journey to meet us at the church yesterday. It turns out there was far more to it than her coming for a Bible.
Now in her early forties she’d become a Christian only a year ago, influenced by her mother who had made the same step two years earlier and accompanied by her two sisters. One sister, living close to the village we were to visit with the Bibles, sent her an MSS message and her decision was made.
She just could not bear to miss the ‘event’ and the encounter with these ‘foreigners’ who loved the same Jesus she now did. As she saw it, here was a once in a lifetime opportunity to celebrate being part of God’s great family in a unique way and she was going to take with both hands. And she did.
With time to kill before leaving our hotel for our onward journey, my camera and I took a stroll nearby through a small market and a riverside park. It’s hard to believe a simple Englishman could be become such a spectacle. But there is distinct shortage of excessively tall, pink, bald people in off the tourist trackChinese cities.
It was a dream to respond to their interest – coaxing the lady with the banana stall to smile, urging the lady cooking noodles over a spurting flame to perform and getting self-conscious teenagers to pose. Equally fun was finally coaxing a thin smile from the man slung in a home made hammock and arousing something close to hysteria from two women for whom a digital camera was from another planet. I could play with these charming and gentle people all day.
Back in our hotel lobby with the soon to be departing group, the church leader who had been one of our guides for the past few days fizzed in clearly bursting with news. ‘This is one of the most special days of my life’ he beamed. ‘I must tell you’.
The story poured out. He’d become a Christian thirty-three years ago aged nine – during the repressive days of the Cultural Revolution. The influence had been his Grandmother who led a small underground church of about twenty. Between them they had all shared just one Bible – which, as he’d read it, had brought him the words of life.
The reason for his elation? This very morning, after some years of searching, he’d become the owner of that very Bible. Exactly how he’d finally made contact with the person who had come to own it passed me by. But here it now was in his trembling hands – dog-eared, tattered and clearly well used and treasured.
The last thing we did before saying goodbye was to take photographs of him with his reclaimed treasure. I’ve seen smaller smiles on the faces of proud new parents. And there was no doubt why. It was not that he had recovered a lost heirloom but now held a tangible reminder of the way the Bible’s light and strength had sustained his small group of Christ-followers. At a time of turmoil and suffering, as they looked to Jesus and each other for the strength to go on this Bible had been at the centre of it all.
That’s the kind of people we have been meeting daily. And now, in yet another city, we’ll be doing it again tomorrow. Which leads me to say, when you check see the posting time on these blogs please remember they are given in GMT. For accuracy add eight hours!
Now in her early forties she’d become a Christian only a year ago, influenced by her mother who had made the same step two years earlier and accompanied by her two sisters. One sister, living close to the village we were to visit with the Bibles, sent her an MSS message and her decision was made.
She just could not bear to miss the ‘event’ and the encounter with these ‘foreigners’ who loved the same Jesus she now did. As she saw it, here was a once in a lifetime opportunity to celebrate being part of God’s great family in a unique way and she was going to take with both hands. And she did.
With time to kill before leaving our hotel for our onward journey, my camera and I took a stroll nearby through a small market and a riverside park. It’s hard to believe a simple Englishman could be become such a spectacle. But there is distinct shortage of excessively tall, pink, bald people in off the tourist trackChinese cities.
It was a dream to respond to their interest – coaxing the lady with the banana stall to smile, urging the lady cooking noodles over a spurting flame to perform and getting self-conscious teenagers to pose. Equally fun was finally coaxing a thin smile from the man slung in a home made hammock and arousing something close to hysteria from two women for whom a digital camera was from another planet. I could play with these charming and gentle people all day.
Back in our hotel lobby with the soon to be departing group, the church leader who had been one of our guides for the past few days fizzed in clearly bursting with news. ‘This is one of the most special days of my life’ he beamed. ‘I must tell you’.
The story poured out. He’d become a Christian thirty-three years ago aged nine – during the repressive days of the Cultural Revolution. The influence had been his Grandmother who led a small underground church of about twenty. Between them they had all shared just one Bible – which, as he’d read it, had brought him the words of life.
The reason for his elation? This very morning, after some years of searching, he’d become the owner of that very Bible. Exactly how he’d finally made contact with the person who had come to own it passed me by. But here it now was in his trembling hands – dog-eared, tattered and clearly well used and treasured.
The last thing we did before saying goodbye was to take photographs of him with his reclaimed treasure. I’ve seen smaller smiles on the faces of proud new parents. And there was no doubt why. It was not that he had recovered a lost heirloom but now held a tangible reminder of the way the Bible’s light and strength had sustained his small group of Christ-followers. At a time of turmoil and suffering, as they looked to Jesus and each other for the strength to go on this Bible had been at the centre of it all.
That’s the kind of people we have been meeting daily. And now, in yet another city, we’ll be doing it again tomorrow. Which leads me to say, when you check see the posting time on these blogs please remember they are given in GMT. For accuracy add eight hours!
Monday, October 23, 2006
In the presence of Saints
It’s late. Far too late to be up blogging with a full day of travel to an even more remote Chinese city awaiting in the morning. But today was a day like no other and though the next few paragraphs won’t do it justice something has to be said.
It was a very early start with a three and a half hour drive to a rural town. The broad roads and sophisticated toll system were a reminder of a China now very much in the developed world. Yet the day emphasised the vast contrasts in this huge nation.
Yesterday we had scoured the six floors of one of the chicest malls you will encounter anywhere. On the road today we past patches of urban poverty to match some I’ve seen in similar African situations. And we ended up in a poor but rural area probably typical of the half of China’s 1.3 billion who live off the land.
One of our group, a former New Zealand farmer, was impressed with the huge yields these farmers were getting from their small emplacements using mostly traditional methods. No heavy machinery here. But they were making the best of the miles and miles of green and fertile land that we passed – all well irrigated with ponds and rivers.
The reason for our journey was to take Bibles to a distribution centre for the province, from which they would travel onwards to members of the scattered churches. The Bibles had come from the printing press we’d seen a few days earlier; the one that’s already printed 40 million Bibles for the Churches in China with Government approval and cooperation and made affordable because the paper had been bought though the donations of Christians around the world.
Now we watched the boxes being unloaded and taken through narrow, stall lined, streets where maybe no foreigner had trod. This was much to the amazement of those selling everything from vegetables to snakes, pans to fireworks, roast nuts to something ‘edible’ that might kill a westerner at twenty paces.
The destination was the large church building built by Presbyterian missionaries at the start of the last century. During the Cultural Revolution it had been confiscated to become a Government television station – during which time more than a few of those we were about to meet had their fathers or grandfathers killed for their faith.
Waiting for us were church leaders from surrounding districts who had come to take their share of the 2,000 Bibles back to their communities. We did a presentation. They were moved with joy. We were humbled at their passion, simplicity and dedication. They gathered at the front for a photograph and, as I looked at their faces, I felt it was along time since I had genuinely been in the presence of Saints. It was awesome. You could see it in their faces and feel it in the air. And all they could say was ‘thank you, thank you’ – at least, that was what we were told they were saying.
Searching to make a connection of my own I discovered a word we all knew that bound us together – ‘Hallelujah’. And we began to shout it to one another to acknowledge our common bond. Equally as much fun was playing paper, scissors, stone with three intrigued ten-year-olds and using the brief friendship to tell them, through an interpreter, that Jesus is my best friend and I hoped he was their's too.
Later that day – after another dead pigeon had spun round yet another lazy Susan - things got even better. We arrived at a humble – and that’s an understatement of the highest order – country church. The people, again mostly women, had been waiting patently for hours to receive the Bibles they had been promised. On their wooden benches they sang and waited as the boxes were brought in. One woman, who had heard from a relation that Bibles were to be given out that day, had travelled for seven hours, arriving at three in the morning.
There were speeches and prayers. And then came the privilege of handing the Bibles personally to each one as they waited in line. For a few, to be honest, it seemed to be ‘just one of those things’. But for others it was a deeply emotional experience. Tears ran down weathered faces. Hands reached out to hug and tug and to say ‘Thank you to you and to our God’. Old, very old, young and in between, became more tactile than we were told the naturally shy Chinese were ever likely to be.
There was a sense that this was about even more than 'at last having the Bible they longed for', even though there were few Bibles to be seen and those that were seemed on the point of collapse. The added dimension was that here were people from round the world, indeed our group represented seven nations, who cared about them. In this an insignificant farming community, in the midst of the most populous nation on earth, they knew there were those who loved their God who also loved them.
We left knowing they would probably never forget us. What they couldn’t know is that we can never forget them.
It was a very early start with a three and a half hour drive to a rural town. The broad roads and sophisticated toll system were a reminder of a China now very much in the developed world. Yet the day emphasised the vast contrasts in this huge nation.
Yesterday we had scoured the six floors of one of the chicest malls you will encounter anywhere. On the road today we past patches of urban poverty to match some I’ve seen in similar African situations. And we ended up in a poor but rural area probably typical of the half of China’s 1.3 billion who live off the land.
One of our group, a former New Zealand farmer, was impressed with the huge yields these farmers were getting from their small emplacements using mostly traditional methods. No heavy machinery here. But they were making the best of the miles and miles of green and fertile land that we passed – all well irrigated with ponds and rivers.
The reason for our journey was to take Bibles to a distribution centre for the province, from which they would travel onwards to members of the scattered churches. The Bibles had come from the printing press we’d seen a few days earlier; the one that’s already printed 40 million Bibles for the Churches in China with Government approval and cooperation and made affordable because the paper had been bought though the donations of Christians around the world.
Now we watched the boxes being unloaded and taken through narrow, stall lined, streets where maybe no foreigner had trod. This was much to the amazement of those selling everything from vegetables to snakes, pans to fireworks, roast nuts to something ‘edible’ that might kill a westerner at twenty paces.
The destination was the large church building built by Presbyterian missionaries at the start of the last century. During the Cultural Revolution it had been confiscated to become a Government television station – during which time more than a few of those we were about to meet had their fathers or grandfathers killed for their faith.
Waiting for us were church leaders from surrounding districts who had come to take their share of the 2,000 Bibles back to their communities. We did a presentation. They were moved with joy. We were humbled at their passion, simplicity and dedication. They gathered at the front for a photograph and, as I looked at their faces, I felt it was along time since I had genuinely been in the presence of Saints. It was awesome. You could see it in their faces and feel it in the air. And all they could say was ‘thank you, thank you’ – at least, that was what we were told they were saying.
Searching to make a connection of my own I discovered a word we all knew that bound us together – ‘Hallelujah’. And we began to shout it to one another to acknowledge our common bond. Equally as much fun was playing paper, scissors, stone with three intrigued ten-year-olds and using the brief friendship to tell them, through an interpreter, that Jesus is my best friend and I hoped he was their's too.
Later that day – after another dead pigeon had spun round yet another lazy Susan - things got even better. We arrived at a humble – and that’s an understatement of the highest order – country church. The people, again mostly women, had been waiting patently for hours to receive the Bibles they had been promised. On their wooden benches they sang and waited as the boxes were brought in. One woman, who had heard from a relation that Bibles were to be given out that day, had travelled for seven hours, arriving at three in the morning.
There were speeches and prayers. And then came the privilege of handing the Bibles personally to each one as they waited in line. For a few, to be honest, it seemed to be ‘just one of those things’. But for others it was a deeply emotional experience. Tears ran down weathered faces. Hands reached out to hug and tug and to say ‘Thank you to you and to our God’. Old, very old, young and in between, became more tactile than we were told the naturally shy Chinese were ever likely to be.
There was a sense that this was about even more than 'at last having the Bible they longed for', even though there were few Bibles to be seen and those that were seemed on the point of collapse. The added dimension was that here were people from round the world, indeed our group represented seven nations, who cared about them. In this an insignificant farming community, in the midst of the most populous nation on earth, they knew there were those who loved their God who also loved them.
We left knowing they would probably never forget us. What they couldn’t know is that we can never forget them.
