Bonus Episode B2

In this special bonus episode of the Removing Barriers podcast we will be featuring an episode from “A Thousand Lives Broadcast” hosted by Austin. A Thousand Lives Broadcast and the Vision for China team have a burden and calling to reach lost souls in the country of China.

We invite you to start listening to A Thousand Lives Broadcast and buckle up to navigate the complexities of missions in China. The hosts explore language learning, mission methodologies, China missions history, traditional folklore, and everything in between.

A Thousand Lives Broadcast is all about making Jesus famous in China.

Whether you are in high school or college, a faithful member of your local church or a pastor, whether you are supporting the work of missions in China from the States, or are teaching English in China currently, A Thousand Lives Broadcast is for you. So go right ahead, go to visionforchina.org/podcast or pull up your favorite podcasting app and subscribe to A Thousand Lives Broadcast today.

Learn more about missionary Austin by listening to episode 94

Thank you for tuning in to the Removing Barriers podcast. I’m Jay. And I’m MCG. And we’re attempting to remove barriers so we can all have a clear view of the cross.

In this special bonus episode of a Removing Barriers podcast, we’ll be featuring an episode from A Thousand Lives Broadcast hosted by Austin. A Thousand Lives Broadcast and the Vision for China Team have a burden and calling to reach lost souls in the country of China. We invite you to start listening to A Thousand Lives Broadcast and buckle up to navigate the complexities of missions in China. The host explore language learning, mission methodologies, China missions history, traditional folklore, and everything in between. A Thousand Lives Broadcast is all about making Jesus famous in China. Whether you’re in high school or college, a faithful member of your local church or a pastor, whether you are supporting the work of missions in China from the States or teaching English in China currently a Thousand Live Broadcast is for you. So go right ahead, go to visionforthina.org/podcast or pull up your favorite podcasting app and subscribe to A Thousand Lives Broadcast today.

Now, here is an interview with veteran missionary Mark as was heard on a Thousand Lives broadcast.

Sadahal. You are listening to the A Thousand Lives Broadcast, the premier podcast for all things related to Christian missions in China. This is Austin, your host and missionary with the Vision for China team. For more information about our Vision for China team and how to take the first step on your path to making Jesus famous in China, head on over to visionforchina.org that’s visionforchina.org. There you’re going to find a slew of resources to aid you in both sharing the gospel with Chinese friends, as well as to assess how you can better aim your life at making Jesus known in China, whether that be by praying, sending, or even going as a missionary.

Our episode, this Go Round, is actually a special interview episode with another member of our Vision for China team. But before we jump into the interview, I’m excited to announce that Vision for China will be hosting our third annual Underground Zhao Lei Conference in June of this year. That’s right. June of 2022. Many of you that have come out to the conference before know what it’s all about, but for those that don’t, we spend a couple of days together for preaching and Bible teaching on missions, teaching on Chinese missions, and devoted sessions to pray for China. This year’s theme is China’s multitudes. Introducing China’s multitudes to Christ’s Majesty. It’s our prayer that the Lord would raise up from among this generation a great number of gospel preachers who will devote their lives to preach the majesty of Christ to China’s multitudes. The dates for this year are June 17 and 18th, just a month and a half away, and we’ll be hosting it in Dawsonville, Georgia, which is about an hour drive north of Atlanta. Some of us Vision for China missionaries will be there hosting the conference and heading up the preaching and teaching. It’s sure to be a great time, and we certainly hope that you can make it and learn more about how you can get plugged into Chinese missions. So what are you waiting for? Head on over to visionforchina. Orgunderground for conference details and registration. Again, that’s visionforchina.org underground for conference details and registration.

Well, I’m super excited about this episode today. I’m here with Mark, missionary with the Vision for China team. He and his wife have spent a considerable amount of time in both China and Taiwan planning churches, preaching the gospel, and it’s an honor to have him with me here on the podcast today. So, Mark, please say hello, briefly, introduce yourself to us. It’s good to be here, Austin, and thank you for having me on the podcast. I’m excited to be able to just share some of the stories of what God has done in our ministry and life over the years. We spent about eight years in China, about two years in Taiwan, and seen God do many great things. And so just excited to be here and talk with you today. All right, awesome. Well, I guess just to get started, why don’t you tell us your salvation testimony? How did you come to know the Lord had to lead you to missions, all those things? So I grew up in a Christian family, born into a Christian family, and so my parents took me to church ever since I was little. And as far as I can remember, and when I was probably in the third or fourth grade, I remember being in children’s church. And during the invitation, the preacher invited people to come up, and I felt some conviction. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I knew there was something wrong in my life. And so I went forward at that time, and he took me back into a room and started explaining some things to me. And it’s kind of funny to think about it now. He asked me a question, and the question he asked me was, do you know that you’re a sinner? And I knew being a sinner was a bad thing. And so I responded and said, no, I’m not. And that’s all I remember really about that. But I remember coming out afterwards and saying I was saved, and I must have prayed or something like that, but I don’t remember any of that. I ended up getting baptized. So growing up in church and then having that experience as a teenager, I really doubted my salvation. I just couldn’t remember, was there a moment that I gave my life to Christ? What did I say? And that really just kind of hindered me. And I had a kind of a desire to serve God, but I didn’t even know if I was saved. And I knew what the gospel was, and I wanted other people to know what the Gospel was. But I didn’t know if I truly, fully was Christ and if he was mine. When I was about 17 years old, I knew I wanted to get this settled and I wanted to know that I want to be saved. And I was in my room. I took my Bible, open it up to Roman roads and read some verses, and got on my knees and just said, god, I repent of my sins and I put my whole trust in you. I want you to be the Lord of my life. And I’m completely putting my faith in you and the death barrel and resurrection of Jesus, your son, and please forgive me of my sins. And from since then, when I was 17, I knew I was saved. I’ve never doubted my salvation since. And I’ve seen God producing fruit in my life and working in me and changing me. I definitely haven’t been perfect since then. Lots of mistakes, lots of errors, sin and different things. But each of those he has used me to mold me more into his image.

And so just praise God for that. I got baptized, and then how did the Lord leave me in the missions? Well, growing up in church, we have a very mission’s mind. The church missionaries would come through the church and they would give their presentation. And I remember one when I was about probably 16 years old, and when I was again struggling with my salvation to know if I was saved or not, I remember a missionary getting up, and I think he was to Australia. And in his presentation, he said something that really stuck with me. He said, man, if there was just somebody that could go and tell them about Jesus, then they could hear and they could believe. Yes. And in my heart at the time, I thought, man, if I could do that, I could go tell them Jesus. Now, understanding a missionary to me was somebody that just went to another country, learned a language and told them about Jesus. And I was thinking, well, Australia speaks English and I know about Jesus, so I could tell them about Jesus. And so maybe this is something that I could do with my life. And our pastor at the time, he was praying that there would be missionaries called out of our church. He was saying that from the pulpit. I remember kind of saying in my heart, that’s me, I’m the next one. I’m going to be doing this. I’m going to surrender to do this. And I didn’t understand the missionary had that, like, preach and travel around temptation, plant churches, make disciples. I didn’t understand any of that. I just understood there were people around the world that didn’t know about Jesus, and they needed somebody to tell them about Jesus. And I was willing to do that. And that’s where that started in my life. And once I kind of felt called in the missions at that time. But once I confirmed my salvation when I was 17, I knew immediately after, man, that is what God wanted me to do. He wanted me to be a missionary. So I confirmed that again. And then I was about 19 years old. I surrendered to be a missionary to China, and that’s another story, but I felt God was leading me there. So that’s kind of my salvation testimony and how God led me into missions.

Okay, yeah, well, great. What does that look like? Obviously, you have planned churches now. What did it look like even just from the Word, putting that on your heart, and then that path from there all the way to, I guess, finding a mission board, starting to raise support, all of those things? Like, what did that process look like for you? So if we kind of fast forward to where I graduated from high school, and I grew up in a very good youth group and had a youth pastor that really worked with me and be able to kind of keep me in church and keep that love for God alive in my life. When I went out graduating high school, my path going forward was, I want to get to the mission field. And it was a bumpy path, but I knew, man, this is what I wanted to do with my life, right? And anything that came in and was kind of making that path go a different direction or, hey, maybe I might not end up getting to do this. It’s kind of let’s get back to what God called me to do. And so that I needed training at first, and so I ended up going to a certain Bible college, and it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. So I only spent about a semester there, things like that. Went to institute and things like that. And eventually I went and worked with a missionary in Peru, South America. And that’s nowhere close to China, a little far away, but I knew I wanted to go to China at that time. So I guess around 19? And the reason I went there is because that missionary was willing to mentor and spend time with other young missionary students. And that was something that I realized that I needed. It wasn’t just the academics. But I needed somebody that was going to mentor me. Pour themselves into my life and help me form character things and not just learn book knowledge. But that would actually help me become more Godly and holy and look at my life and say the hard things that need to be said and just be discipled like Jesus disciples. His disciples. And there’s an open door for that.

And so I moved down to Peru, spent that for six months, and I spent there for six months. And really, that was the first time I experienced that kind of level of discipleship, and it really was kind of life changing for me. It’s something I wanted to continue. And so after those six months, I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I come to find out that that missionary, when he was at the end of my time there, he was actually coming back to the States to start a church and also a missionary training school. And I thought, man, this is a great opportunity for me because I want to be a church planner one day, and I want to be a missionary and start a missionary training school. And he’s going to plan to church. So I get on the ground floor of that, and he moved back. I moved down, I flew in. And immediately when I got back to the States, I got my stuff and moved down to Georgia. I was there for the first service of the church plant. I was one of the first students at the training center and finished my training there. I already had credits from other Bible colleges that I attended, transfer those over, finished my training, and then stayed and kind of worked on I call it unpaid church staff for two years because I work at the church during the day and deliver pizzas at night. And I delivered pizzas, Chinese food and newspapers. So anything that can be delivered, help us make money and get by. While I was learning from the ministry, you kind of did that. You were uber before there was uber eats before there was I was uber eats before there was uber eats. And so I would deliver Chinese food usually at lunch and then pizzas at night and then newspapers at midnight. And that wasn’t fun. Don’t ever deliver newspapers. And so that was kind of, I guess, my path of training. And really I needed to be disciples. And we kind of caught the B level on your character and who you are in Christ and growing just in the basics and your Bible reading and your prayer and your knowledge of God and all those kind of things. And then you also want the missionary training and learning how to be a missionary, how to learn a language, what is culture shock and all these different things that come up. You want to learn about those and then how to raise support. And what does a missionary, when they go to the field, how do they raise support, and all those kinds of things. We learned all of those during our time of training, and that was invaluable to me. And I remember when I finally got to the mission field, a lot of the things that I was taught just came to life. All of those things started happening, and the things that I was trained in were actually very useful. Okay, well, one quick question for you.

So you just mentioned that even before you went down to Peruse, south America, you already had China on your mind and on your heart. What was it specifically about China? If you could kind of briefly describe how you landed on China. Okay, this is one of the things that’s a little more interesting in the sense that it’s hard to explain. We were at a friend’s wedding at the time and after his wedding got married near’s Eve, I think on New Year’s Eve, after the wedding, we were as a group of us, and we were staying at a church. I think it might have been the church where the wedding was, but they were allowed to sail because we had to travel kind of far to get there. And we were kind of just praying the New Year’s end. And I have been praying already about maybe where we got to have me and honestly, my personality. I was really thinking about a Muslim country somewhere in the Middle East. That’s kind of where I was focused on. I kind of was set, and I wanted to go where nobody else had been before. And with China, even though there was a great need, there was a lot of missionaries that’s been to China. Just view your mission history. Who do you read about? Hudson Taylor and all these missionaries in China. And so I was really praying about now I’m just wondering nobody’s ever heard of before where there’s no missionary. And that’s kind of like the Islamic world, right? So that was kind of my focus at the time. But I was just praying about it. And I remember one of my good friends today, I didn’t really know him at the time, Jeff. He was preaching, and I was at a conference and he was actually preaching about his field in Latin America. And when he was preaching about it, I realized that I wasn’t really willing to go there. I already, in my mind, kind of had countries like that in Latin America already crossed off because I was trying to pick the field about where I wanted to go. And he really used his message to convict me and say, it’s God who’s calling you. God who is sending you is God who’s also going to show you where you’re going to go. And that really caused me to say, all right, God, wherever you want me to go, I’ll go. You called me to be missing in the first place. So if you want me to go to Latin America, you want me to go somewhere in America or Asia or wherever it may be, I’m willing to go. And it was just kind of like that opening up. I didn’t narrow it down just to these areas that I was kind of choosing and getting back to that night. We were praying on New Year’s Eve after that wedding, I was there praying and just felt that God had laid China out of my heart, really out of nowhere. And sometimes you have those where God still small voice or whatever it may be, how do you explain it? And that’s kind of the weird part. But just like he told me, China is the place. And I was like, man, is this how it works? I don’t know. I don’t get it. It’s not the same for everybody, right? But I remember getting up and telling my other friends, hey, I just turned her to go to China. And he’s like, really? Like, what do you know? That’s what God wants you to do. I’m like, I don’t know how I know about it. That’s what I feel like God’s laid on my heart for me to do. I wasn’t even on my radar. And I said, this is where I’m surrendering to go. And I said, hey, I may be wrong, but I’m setting my path to go in that direction. And just expecting that was what God wanted me to do, that he would bless it, and if I was just wrong, then he would block it and redirect me somewhere else. And so he started blessing our path in that direction. Great. Amen.

Now, I guess kind of fast forwarding back up to you have ministry training, you have a mission board. You’re launching out to have a season of support raising before you leave for the field. And I’ve heard you speak a bit about this before. About how as you were raising your support. You’re calling churches. You’re talking to pastors. You’re letting them know what it is that the Lord led you to do in China and that there was some I don’t know if you call it pushback or just some questions there. Because China is a bit of a unique mission field in a few different ways. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So when we started devotion, obviously excited young guy, newly married. We had a six month old when we started debutation and going out, man, and just really excited to share the ministry, we felt God really had called us, too. And when we started traveling, you had people that were really excited. I’ve never heard of a missionary in China before. This is great. We’re glad that somebody’s going there. But then you also kind of got the attitude of, are you sure you can be a missionary there? Are you sure you can go there? They’re a close country, and at the time, there wasn’t really a reason that we saw that we had to not use our name on the Internet and things like that. And again, the Internet was just coming in, social media and all these kind of things when this is all happening and people are using it more and there’s different can you Google your name and all these kind of things. So we never talked to anybody where that was a problem and see where that was a problem. And so we were just kind of just open about what we are going to do in China. And we know it was a closed country or creative access country, whichever way you want to look at it. And some of those attitudes from pastors were very negative in the sense that some would say, hey, we’re not going to have you in because we don’t think you’re going to make it. Some of those would say, hey, and I think I wrote this in some different blog posts, the experiences that we’ve had. But some would say, you’re going to get arrested as soon as you get to the border because your name was mentioned on the Internet or something like that. As soon as you arrive, they’re going to rest you on the border because of some of your information being online.

Yeah, some of the information being online. And it was a mindset of fear that really had gotten into a lot of these pastors, and it was, well, is there anything to back that up? Is there any stories that you’ve heard of? And fast forward today, we do know a missionary where because of what’s happening in Hong Kong and things like that, there is some concern with the Internet. So we stopped using our full name on the Internet and things like that. But at the time, just being normal or just saying China for the pulpit or having a prayer card, I would have people in churches in America, you go to the church, right, nothing is being streamed online or anything like that. And somebody would come and they whisper to me because they think that things were happening and they couldn’t write me an email without speaking in code and things like that. It was just things that didn’t really make a lot of logical sense. I don’t subscribe to the mindset that China’s listening to every single space that I am, that they’re kind of I’m not president here, everywhere, and they’re listening and they know everything. And you can’t have that mindset because it’ll make you crazy. Sure. So there was a lot of that attitude that was just like, well, you’re just too open, you’re too bold, you’re too outgoing. And that did close the doors on several churches I was thinking of. I have a pastor at the time that encouraged me to keep being bold because I think if I allowed the mindset of the minority really to affect me and let that fear set in. Then when I would have got to China. I would have been more fearful. Because if you’re that fearful inside of America.

How much more fearful would you be living on the field when you have to go to China? And so if they’re listening to what we’re doing here in our little local church in America, then when I’m going to China and planning a church, how much more would they be listening there? And maybe that’s if you really believe that, then that’s probably why some of these pastors thought, well, there’s no way you can do this. Sure. And so to them, it was a contradiction to be a church planning missionary to China. And so, again, it was one of those things I didn’t know how it was all going to work out, but I really felt that’s what God called me to do. And so that was the direction that I was headed. Yeah. Okay, so what is kind of just a basic overview, a basic timeline of your ministry in China and then more recently in Taiwan? Say that again. Kind of just like an overview of timeline. So you mentioned, I think, being in China for eight years, taiwan for about two years. So kind of just a big bird’s eye view of that.

What would that look like? Yeah. So we went to China, and we spent the first two years up in Harbin, China, that’s kind of near the Russian border and very cold up there. And so we did language school there, worked under another missionary and spent the time really learning the language, seeing how he did ministry in the Chinese context, and learned a lot from that. And then after we finished language school, we took a short furlough. It was three to six months. I forget exactly how long that was. Probably three months. And then we went back. We moved to a city called Dalian, which is in the northeast part of China. We were there. And Dalian is a city of 6 million people. harbing was a city of 10 million people. And so these are mega cities, millions of souls for whom Christ died that need to hear the gospel. And we were there. And that’s where we started our personal ministry. We were there and went out and started the church plant there. And that’s where God eventually gave us amended train. And then they were able to start some other churches. And then after eight years, we left China, went home for a furlough, and we were on furlough for a little longer than a year, I think, and then went back to China. And when we went back, we weren’t able to stay. We ended up having to leave because of things that were happening, and then moved to Taiwan directly from there and been in Taiwan for roughly two years and started a church plant there. Well, praise the Lord.

And so you’re starting a church in a place like China. What does that look like? You mentioned men to train. Maybe you could elaborate on that. What would you say would be the focus of planning a church as far as evangelism or trying to host some sort of event? How do events work at churches in a place like China? Did you do a lot of discipleship? You could just kind of talk through some of those things. Yeah. So training men will start. There was a focus of my training when I was in Bible college. And being trained in the local church. And it really worked to our benefit once we see it in the Bible. Saints Timothy Two so you see it there, you see it’s what Jesus did with his disciples. But in the Chinese context, it’s important because most likely you’re going to leave China one day if you’re a missionary there because of persecution and if you are boldly preaching the gospel and making disciples and planning churches, it’s not something the government wants. And so really it’s a question, not if they find you, but really when if you’re not there, the best thing that you can do is leave men behind, that you’ve trained Chinese, local men so that they can continue church planning. And that’s what the Lord allowed us to do. And so give you a little bit more about kind of the history of the ministry in China. We went there and the first church plant that we had, we tried to go out and meet people. I was really discouraged and I was trying to go out and invite people to just come to our house. We didn’t know where to start, the church plant. Nobody was really coming. And I remember being discouraged and I just was at home praying one day, man, God, just give me somebody to study the Bible with today. And remember after I got done praying that, hey, first of all, they’re just going to show up in my living room, that I had to go out and find that person, but expecting by faith that God would answer that prayer request. And so I went out walking around with my Bible in my hand. And the reason I walked around with the Bible is because I remember I bought some Bibles when I was up in language school and a Christian had solid I was walking down the street with these Bibles and they came and said, Are you a Christian? And I said, yeah. And I said, well, do you have a church in your house? And I was like, no, but I go to one and I try to explain and invited that person to come.

And so I said, well, maybe the same thing will happen if I walk around the Bible. Somebody will come by and ask me that Bible. So it’s just an idea. So I walked around for about an hour at a university and nobody came to talk to me. And so I was just discouraged. I’m going to go back home and I got to get in a taxi. And on my way to go get a taxi, there’s a group of three young guys standing over to the side and one of them turned around and looked at me and I looked at him and kind of made eye contact. And I was like, okay, God, I’m going to go talk to that person. And I got close enough and I walked to him and he looked down and. He goes, Is that the Bible you’re carrying? I said yes, it is. I said, Are you a Christian? He goes. Yes, I am. And I said, well, where do you go to church? And he said, well, he says, I moved here for university, but I haven’t been able to find a church to attend. And I said, well, would you like to go to my house and study the Bible? And he said, Absolutely. And so God had answered the prayer that day wow. And led me to somebody who was interested in studying the Bible. So he came to our house and we started studying the Bible together. I’m fresh at a language school, so my language is still rough. But they come to find out that young man, he had enough of the gospel to be saved, but he had never really been discipled and baptized. And so started working with him. Ended up taking him out to the ocean. He got baptized. His friends he invited to come see, inviting them to my house, to the Bible study. And eventually his friends, they didn’t really want to come to my house anymore because it was too far. And so I said, man, what if we rent a building close to your location to the university in their dorms? You think, would they keep coming? And he said, yeah, I think they would. And so we ended up renting an apartment near their university so they could walk they don’t have to take a bus to my house and they could just walk to the church plant. And they started coming and started learning more about the gospel. And we started going on university campus and giving out tracks and church invitations and events and anything we could do. And eventually, because I made friends with these guys, I get invited to the dorms and you go into the dorms and meet different Chinese young men. And that was a big open door for us. Yeah, kind of networking. Yeah, kind of networking and using those networks and those friendships. And in China, one of the things that we found out is a lot of people there’s not much of a base of understanding the gospel because a lot of times they never heard it, sadly, and because many of them haven’t heard it, it takes a while to understand. And we saw people, they would come to church and they would come for 1234 months or longer, just coming because they need to understand it. I haven’t heard this, so I’m going to come. And you kind of see this process of three or four months go by, and then they would rather make a decision to believe or they would just reject it and say, okay, this isn’t for me. And that group of young men that were coming because of this friend, they were learning. But I remember and it was really sad because eventually they came to the point where they came in and said, mark, we’re not going to come to the church anymore. We understand what you’re trying to teach us and tell us, but we just don’t believe it and we’re not going to come anymore. That was a hard day because I got this group of young men that you think, man, you’re going to get saved and become preachers. That’s kind of your goal. And they just ended up kind of rejecting the gospel.

And we were having services on different days. And I remember like Sunday night, and I think Thursday night we would have better attendance than we would on Sunday morning. And so kind of after they kind of rejected the gospel, we decided nobody’s really coming on Sunday morning besides one or two. So what if we canceled the Sunday morning service? And I know this is kind of strange to do when you’re in midst of a church plant, but I said, let’s cancel Sunday morning service because nobody’s coming anyway, and let’s go to a different part of the gospel. And you kind of see that in act as Paul’s going and preaching the gospel, somebody rejects it. It’s just kind of like, okay, a different part of the gospel or a different part of the area. Yeah, I think I said that wrong. So if they reject the gospel, then let’s go to a different part of the city or go to a different city, one gospel, okay, and good for clarification there. And so if people were rejecting the gospel and where they didn’t want or they didn’t want to believe or they persecuted them, they didn’t stay and just keep enduring that, a lot of times they shake the dust off their feet and go to the next place, right? So I kind of felt that was what was kind of happening for us. And so there was another part of the city that I was already burdened about that I was hoping that we could eventually do something there. And so there was an English corner at a different university, and this was probably 25 minutes from the location that we were at. And I went to that university and started meeting people, and I was very open about kind of what I did. In China, you don’t often tell people you’re a missionary because their understanding what a missionary is is very tainted. And so it’s not somebody who preaches the gospel. It’s more like your political tool, the US. Government, kind of things like that. They see it more as like being a spy. Yes, more like being a spy. And so I would often tell them, I would say, I’m a pastor, and they say, well and I’m talking to them in English because they want to practice their English. And you can imagine people always ask me, what is an English corner? I’m going around and telling some of these stories in churches here in the States and say, well, what’s an English corner, an English corner is just usually a place. It can be oftentimes outside where people come and they congregate Chinese people and they practice speaking English to each other. And so it can be color students, it could be businessmen or anybody that just wants to practice English. And so somebody like myself shows up. Native speaker you’re kind of a superstar because your English is awesome. And so it just works out really well. And they always want to come and ask you questions.

So if you’ve been in China, you always get the same basic questions. Why are you in China? What are you doing? Are you married to a Chinese lady? You make lots of money, right? Kind of the basic questions, is China America better? They always ask these kind of comparing questions and so that always opened the door because I would say, I’m a pastor and they don’t know what a pastor is. Even if you say it in Chinese, I’ll say, oh, you mean a priest and things like that. And then they’ll say, well, it’s kind of like a Bible teacher. And then often they would say, well, teach us something. Like, teach us something from the Bible. Then I was like, okay, great. Challenge accepted. Yeah, challenge accepted. Well, there’s a guy named Jesus and you start there. And it was a way to share the Gospel doing that. I did that for about six weeks and I told them, I said, I’m going to start a Bible study if you’re interested, because I have Sunday mornings open now, and if you’re interested, give me your phone number and I’ll text you when we’re going to come. And a lot of people, because of the fear thing, they wouldn’t even take these steps. They wouldn’t even go. And they shared the Gospel with people, sometimes in English corners, because the fear mindset says, well, one of these people might be a spy, one of these people might be part of the Communist Party or work for the government. And that is a chance that you take. And some of those people were and we’ve seen people who were in the Communist Party get saved in our ministry, but that’s just the chance we take. And that’s the part I call it a wise forwardness. I’m not going to be on the sidewalk with a blow for him preaching in China, but also I’m not going to keep myself from telling people about Jesus, so I’m going to always tend to go forward, but with a wiseness and so wisdom never tells us to not talk about Jesus, right? We are always going to be talking about him. So going forward, that wise, forwardness, talking to people. Did this for about six weeks, sent a text to everybody phone numbers that I had, and we ended up renting a small location. I could see maybe 20 people in a little pizza shop. And pizza shop didn’t open to lunch. And so they were in there preparing before lunch. So I rented for about an hour, it was like $15. And we had, I think about eleven people show up and I report all this in our prayer letter so I can go back and find the exact number. I think it was like eleven. And they were all unbelievers except for one, and most of them have been I think we had one girl show up besides my wife, and that wasn’t counting us. And only one person was a Christian in there. So they were coming and learning. We didn’t have music, we didn’t have anything else. We just was going through the Gospel of John. We just read it, trying to explain it to them and invite them to come back the next week. And they would. And each Saturday I could go to this English corner, meet new people, invite them to come on Sunday morning. And that was kind of what we had going on.

And we had this other church plant on the other side of town that was going on Sunday night and on Thursdays, okay, so we started seeing some movement. But again, you give it three or four months and you don’t see by getting saved right away, right? But what’s going to happen in three or four months? Are these people going to walk away like they did before? Are they going to get saved? And the one young man that was coming, that was a Christian, I met with him and I love to start a church plan and hopefully people get saved. And he just caught the vision, yeah, I want to help with this. And he was on board with it. And again, he was a college student that moves into the city because we were working with college students at the time. And several months go by and we started seeing people from that group get saved and we started baptizing them and seeing that Bible study grow. So eventually we moved into a restaurant that had banquet rooms. And so we had rented those two banquet rooms. And so we do meals, we do a whole service at this point. And so we were doing music. And the young men would discipline, they would lead music, they would play guitar. There were specials that we had. We had a special Easter service and we’re doing it all around like the dining room tables. Nothing more Baptist than a banquet in church. We do a meal every service, but a lot of times we would just because it would help with renting the place. If not, we just build rent, we take up offering. And so we had this church plant that was growing and I noticed myself spending more time here, but we still had some believers and things on the other side of town that were still there, even though there was a good chunk of the people we were working with that rejected the Gospel we still saw fruit. There are still people saved and baptized there. And so we felt the Lord was leading us to take both of these church plans. And they both had separate names at the time and one was called Gospel and one was Grace. And we ended up putting them together. Merging Grace merged with Gospel Baptist Church and we ended up renting a first floor apartment and we were going to between the locations and we’re going to start having services together. And we were only in that building probably for about a month before we had problems from neighbors and they called the police. So we had to make some quick decisions. They didn’t come right to any of our services at that time, but they did show up during the day and one of the guys we were disciplined was there and answered the door.

They ended up finding out it was a church. And so we sent one of the other young men that was helping us with the church down the police station. Explain, make sure that we’re not a cult. So this is the police showing up to the location on a day where there was not a service. Right? And they were responding to complaints from neighbors. And so the neighbors that know what was going on, they were mad that we were too noisy. Okay, I guess that’s what we can piece together for what disturbing the piece. Disturbing the piece too loud. The Baptists are too rowdy, ended up showing up. So anyways, and that wasn’t our first run in with the police, but that was for merging this. So we had to make a decision. What do we do? Because I think up to this point we’ve had the police on our tail for other things. We’ve had people passing out tracks that got in trouble and things like that. And after our first kind of going back to our language school, we were in a police raid where the police actually came in during a church service. You may tell that story later. Okay. We were kind of moving things around and the police had come at this point, they had come to our other location. I think there was a time in there where we had to take a small furlough. We were having problems with our visa and my wife was expecting at the time. So we ended up having to come back to States for a short time and because of the passing of the track that got to a police officer, that led to a police raid on the first church plan. And they had moved buildings and things like that and no one depletes you up to this. And so it was just kind of like God was blessing. I’m kind of telling you the stories about how we kind of moved, but in the background you had these persecutions kind of happening and the police showing up and that’s just kind of part of the normal life and doing ministry there. But it kind of got to the point, like, okay, God, what do we do next? And we seem to keep getting in trouble with these apartments and things. And we said, we’ve always kind of been advised not to do an office space. And so I finally got the point, man, what if we rethink that? Okay? And office space is a lot more expensive. It could be two or three times more than what you’re renting an apartment for. But I said, well, let’s rethink that one. So we started looking at different places that we could rent because we know, like, well, we can no longer use this place anymore because the police know about it. And the police said at the time one of the guys went down the police station, told them what was going on, even said, okay, our passage foreigner shouldn’t be a problem, right? They say, oh, yeah, no problem. Right. And obviously we don’t believe that.

But we did continue on. And while we’re looking for new places, I lived right across from an office complex, and it was about a 30 story building, okay? And they had a couple of spaces available. We went in and looked at one on the 25th floor, and I was like, man, this is the space. So I called the guys up, so excited that we were working cycling, and said, let’s pray about renting this place. And we thought, well, before we rent it, let’s just go ask the neighbors, since we were having problems with the neighbors, like, we’re going to rent this space and put a church in here, and on Sunday morning we’re going to have kids, we’re going to have music, and we’re just going to be really loud. And just if that bothers you, let us know. We won’t rent it. Let’s just go ahead and tell the neighbors. It was two reasons. One, to see if they would be annoyed by loud noises, but two, to see if any of our neighbors were anti Christian. Oh, yeah. Because basically in China, your average Chinese person doesn’t know what we consider as Christianity to be illegal because they’re going to say they have religious freedom. They see churches that are in their country that are open, and they’re government churches and they’re controlled churches. What we wouldn’t say is, man, this is a true church, because they’re controlled by an atheistic head, and Jesus isn’t the head, but they would see because they don’t go to church, the average Chinese person. So there is Christianity allowed. So they would see us starting church as being illegal. Yeah. So, like, in their ignorance, it’s just like, church is legal, right? Not a big deal. It’s just a normal thing. Sure. But if you’re in the Communist Party or you are very anti Christian, you would know that these things are illegal. Okay? So we wanted to see if there was anybody living around, because if we just put all this money down to rent this space and all of a sudden the guy next to you is very anti Christian, then we’re in trouble right away. The people that were there and obviously your neighbors changed because it’s an office building. But the people there, we knocked on the doors and everybody most of the people I remember responding to saying, we don’t work on Sunday, or Our business closed on Sunday, so you won’t bother us. Okay? And one of our walls was windows. It was kind of so you’re looking outside, and so there was nobody on that side. So that really kind of worked out for us. And so we felt Lord leading us to rent the space. We moved in there on the 25th floor, which is really funny because everybody refers to planting churches in China as underground church planning. And we were on the 25th floor with 30 story skyscraper, and it wasn’t really underground, but the term just means it’s illegal.

But the irony, they like that. And so we moved down. We really started seeing God bless, and we started seeing the church grow and mature. And this is about the church is there. And eventually we’re kind of nearing the four year mark. And I don’t know exactly how long we were in that space for that four year mark. I have to go back and look. But it was right around that four year mark that God started giving us men that said, I’m called to be in the ministry. This is what God wants me to do. I’m shredding their lives. And we had several young men. That was discipline, and they were growing, and they were helping the church, and they were edifying the church, and they were personally growing. But they didn’t necessarily have that call to say, I want to be in the ministry. I’m going to be a pastor. And some of them struggled with it and ended up not going into it. And they’re still serving God today, and they’re helping the churches where they’re at. But guys, start giving us some of those young men. So instead of taking a furlough at that time, we stayed for an extra couple of years training those young men that God did give us so that we could turn the church over to them. When we took our furlough, that’s what we did. And it was a blessing to be up there again on the 25th floor and just kind of see what God did there. I did kind of a quick history of how the church plants and how those things kind of developed over time. And there was another question in there. It says something about events, right? Yeah. How do events work? Or are there events at church oftentimes maybe in a more what we would call an open country, it would be common to do like, I don’t know, bring a friend Day. And when you do that, you might blast social media. You might make flyers that you’re passing out everywhere. You’re probably going to put a huge sign out in front of your church, all of that stuff. I would imagine that at least some of the things that I just said probably wouldn’t be like even you said earlier, you’re not going to get out with a bullhorn and just start preaching. So where would the line be as far as how open to be? You kind of talked about that kind of forward wisdom. How does that work with even just inviting people to church and maybe different events and things like that for us? Because there are so many things that were told from deputation on about China that it was a lot scary being outside of China than inside China when we got there.

One of the things that I grew in the machine we worked with and kind of the things that we learned to do and then I adopted for myself, too, was not just assume that the line of things that you can’t do if somebody else said it was drawn here, to assume that line was actually the line, but that I was going to find that line myself. And so we would push that line. Okay, can we do invitations with our church address on it? Yes or no? Can we do invitations with maybe a WeChat contact on it QR code? Can we do it with a phone number? What would get us in trouble? And so through trial and error, we figured it out. We figured some things out over time, and some people did get in trouble because of some of the things that we did. And there was different lines, but that we were able to accomplish things to a certain point. And so we’ve kind of accumulated this wisdom, and eventually it got to the point where we weren’t going to give out invitations with the church address on it and just say, here’s what’s going on. But we would put WeChat information or we’d use a church logo. And so people that knew our church logo knew that this event was at our church. So you could send something on WeChat and invite people, say, man, we’re having a special Christmas service, and they can see the logo. And we wouldn’t need to say the address or the phone numbers or any contact information. They would just know that’s connected to our church because they’ve been before they write it, or they know what it’s been. So they could build it to say, hey, where’s that? Or people they could ask for a response, ask for the address. And we could do some follow up questions like, oh, where’d you hear about this from? And see if there was anything kind of fishy there. And a lot of times, if you were really concerned, you could say, oh, just meet us down at the KFC in front of this building. And then that way you didn’t direct the person directly to the church. And then you could have somebody down there meet them, see if there’s anything fishy. Nothing fishy, you go on up. But we tried to generally be open with that. We didn’t have as much problem with that, but we did do a lot of events because you couldn’t just I’m going to pass out 40,000 flyers and pass out 10,000 flyers four times to get people interested and then have a big day and have people come. So we would do events and we would use American holidays to host different events and do different fun things because they would be interested. We could promote this as a cultural thing or as an American thing, and then we would make friends with them. We used on Friday nights. We call it men’s night. We have different men. They could get off work, and we usually go from five to ten. And so basically, hey, from five to ten, we’re going to be at the church location. You get off work at 5678, whatever it is, you have different schedules. You can come in. College students obviously get there a little bit early, and we just kind of play different games and do different things. And then we usually go out to eat together. We all got some, like, lamb soup or different things like that. That was my favorite thing to eat. Or we go get barbecue and stuff. And it was a really good thing. There would be a group of 10, 15, 20 of us, and there’s always been somebody new there, and we’d just be going and walking to the restaurant.

You’re meeting people that you don’t know. You’re trying to witness to them throughout the night. Because again, we’re just spending time together, enjoying time together. And we’d sit down at the table to eat, and I’d say, hey, why don’t you pray when the guys are disciplined? And then while he’s praying, this other guy looks confused because he’s never prayed before in his life. So the guy sitting next to him and say, explain to him why we pray. So it’s kind of like this cyberpunk evangelism time and eventually got to the point where most of those guys that were coming when they got saved and they were kind of like all discipleship, and then people that rather didn’t want to get saved stop coming. And so it’s just kind of cycling them. And then after we go eat, they come back and they’d do like a five minute devotional or things like that. It just worked out really good. And so we had to use a lot of events and try to be creative. We would do on around Chinese New Year, we would do Dumpling Sunday and basically come to church after church. We’re all going to wrap dumplings, make dumplings, nice folks with us, right? So we’re going to do that and then we’re going to boil them and eat together. And that was always a big day that people would come. We did moon cake Sunday. Everybody bringing different moon cakes that they liked. And we even would make our own special ones with, like, snickers and stuff in them. Those are really good missionary friend that would do that. He found a bakery and he would ask a guy to put in his own fillings in them. So that was always interesting. And just things like that, that would get people interested. And we would go out and do I think we did like a hike thing one time and just different events to get people to go. And we did a marriage and treat get away couples could come to. And so it was a lot of event focus because that allowed us to meet people and invite people. Wasn’t on a grand scale, but it allowed a continued flow of visitors. Okay, I got you. Yeah, that’s really neat. Okay, so a while back, you had a furlough that was about a year long. So you’re back here in the States.

What was your plan going into that? As far as for the church, oftentimes you hear about missionaries who they don’t really want to take up for a loan because they feel like they have to find some other missionary to come take your place or what have you. So how are you kind of preparing for that? How did the church fare over the course of that year? And then what did they look like when you went back that ended up being our, I guess you would say year long furlough? That was the plan. I think we stayed a little bit longer than a year. But the goal with that is one, to come back. We can report to supporters, our family can take a break, get arrested. We can raise more support if we need to. We get reconnected to our local church here in the States. But also it allows the ministry that the Lord allowed us to start to mature and to stand on their own as much as they can and to really kind of test them. Hey, you guys are in charge now. I’ve been here, been helping on a financial level and on a physical level, like being physically present, preaching, helping you grow spiritually. You’ve been training. And so it’s kind of like taking the training wheels off and allowing them to go forward without you. Okay. Yeah. So, like national leadership, right? Stepping in, stepping in, stepping up and saying, okay, the missionary is gone. And now this is us trusting the Lord ourselves, going forward with this, it gives them that opportunity. And so our goal was because the Lord allowed us to, I said we merged those two churches together. So we had one church plant, and then we had a couple of young men that we were training. And then right before. We left, there was a third young man that joined our team. And so we had these three young men, and one of them was he took over the church that we started.

Another young man was helping another church, and the other young man was helping in another area as well. So we came back on Furlough. And while we were back on Furlough, they went through a lot of persecution. Two of the pastors there, they really went through a lot of persecution. And it was really hard for us being in the States because you want to be there with them when they’re going through it. What can you do? And to see them really to trust the Lord and to rely on Him in the midst of the persecution was encouraging to us, but it was hard nonetheless. Now, when you say persecution, that word to us American believers can mean quite a few different things. People look at you funny when you pray for a meal. Or in China, we would think, well, maybe it means you’re imprisoned or you’re killed. So what does that look like for them during that time? Yeah. So that persecution at that time was, I guess, the worst persecution that our ministry had gone through. Like I said, personally, I’ve been in a police raid where the police shut down the service. My wife was there. My child was there. We had police come and taken the members to the church that we planted. The first church that we planted down to the police station. It was like a midweek. Bible says there wasn’t a lot of people that were in attendance, but the group went down there and people have been questioned, have been brought in. And it started out that these pastors that we were working with and even one of the missionaries that we were working with there, that they were having trouble with the police, and the police were contacting them. And somebody had reported that the missionary and one of the Chinese pastors had done these illegal things online. And it was like political related, and the whole thing was just kind of made up and it was really scary. And so at the time, they’re asking, what do we do? And I said, I’m not sure. I don’t know what angle they’re coming from. We have some experience in this, but these accusations are new. And so we told the missionary, get out of the country as quick as you can, because they were using his full name in English. And we say, Get out because it seemed that maybe they were going to try to put him as a spy or something like that. And we’re just when you get accused by the police of doing something illegal online, it has to do with clinical nature, nothing to do with it. At the time, they were saying it has nothing to do with the church. And so we were thinking, man, if this has nothing to do with the church. We know that he hasn’t done anything else illegal and so this is some kind of setup because the only legal thing that he was doing was working in an underground church, right?

So he was able to flee to the next city up, get on a plane and fly out. So we got him out within like 24 hours. And so he was out, he was able to actually call the police station after he’s out of the country. Hey, I’m traveling overseas, what do you guys need to try to get things fixed there? But they took the pastor in and we didn’t hear from him for the longest time. We were talking to his wife, she was at home, she didn’t know what’s going on. She’s going to go down to the police station, try to find him. And they basically said all these kind of crazy things that were happening and they said it had nothing to do with the church. The other pastor that was also working at another church at the time, but his name was on the lease at the place we were renting there on the 25th floor. And trying to remember how it all kind of work all happened, the series of events. I could go back to my blog and look to get the exacts, but basically they are contacting these two pastors and they are meeting with them outside of the church services. And something led to us, me having a conversation with them and say, what do you think is going to happen? And I said, because of this, I think they’re probably going to raise the church on Sunday. And I said, just based on the history and the things that we know, they’re probably going to raid the church on Sunday. So I said, I’m not there. So I can’t make you guys do whatever you want. If you guys want to pack up the bags and go home and not go through this persecution, you can do that. Obviously I’m staying here in the comfort of America, so I’ll give you an opinion on what I would do. But this is in your hands. This is you guys have the trust guy and I’ll help you through it. But this is really you guys stepping up. And they wanted to step up, they wanted to do that. They didn’t want to turn their back on Christ because of some persecution or what the government was saying they were going to do and different things. And so I suggested to them, why don’t you move everything out of the church location there on the 25th floor? And we had rented a couple of apartments, tore out walls, made a big auditorium, and we had multiple apartments that we were renting. And like I said, we made two into one big auditorium and then we’re running another one for kids classroom and different things like that. I said just move everything out. Go run another apartment building. We’ll help with the finances.

And then just put all the church equipment in there, the microphone, speakers, the chairs, everything, and just have the other place empty. And then I said, go meet in a Chinese restaurant on Sunday morning for the service. And I guess all restaurants in China or Chinese restaurants, I wasn’t going to call you on that. Go meet at the restaurant in the bakery room. We’ve done that before, so some of them I saw that before. And you guys can have a meal, you have the same service, just do it there. And so they did that on Sunday. They went and then the church people came, they responded to that and they moved all the stuff out. I think it was like a Tuesday or Thursday night or something. They moved everything out overnight just to make sure if there’s anybody watching. Because generally the police, even though there’s persecution, they’re still I mean, they’re humans and they’re lazy, right? They’re not going to sit there and watch it all night unless you’re like a big case. And so we moved out everything overnight and they put into an apartment. The place was empty. They had service on Sunday, no problem for them. And the police showed up to raise the place on Sunday. It was empty and nothing there. So obviously it doesn’t make them happy. But they didn’t get all the names of everybody that was meeting at the church because what they do is they try to get everybody’s name that they can and then they interrogate them one on one and try to find somebody to break to give everybody else’s information until they can just keep doing this and getting as much information as they can. And so they might know the pastor, but if the pastor doesn’t break, then it’s a dead end. And so they called the pastor. He wasn’t actually passing the church at the time, but he was helping another church. But his name was on the lease for the place we rented, because we rented it when I was still training him. So they called him in, they treated him really nice. He said, man, we’re drinking tea. We were talking to him. We’re just having an okay time. They were being really nice. They said this is legal. We got to break the lease on this place. You guys can’t rent it anymore, so you guys need to talk with the homeowner. So he met the homeowner there on the 25th floor and they broke the lease. And I don’t think we got our deposit back. And everything seemed fine. And they ended the conversation. And he told me to man, I thought we were going to be good to go, that we just got in trouble because they found out, but we weren’t using it, the place anymore, so we were okay, he said, but when we got done, he said, they put a bag over my head and took me down and put me in the back of the van.

He said, I knew it was getting serious, obviously, at that point, and he said, I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what they were doing. He said, they took me to a location. I didn’t know where I was. And he said, they eventually put me in a room, and they handcuffed me to a table. There was an interrogation room. He said the lights were bright and all these kind of things. And he said he asked for a lawyer because of our running with the police before. We’ve talked to Christian lawyers and things like that. And he said, the police officer said, hit him in the side and said, we’ll let you have a lawyer when we get done with you, and started physically abusing him and handcuffing his hands up and asking all these questions. And they were saying they were asking questions about me. And they said, we know you know this guy. And he said they would take a picture and hold it really close to his face that he has a picture of you two together. And he said, I don’t even know if it was a picture of me and you, because I could never see the picture because they never actually let me see it, but they just, like, hold up to my face real quick and pull it away. We have all this information on you. We have all these documents on you guys, and we know that you guys are friends and all these kinds of things, and he just didn’t give them any information. And obviously, I wasn’t in the country. There’s nothing that he could have done. And I remember telling him later, I was like, man, if you guys are if you get in that situation, you know, if you feel like you can turn me in, like, you don’t have to protect me. And I remember him telling me, he said, it’s worth me going through it if you can stay here and preach the gospel, because we need it. And the fact that he was willing to endure some of that abuse so that our family could stay and continue on, obviously is very humbling for us. Sure. And they say, we know you’re pastor. We know you’re part of this church. And all these things that were going on. After they get done interrogating him, they put him in jail, and he tells the story. I was in the jail cell. He said I was just emotionally drained, physically drained. He had eaten all day. He was nervous when he went and meet with us. We didn’t eat. They didn’t feed him. Obviously. He said that the jail cell was really cold. There’s no covers. Metal bed just froze all night. And he gets up the next day, and they finally give him something to eat.

And then they gave him room, put him on cleaning duty. And he said, I didn’t know if he’s like, I’ve never been in jail before, so I don’t know what was going on. But I figured if I was on cleaning duty, that’s not a good sign that this is going to be a short term thing. He’s thinking this is going to be a long term. And thankfully, because it was getting close to Chinese New Year, and I just praying and God answering prayer after I think it’s two or three days, they end up releasing him. And they called his wife. She had to come in and pay a fine, and they ended up releasing him so he could go home for the holiday. And I think they made him sign some things and told me he couldn’t do this anymore and all these kinds of things. I don’t remember if it was that time before the police came or if it was a time after this because he’s had follow up visits from the police and things like that. But at one of those points, he told me, he said, if I go in and I don’t come back out, will you take care of my wife and children, her child? At the time we take care of my wife and child. And that was obviously very convicting sure, one that he’s willing to pay that price to follow Christ. But I said, yeah, we’ll do whatever we can to take care of your wife and child if you don’t come back and financially support them and things like that, that’s what he faced. And the other pastor was also taken in, targeted not to the same degree, but also threatened, hey, if you guys don’t turn information in on these missionaries, and if you guys keep planning these churches or pastoring them or having illegal services, then you’re never going to be able to work in China. You’re going to be on the blacklist. Your kids are never going to be able to go to school. You’re not going to have health insurance. You’re going to just threaten them with, you have the worst life ever if you keep doing this, because you’re disobeying the government. And they continued on.

And that same package that went through all of that not too long ago, I guess probably around this time last year or so or maybe a little longer, called and asked me and said, hey, do you think you could help us with the rent for a second church plan? So he had planted a church, and after going through all of that, I was still willing to go on and try to plan another church. And so excited to see that. So to connect that back to Furlough, all that happened while we were on Furlough, we went back to China, and we are excited to get back and take some of the weight off of those pastors and all they were dealing with and be an encouragement to them. And I remember getting back at the airport, one of the pastors wife, she gave me the biggest hug I think I’ve ever had, and it’s not me over because you’re just so excited that we were back and offered some relief to the pastors and helped the churches again. And we were there, and it was just a few days, and the pastor we had left the original church with, he was asked to come in by the police. And it wasn’t the local police anymore. It was kind of the National Security Bureau was from the FBI of China, I guess. And he was questioned about me. He said, they said my Chinese name. And so we know he’s back in the country and we’re looking for him, and we want to deport him from the country. The way that we interpret that is really two ways. One, the government knew everything about me, and they were just offering me an olive branch and saying, hey, just get out of the country. We’re going to make you the lead either way. That they didn’t really know a lot about me, but there was a Judas somewhere in the ministry that was reporting information.

Because the interesting answer, we had a business visa. We started a business. We got approved to come in. There was no problems at the border. We registered when we got into a hotel and everything. And again, there was no problems. And so if there was, my identity was compromised and things like that. They could have showed up at any point because I had all these things, but the names that I used in China and then the transliteration of my name or two different names. And so the name that they were using was different than the name that was on my paperwork and things like that. We see that there might have been a Judas somewhere that was telling them information. So they didn’t know probably all the information about us, but they knew that the guy that they were after, that they were persecuting people over when they were doing different police raids. My Chinese name came back up, but they never could really come in contact with me. Probably somebody told them that we were back and they were going to put the pressure on these Chinese passers to figure out exactly who I was. Okay? So that really put the pressure on us to say, okay, what does that mean for us? I want the child. One child left with five. And so I guess that’s why she was so large, right? Because there’s something in the water there. And we couldn’t just move around. We couldn’t just rent a house, put a year’s rent down and then have problems with the police in this area, then move somewhere else and things like that. And so we’re praying about what does that mean for us and what does it look like if they’re going to continue to put pressure on these men that we’ve trained up until they turn us over. Can I move to another area? And at the time, you can look now and kind of process some of this information. Okay, do they have all this information on us? Do they know what my passport is? Or was it just a Judas in the ministry that didn’t like us or somebody that was coming to make one of the English corners that turned us over and just turned out some of the information, but not all of it? And you don’t have the answer to all those questions.

You’re working on limited information, so you’re truly just seeking wisdom, seeking counsel, asking God, okay, what is the next step? But it seemed clear that they were intent to find us. Even if we moved to another spot in China because of the National Security Bureau, we said, well, if we just move somewhere else and then all of a sudden we have the same problems there. And then because we were moving to a different city then our business fee still wasn’t going to work like we wanted it to. And that was connected to one of the pastors. Really. There was a lot of things to consider, and when we were processing on, it was a lot to do because, again, they were threatening to deport us. And we really didn’t want to be deported from the country. Sure, because now we have friends who have been deported who have tried to get back in, and they can’t get back in. I was thinking, man, if I get deported, there’s a chance I’ll never get back into China, and I want to keep working here. After praying about it, talking with everybody, seeking council, we felt that God was leading us to move away from the mainland and move to the island of Taiwan. And part of the reason was one that from Taiwan we could make trips back into China. And so our whole goal of leaving China was so that we could get back into China, if that makes sense. And so we want to continue meeting with those pastors and doing zoom calls with them and training online. But I want to be able to fly over and meet them in person and continue that life and life discipleship, but also living in Taiwan that offered us they offer missionary visas there. And so I could get a missionary visa. My family can have a home base, and we can start a church playing ministry among the Chinese and Taiwan. So the same language, and we can use that there. And there’s a great new to the gospel there. People worshiping Buddhas, and Taoism is the main kind of religion there the traditional, I guess, Chinese religion there. And so they’re worshiping idols there. China’s worshiping idols. And there are also a lot of atheists. And so the need of the gospel in both places was great. So you can’t go wrong as a gospel preacher in either of those places and so we feel we can do both. Then let’s do that because we felt God was leading us there and so we moved to Taiwan and then starting the church plan and when we left China and looking back now we see God’s hand in it because after the month after we left.

That was November 2019. Then Coba hits right around December. It’s starting to see this weird virus thing in the news and all these kinds of things happening and people start shutting down by March 2020. The rest of the world is starting to shut down. Even churches in the states are shutting down, not having services, that’s something that nobody’s ever experienced before. But because of the way that Taiwan shut down early and closed off its borders, they didn’t have the outbreak like everybody else. And we actually were able to start a church plant in March of 2020. A lot of people were shutting things down. So even we see God’s hand in that looking back now. Well, so now that you are in Taiwan and you’ve had ministry there for a couple of years, what’s that ministry looks like? And then have you been able to maintain any sort of remote ministry in mainland China? What would that be like as well? Yes, our ministry in Taiwan is similar to the ministry that we’re doing in China. So our emphasis is the same is to evangelize, make disciples and train leaders. And so we do that through church planning. And so we’re going out, we’re evangelizing, trying to reach people with the gospel. We planted a Victory Baptist Church there in Taiwan so that’s the main church plant. We’re still in the midst of that church plant right now we’re on furlough in America. But when we were there in Taiwan, that was our main focus and praying that God gives us young Taiwanese men to surrender their lives so that they can one day be pastors and pastoring churches and go out and start other churches and maybe even go to mainland China one day and take the gospel there almost in a missionary capacity. And then our ministry in the mainland has been able to continue online and so we have zoom accounts and each of the pastors that we work with and one of the young men that’s in training, they get on and every week we do a class, we do about 2 hours.

We try to set aside and try to teach them. I’m studying through proverbs just different things with them and I know you’ve been able to participate in that sum and teach a lot of fun to teach some of the classes there and just make sure that they’re continuing to grow. And we will ask them how did last Sunday go? And everybody kind of gives a report and then usually something comes up. This happened at the church or, hey, I’m dealing with this problem with this person. And sometimes one of the other pastors, they didn’t even know they needed to ask that question. And so just listening to somebody else asked that question and get the answer, and that really helped me too. So now I know how to deal with this because I was kind of struggling with that as well. And so it’s really a good and encouraging time. A time that we can continue to grow and really we continue just to study the word of God so that they’re kind of growing and challenging them and just keeping that motivation because they’re in different locations and they’re doing their own church plans and so just don’t want them to be out there and feel alone. That nobody cares. And so we continue that training online. And I would love to. As soon as China opens up from their COVID restrictions. To start making trips back into mainland China and to meet up with them so that we can continue to encourage them and help them push the gospel forward in their areas and praise the Lord for technology and praise the Lord that there’s things like Zoom and other types of apps and things to kind of keep in touch and maintain as much of a relationship as you can. Given the circumstances. I’d imagine that’s a tremendous blessing for all you guys. It is a little annoying that you can’t be there, but this is the second best, right?

So the best is being there and you want to do life on life, discipleship with them. But when you see the Apostle Paul, when he was there, what do you do? He sends letters. Right? And so this is kind of the next step up from that. We’re not sending letters, but we are able to meet and we’re able to write lessons and to share them through the Internet and through Zoom and the different apps that we stay in contact with. We’re able to upload different resources and they can access those. I can record videos and send it to them. I can upload PDFs and different things and give them resources. So that is definitely a huge benefit and blessing. Yeah, certainly the next best thing, not being able to be there. So I guess looking forward, as you and your wife kind of think through where you’re at ministry, what do you kind of, I guess, see the future of your ministry look like? What would you hope would happen in the years to come? Well, I mean, best case scenario is that China has a change of government, I guess, and completely opens up and welcomes missionaries. That would be the best case scenario. But even if that doesn’t happen, we still want to continue pushing missions to the Chinese people in Taiwan and the China and really the Chinese all around the world. God used one of the young missionaries that was working with us and relocated to New York City and reaching the Chinese there on the canon here on the podcast. And they say that New York City has the highest amount of ethnic Chinese outside of China over the side of the world, not outside of Asia, I guess you should say, right? And so exciting to see him there and reaching the Chinese that are in New York City, and they’re coming to New York City. So that’s an exciting thing there. But we want to continue on producing resources. That’s something that I feel that God has allowed me to do and develop something I didn’t know that I was going to do when I first started out, but develop those resources to help keep helping the pastors, but also praying that God gives us more pastors. It was probably a month or two ago that one of the pastors contacted me and he told me there was a young man that got saved. I don’t know if I mention this or not, but he got saved when he was a freshman and he’s been disciples in the church. He just graduated college. He’s about 23 years old, and he said he feels called to the ministry and so he could go into the workforce, but he feels like God wants them to be in the ministry, so we’re helping to start training him. And so it’s kind of that second generation being raised up. And so we’re really excited about that. What the future looks like for us right now as things stand, is returning to Taiwan, continuing in the church point. They are praying that God gives us five young men that we can start training so that we can start multiple churches there in Taiwan.

But also God continues to give us men to train in China and that we will be able to start making those trips back in and helping them evangelize. But also reaching out to the villages again and different things that we had in place that we were trying to put in place before we had to leave and just kind of see those dreams come back alive. Well, by way of transition, you just said something I’d like for you to elaborate just a bit. You were telling me recently that young man, 23 years old, he’s been saved for a few years now, he wants to go into a life of full time ministry. And you were sharing with me that when you first spoke with him, he had what was, I think, two questions for him. What were those questions and what were his responses to those questions? So when the pastor told me about this young man, I trusted that this pastor’s opinion of this young man was probably on target because he’s been working with him. He’s told me all about the discipleship and things that they’ve been doing together. But I said, well, man, if you want to join our Chinese pastoral team and maybe we. Can help them out, training full time and things like that. So let me talk to him on the phone. Can we plan a zoom call or something like that? And so we did, and I asked him about his testimony. Tell me how you got saved. Tell me about your call to ministry. Why do you feel God’s called you to ministry? And so he told me all of those, and everything sounded good. And then I asked them two questions, like you said, and the first question was something like this. It was, do you realize that in your country being a pastor in this capacity is illegal? And he said, yes. He says. I understand that. And then I followed that up with, do you realize and understand that if you are a pastor in China that one day you’re most likely going to be persecuted for it? And he said, yeah, I understand. I said, you still want to do this? And he said, yeah. And so he fully understood. And I told the story before about one of the pastors and that he had put in jail, and he got physically beat. And so this young man surrendered the mystery under that man’s leadership. And so I’m guessing he already knew some of those things going into this, and so he was prepared for those. But it’s interesting, somebody candidates to be a pastor who wants to be a pastor, you wouldn’t necessarily ask those questions upfront. But I was like, hey, if we’re going to help you, if you’re going to go into this, let’s just tell you this is the price up front that could possibly happen. Count the cost, because we don’t want to do all this investment without him kind of realizing maybe this upfront and just kind of felt led to ask him that. And I was very encouraged by his answers.

Well, I was asking about that. To transition to what sort of encouragement would you have for a young man considering a life of missions in China? So someone here in America, they feel like the Lord’s put China in their heart. They’re not sure what the next step would be, and yet the Lord is putting that on the hearts of young men here in America and in the heart of that 23 year old there in China. What would you say to someone here that would want to do that? If you feel that God is leading you to China as a missionary, then I’d say go after it. Obviously, do what God has called you to do, and at the same time realizing the door kind of right now is closed. Now, there are some missionaries that are in China, and a lot of them that are there, from my understanding, they were there before the COVID restrictions. And then if you left, you haven’t been able to get back in. And that’s been our case. We haven’t been able to take trips back in since we left. We left right before COVID hit the scene, and we haven’t been able to get back in because we haven’t been able to apply for visas because they’re not accepting applications. And so if you are surrendered to go to China, there is a pathway to get there, and that pathway isn’t instantly moving to China right away. What that looks like is you need to get some training. And first you need to make sure you’re walking with God and that you know God and you’re living a Holy Spirit filled life and you’re learning how to do the ministry here in the States. So before we send you overseas, you need to be doing it here. And what that looks like is you need some mentorship. You need somebody to mentor you, to train you. You also need to learn the Bible and go to Bible college or get some kind of training there so you have some kind of theological training. And you need that practical training of actually serving in a local church and being connected to a local church, because it’s a local church that sends missionaries. And so you need to be connected to a local church that’s going to send you out and has confidence in you and that God is with you and that you can go there’s.

So many people that just kind of maybe feel led to China and they just get disconnected from their local church and they just move over there. They don’t have any backing. They don’t have anybody that has confidence in them. They just kind of are out there and loaners on their own. And I’m not sure that that’s the plan that God has for us. I see it as the local church sending missionaries, and they’re backing that missionary, and they understand that, hey, this missionary is called a God and we’re behind him and we’re praying for him, we’re supporting him. And so you need that training. And something that we focus on that is so important is learning how to disciple and then train leaders of leaders, because, like we said, most likely, you’re not going to be in China for the rest of your life if you’re doing bold ministry there. There’s a time limit. And so you need to train as many leaders as you can while God has given you the open door there, so that the day that you leave, they can carry on the work. Because how sad is it, man, if we spend all these years there? You spend 8, 9, 10 years there and you leave and everything falls apart because you are no longer there. And you don’t want to be the key ingredient to the ministry there. You want to train up those Chinese young men to not only start churches, but leave the churches and carry the Gospel forth and stand strong in that persecution. And so a lot of people maybe if you surrender to China, you don’t know how to do that right away, and I didn’t know how to do those things, so I had to learn. And I worked at churches in the States, and I finished my training here in the States. And then we started reputation and raised our support, went over and learned the language and even learned how to do ministry in China. And then finally we went out on our own to do that. So hopefully that maybe some encouragement. I would definitely say there’s still opportunity. God is still working. The door might not be open right now, but when the door is open, we want to have a flood of missionaries be able to go in. If the door opened up and nobody was ready to go in, man, we’re just wasting time. And so in the meantime, you can be working in New York City with the Chinese. You can be working in Taiwan with the Chinese, and there’s a lot of places you can do in the meantime but keep moving forward until God redirects you somewhere else, right?

Tell me where you agree and where you might disagree with this. But the process to get from, say, just being a high school student or a college student to being in China and beginning to do the work of evangelism discipleship, starting a church, that’s somewhat of a long process because there’s training involved. There’s Bible training, ministry training, there’s fundraising, there’s learning the language and all of those things. And so though right now the door isn’t open, it’s almost like God, and this is how I see it at least. It’s like God in his grace is giving an opportunity, a window to prepare, so that when the door opens, the preparation is already there, the training is there. Maybe guys who don’t speak the language yet have that time to learn the language, maybe in Taiwan or somewhere like that, and then the door opens and then, as you would sometimes say, the pipeline can begin to pump in with preachers. Yeah, I would agree with that. For the most part. I don’t fully understand why maybe God has allowed the door to close. And maybe it was to strengthen the Chinese church in the sense that the mysteries aren’t there, propping it up, and maybe they’re going through the process or something like that. We don’t know. We know God is using it for their good because that’s what God does. So we can be confident in that, and that can come for us. But at the same time, we also want to be ready. It is a long process because you’re going into another country. Just learning Chinese itself is a long process, but you want to be able to know how to do the ministry that you were sent there to do. And sometimes when we read the Bible and we read the stories, it’s so easy to look over the time frame in which the stories developed or the time frame in which they happened. You can look at the Apostle Paul, and then when he was called being apostle, and then that time frame from when he surrendered his life, he got saved and then he’s actually out doing open ministry. Even just the disciples themselves in that time there with Jesus, we sometimes overlook those timeframes, realize it wasn’t just instant, these were years in the making. And so it does take years to get to that point. But it’s worth it. It’s worth it because you’re reaching people with the gospel and God is glorified.

Amen. Yeah. Because on the flip side of it, I feel like how sad would it be if right now, because China’s doors are at least for the time being, closed, no one starts to work that process. No one seeks out training for mission work in China. No one sets out to learn language and culture. No one begins to take those steps. And then two years down the road, three years down the road, five years down the road, the door opens and all of a sudden it’s like, oh wow, we can go to China, but we haven’t even begun this year’s long process. I obviously don’t claim to know what the Lord is up to. At the same time, what I do know is that the Lord, he loves China, he loves Chinese people. He desires that they be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. And he’s putting it in the hearts of people that are even getting in touch with us, and he’s putting it on their hearts to pray about and consider about going to China one day. And I recently read husband Taylor said that? Well, not Hudson Taylor. Marshall Broom Hall, who wrote a book about Hudson Taylor, said that Hudson Taylor believed that the guy that supplied the men would supply the open doors. And that really stuck with me. And I pray often that the door to China would reopen. And I can’t help but think that, hey, there’s people out there wanting to get in. So perhaps in time the Lord will open those doors and let those people get in. To preach. A term that we kind of jokingly use sometimes is Ultra Portable Disciple Maker. Right? That we want to be ultra portable. Disciple Makers. That God could pick us up at any time, any moment, place us in any location, and we’re going to make disciples because we’ve been trained in that and that’s what we do. And so we’re prepared for that. And so for China, we want Ultra Portable Chinese Disciple Makers, meaning you know how to do the ministry, you know how to make disciples, but you also speak Chinese, so you’re able to do it in their language. And so we have those ready when the doors open. We can take these Ultraportable Disciple Makers, put them in the country, and disciples are going to be made. And that’s really kind of the goal and the idea there that preparing while the door may even be closed, why would you go in that direction? Because we’re waiting for that door to be opened and trusting by faith that the door will be open one day. And if you study mission history, the door being closed doesn’t really surprise us. Right. Like it’s an ebb and flow. There are seasons where China closes down and then China opens up like it’s never opened up before, but then they close back down and they open up so much. You can see it in missions history when you study China, but you can also kind of see it just working there. We say things that we’re really getting away with a lot that people say you couldn’t ever get away with. But then a couple of years go by, and then they start kind of cracking down on those things and start making it harder and harder, and you just kind of see the slow progression of it closing down, and then something happens and it starts opening back up again. So it’s not surprising, but we can’t necessarily guess the time frame.

Sure. Absolutely. What would be mark your advice, your guidance to someone, a young man maybe he is in high school right now that he can be doing right now. Let’s say he’s in high school, and he can’t just pick up now and change his location, even in the States to seek out missions training. Yet what are some practical things he can do in his life to begin this preparation? Well, you can obviously work on your relationship with the Lord, walk with the Lord, learn to be a spirit filled Christian and live for God and live boldly for God wherever you are. If you’re in school or just in your church and community, live for God. Be the one that people say, man, that guy really loves God. Not because you want the praise of men, but because you really do. And you want people to glorify God and look to Him. And so that’s the most important. You can also be reading biographies, and you can be reading and researching about China. You can contact Austin. He’ll recommend some books and things and resources. You can check out our website, Vision for China. And there are resources and things that you can there. We have conferences that you can come to and be learning more and more about China. But also you want to be doing what you hope to do in China one day. Now, you might not be able to train a pastor right now. You might have to plan a church, but you can evangelize a disciple. You can work on the basics. And if you never led somebody to Christ, you need to start preaching the gospel to people. You need to start witnessing the people. If you’re serving in your local church and if your pastor be willing, he can help you start preparing lessons and learning how to do that. Go read as you read through your Bible. Bring questions to your pastor, and so you can learn what the Bible has to say about certain things. When you’re witnessing the people, people are going to ask you questions, they’re going to reject you. And that’s what happens in China. You listen to people, people ask you questions, people reject you. They laugh at you there’s. Pushback you learn to deal with that now. Sure. And then disciple people, and not only just they’re saved and they’re coming to church, but help them to grow in the Lord and continue working on that and do the things that you can do now that you hope to do in China one day.

There’s nothing magical about the location. It’s most likely going to be harder to do it there than it is here. Because here people, at least the people that you’re witnessing to, they probably know you a little bit, or there are some of your friends, or there’s some open doors, and there’s a place that you can start. But when you move there, you’re in a new culture, and it’s in a new language and people that you don’t know and you’re a stranger and all of these things. And so start where God has you and work your way towards there. But, man, it was my prayer request. God used me here before I ever go there. If you want me to go all the way to the other side of the world, use my life now so that I know that you’re going to use me there.

Yeah, great. All right. Well, then another scenario would be you’ve got someone, maybe they’ve graduated high school, or they’re about to finish up maybe Bible college somewhere, and they’re wanting to take next steps towards China, but they’re like, I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know what to do or what my next step should be. What would be practical next steps for someone there in that position? Yeah, they’re finishing up maybe Bible college, so they have maybe more of the Bible training. They might even have practical experience from a local church, their own church, or maybe a church there around their Bible college, something like that. So they have those things, but they’re like, okay, but there’s China, and there seems to be this gap between here and there, and I don’t know where the path is. Right. Yeah. You can get in contact with us, and we love to maybe walk you through, because I think at that stage, a lot of people, their stories are different, their experiences are different. And if you’ve never been to China, then maybe that next step would be a six month internship on the field and say, okay, I feel God’s maybe calling me to China or calling me to Taiwan. Come spend six months with one of our missionaries. Come spend six months with us and start learning a little bit of the Chinese language and see if this is really what you want to do. Maybe for us, something I would recommend is the training center that we work with and coming and getting a year’s internship there. And so you’re getting the Practical missions training so that, again, when you get on the field, you know how to learn a language, you know how to train men, you know how to disciple. You might have all the theological understandings under your belt, but you need some of that practical things, or maybe you just need the mission side of things. You got the Bible side, but you need to also learn the practical ways of missions. So the training center we work with would be able to help with that. And then you would do reputation if you were in our crowd. You need to raise support to go. If you want to do this full time and not have to work as an English teacher or some other job, you can raise your support so that you can go and you can be doing this type of ministry in China or Taiwan full time. Amen. Amen. Yeah.

And if you have any questions about that, please reach out to us again, infoavisionforchina.org. You could find us on social media, shoot us a message. There Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We would love to help out any way that we can if mark, I guess we’re going to start to wrap up here. Maybe there’s somebody listening in. They’re just interested in you, your family, your ministry. What would be a good way to learn a bit more about that? Is there maybe a website or something that they could look into? Yeah, like you said, somebody can just reach out at infovision for China.org if they want to do an email, and our team uses that email. So if you want to reach out to anybody on our team, you can go there. My personal website is inhizjoyfulservice.com that’s inhisjoyfulservice.com that’s my website, it is password protected. If you go there, there’ll be a link you can click and request the password, and then you’ll be able to have access to different resources. We have different sermons and things like that to find out more about our ministry. And we password protect that just so we can try to be more open with people that want the resources and make them available so they don’t just show up on Google and things like that. So you can go there and you can click and say, hey, I heard this on the podcast and here’s who I am. Can we have the password to access this? I want to learn about your family and ministry and things like that and love to connect that way. Okay, great.

Well, I guess two more things and we’ll kind of wrap them into one thing. Just final thoughts in general. And then also if you could just give, I don’t know, just one final plea for people to consider being a missionary to the Chinese. So, final thoughts and then a plea for missions to the Chinese. Well, one, thank you for listening to me ramble about China and all about the ministry and our family and what God has done and just all glory to him for what he’s done. And as we finish the podcast and you’re thinking about China, the one thing that captures most people’s heart about China is the largest country in the world, 3.4 billion souls. And when you put that in perspective and you look at America and you see how gospel saturated America is, and then China’s, five Americas, and that four of those don’t have the gospel, four of those are full lost people, we are the same size as the population and things like that. If you look at the statistics and there’s just such a great need and there has been a lot of mysteries in the past that’s gone to China, there’s been persecution, there’s been revival, but there still is a great need of the gospel there. The current generation is being taught atheism the old generation was taught Buddhism or Taoism, so you have this generational gap of people worshipping as many gods as they needed to. Now people worship no god at all and there’s nothing there. And both sides are wrong, both sides don’t have the truth. Just when they went from one extreme to the other extreme, they’re no better, they’re still dying and going to hell. And if they die without price and they die in their sins, they’re going to end up in the fire and that ought to break our hearts because Christ has done everything that needs to be done for them to be redeemed on the God. They just need to hear. And so who will go and who will tell?

Well, this concludes today’s episode of the A Thousand Lives Broadcast. Thank you all for listening in and letting others know that Jesus is worthy of being made much of in China. And don’t forget register for underground Jahu Conference 2022, china’s multitudes. We hope that you can make it and learn more about how you can plug into the awesome task of making Christ’s majesty known among China’s multitudes. Remember, for conference details and registration, head on over to visionforthina.Org/underground. That’s visionforchina.Org/underground. We look forward to seeing you there.

Thank you again for listening to the A Thousand Lives Broadcast. This has been Austin, your host and missionary with the Vision for China Team. For information about our Vision for China Team and how to take the first step on your path to making Jesus famous in China, head on over to visionforchina.org or you can email us at info@visionforthina.org there. You’re going to find a slew of resources on the website to aid you in both sharing the gospel with Chinese friends, as well as to assess how you can better aim your life at making Jesus known in China, whether that be by praying, sending or even going as a missionary. Well, until next time, Sai Jin

thank you for listening. Our goal in airing that was to introduce you, our listener, to the vision for China team and their podcast a thousand live broadcast. You can learn more about missionary Austin by listening to episode 94 of the Removing Barriers podcast.

Thank you for listening. To get a hold of us to support this podcast or to learn more about removing barriers, go to removingbarriers.net. This has been the removing barriers podcast. We attempted to remove barriers so that we all can have a clear view of the cross.