Work It On Out Now

Since deciding that this is our last semester in China, we've been adjusting the way that we spend some of our time in our ministry. Good missionaries will tell you that good missionaries start working themselves out of a job the first day they arrive in the field. Good missionaries will also tell you that good missionaries don't refer to themselves as good missionaries. :-) The idea is that we as missionaries will one day be leaving and the ministry we do should always be done with an eye towards our inevitable departure. In the past, we've fallen victim to building church groups around ourselves and even causing people's faith to depend too much on our presence. Then when we left, those groups and those people's faith came crumbling down.

So when we arrived in Shaoxing we made some tough, sometimes counter-intuitive decisions about the way we were going to work in order to make it easier for us to transition out in a smooth way. We didn't start our "own" group, but instead chose to work with existing Chinese groups. We also didn't allow any of our friends & contacts to isolate themselves, but have encouraged them and sometimes forced them to interact with other believers in order to help them belong to a real Family and not just ours.

And during this last semester we've been trying to further cement people's relationships with other people and get them more deeply involved in local groups. Almost all of the young Christians (people like Shirley, Shao Fang Ying, and others) that we've worked with have been able to make some good, Christian friends. And most of the other students that we've been studying with (like Hawk, Cici, and others) have also been able to connect with other groups who will be staying here after we leave. In the meantime, we're continuing to hang out with the same people we've been discipling and loving in order to help them as much as possible while we're here. But we're also happy to see them spending more time with other people and finding other ways to continue in their journey of faith. There are still a few newer friends who seem very promising and may be able to make some quick progress in their faith, so we plan to study some with those individuals. But for the most part, we're in a season of transition - not just for our family, but also for the people we've known here.

Please keep our friends in your prayers - ask that they'll be able to build long-lasting relationships with others here in Shaoxing. Also ask God to continue putting them in situations & meeting people who will draw them closer to God and more committed to life in his Kingdom.