In March China Christian Daily published an interview with a pastor from Dalian about the importance of properly managing church finances in Chinese churches. He highlights some of the difficulties that churches in China have in this area and some suggestions for improvement.
There were a couple of adoption stories out of China in the past few weeks that caught my eye. The first was an article in Christianity Today about the drop in global adoptions, as reported by the US State Department in their Annual Report on Intercountry Adoptions.
My love for China started in 1973 when I was adopted by Chinese immigrants in America. My heart for adoption sent me to China in 2007 to welcome my adopted Chinese daughter into my family. These two elements of who I am brought me and my family to live, breathe, and become a part of China’s heartbeat in Tianjin five years ago.
A ChinaSource 3 Questions interview with Dr. Brent Fulton, author of China's Urban Christians: A Light That Cannot Be Hidden and president of ChinaSource.
If you’ve been to China you have probably noticed that it is a society of walls. There are walls around schools, factories, and housing estates. Sometimes the entities within these walls are huge, covering many city blocks. In an attempt to alleviate congestion and open up more through ways through the cities, the Chinese government in February issued a new regulation calling for walled communities to open up their roads and streets to through passage. In other words, they want the walls to come down. In this article, originally published in the mainland online journal Territory, the writer uses this new regulation as a starting point for a discussion of the walls that we build in our hearts and how only through the cross can we tear them down.
One of my favorite China books is The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History, by Joanna Waley-Cohen. In it she chronicles China’s historical interactions with the outside world, arguing that China has never been as isolationist as historians have suggested. What the West often perceived as isolationist policies or attitudes were instead China’s insistence that authority must never be surrendered to outsiders.
Last week we interviewed Kerry Schottelkorb, Director of Advancement for Christian Action Asia, about his organizations work with disabled orphans in China. Here is the story of one of the orphans they have cared for.
The China Partnership website recently carried the story of an urban pastor who planted 16 churches in a major Chinese city. The article profiles the transformation in this pastor’s thinking concerning the nature and purpose of the church.
Over the years, many stories have come out of China about believers who, having no access to the printed Word, painstakingly write out the Scriptures by hand. The 21st century has put a new spin on that practice—copying out the Bible by hand not because of its unavailability but in order to break an addiction to online games! This story, from the Gospel Times, tells of a man in China who has decided to write out by hand a chapter per day.
My first visit to Wuhan was in January of 1984. I was travelling with a group of 17 teachers on a boat trip down the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Wuhan. We disembarked in Wuhan three days before Spring Festival, and set out to acquire 17 train tickets to Guangzhou. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.
Today we are launching our first-ever online training course titled "Serving Well in China" for people working in China or preparing to work in China.
Brent Fulton, president of ChinaSource, talks with Joann Pittman, senior vice president of ChinaSource, and Amy Young, author of Looming Transitions: Starting and Finishing Well in Cross-Cultural Service about five essential keys for adjusting well to the cultural challanges of China. They also introduce ChinaSource Institute and its first on-line course "China: Serving Well Where You Don't Belong," taught by Joann and Amy.