Joann Pittman is Vice President of Partnership and China Engagement and editor of ZGBriefs.
Prior to joining ChinaSource, Joann spent 28 years working in China as an English teacher, language student, program director, and cross-cultural trainer for organizations and businesses engaged in China. She has also taught Chinese at the University of Northwestern-St. Paul (MN), and Chinese Culture and Communication at Wheaton College (IL) and Taylor University (IN).
Joann has a BA in Social Sciences from the University of Northwestern-St. Paul (MN), and an MA in teaching from the University of St. Thomas (MN).
She is the author of Survival Chinese Lessons and The Bells Are Not Silent: Stories of Church Bells in China.
Her personal blog, Outside-In, can be found at joannpittman.com, where she writes on China, Minnesota, traveling, and issues related to "living well where you don't belong."
You can find her on X at @jkpittman and on Facebook at @authorjoannpittman.
She makes her home in New Brighton, Minnesota.
If you are looking for a tidy answer to the question of how many Christians there are in China… then you will be disappointed. That’s because this is the first time Pew has (sort of) come out and admitted that they don’t really know and that it’s almost impossible to really know.
Please join us in praying for this burgeoning missions movement from Asia and for the many conference participants who made commitments to give their lives for the kingdom.
At the upcoming Arise Asia conference, I look forward to hearing first-hand what God is doing among his people in Asia and to discerning ways that we can be more deeply involved in mobilizing and serving the next generation of gospel workers from Asia.
I can’t help thinking about how discouraged they must have been when they had to leave China so soon after working hard to learn the language and start a new ministry… But God wasn’t finished with either them or his people in China.
An interview with theologian and composer Scott Callaham.
At our May 31 webinar, we featured four ministry leaders who have years of experience as evangelists in a digital environment. They told encouraging stories about how God is working through technology in China and the Chinese diaspora.
Last month I had the opportunity to meet Shuguang Wang, the author of a new textbook called Chinese through Scripture. I looked at the book and my first thought was, “I sure could have used this in 1990!”
Despite restrictions and an increasingly tight environment, there are still creative ways that Christians are using the internet for evangelism, discipleship, fellowship, and encouragement. In this webinar, we will present a picture of what God is doing through four different ministries involved in digital engagement.
I want to thank Daryl Ireland for delivering such an interesting and enlightening lecture. We were deeply blessed, and we hope that those who view this recording will be as well.
Xiamen (厦门), meaning “door to the house,” is on the western side of the Taiwan Strait and was a treaty port ceded to the British. Today it’s the eighth largest port city in China with a thriving economy.
I’m not the tidiest or most organized person in the world, so the expression luan qi ba zao (乱七八糟) was one I learned and took to heart early. A direct translation is “chaos seven eight in a wretched state.”
Johnson talked about how China is using civil religion, which he defines as the government using religion and religious images to legitimize its rule. This has been most visible in the government’s more tolerant attitude towards what it considers to be indigenized religions.