By Greg Yee, Superintendent, PacNWC
Part 3 of 4 of my reflections at year 10:
Last month, several Seattle area pastors and leaders interacted with a mission team from Top Church, a Taiwan Covenant church in Taipei. They came to Seattle to work with our church plant Seattle Chinese Covenant (Bellevue) as they hosted a Seattle-wide Chinese outreach and revival Fire Seattle 2023. As you visit the link be sure to watch the 2-minute video that was the mission report the Top Church mission team used the Sunday after they were here. For you non-Chinese speakers like me, soak it in and just know it ends in English!
While in office, former president Gary Walter wrote an inspiring article about the history of the ECC’s work in China and Taiwan and what was current then in 2012 here. As I read it, my heart quickens. We are blessed to have a long and beautiful retrospective of God’s faithfulness and intentionality there. My heart quickens even more as see connections to what is happening right here, right now.
God invited us to join his work in Taiwan as the Cultural Revolution attempted to push God out of China. In 1985, there were 13 Covenant churches in Taiwan. President Walter writes that “Progress was modest and fragile. Taiwan was ‘rocky soil’ for the gospel, for many decades…”
Last month, when the Top Church mission team met with us at Encounter Church on Mercer Island, they celebrated that there are now over 60 Covenant churches. They thanked us for our faithfulness in our mission work in Taiwan. They explained their desire to be faithful and steward the blessings they had received. They were so proud to share how God has been using them globally and now return the favor by sending their mission team back to the U.S/Seattle.
From a recent Christianity Today article,
Whereas roughly a century ago 82 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America, 70 percent now live in the Global South. Today, Africa is home to more Christians than any other continent. Latin America is not far behind, with Spanish now the most common language spoken by Christians globally (Costanzo, E, et al. 2023, May. “As the American Church Shrinks, Global Christianity Can Point the Way Forward”).
In fact, Africa is growing over 10 times faster, Asia 5 1/2 times and Latin America over 4 times faster than the U.S. And the powerful experiences of God’s movement and work abroad is immigrating to the U.S. Just ask our Latino/a pastors. Ask Pastor Bashu at Nepali Covenant in Kent. Many experts believe that this is one of God’s provisions to the church in the U.S.
I believe that our fourth test in the Covenant’s Six-Fold Test for Multi-ethnicity, “Pace Setting” stands as a good prompt for us here.
With additional perspectives, burdens, and gifts in our midst, what new ministry opportunities is the ECC now better positioned to strengthen and initiate?
As more and more immigrants come to the U.S. what can we learn from them? How do we build new partnerships and become more proximate? How do we posture ourselves to learn more from our Covenant global personnel and partners? As we see war and global crises increasing, how can we learn from Christians in these places? We need to not just learn from the global church, but we must be discipled and mentored by their leaders. We must take the posture of a student. We need to learn our Western limitations and challenges and stop pointing our decline on social issues or the pandemic.
Experts note that a large part of the global church growth is within charismatic/pentecostal streams. Certainly this is true for our sister churches in Taiwan. Even here in the States, the Assemblies of God denomination is the only “major denomination that has seen consistently positive year over year growth over the last four decades…” (The Great Dechurching, Ryan Burge, et al).
One of the Covenant’s affirmation is our conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit. I’ve been especially aware how often I live life and approach ministry unconscious about things of the Spirit. At best it’s a footnote. Though I know that Jesus said that the Spirit will come upon us with power, I often reflect low battery warnings.
As I think about being humble students of the global church, I am challenged to understand what it means to cry out to God? What does it mean to be desperate for the Holy Spirit? What is my conviction, posture, and practice of prayer and worship? How uncomfortable am I willing to be? Will I believe…