A small group of believers in Asia watches as tears fill a woman’s eyes. She stands before them in a tunic and baggy pants — their own traditional clothing — and her voice quavers as she speaks.
“You can pastor yourselves without foreigners,” the woman tells the group. “You can evangelize.”
The government of this country in southern Asia may deport the foreign workers who have helped disciple the believers. They are worried what will happen when they are left alone.
Although Huan Tan resembles her listeners, she doesn’t speak their language and must use an interpreter to encourage them in their spiritual growth. Through the voice of another, she tells the group they can mature in their faith and spread the gospel to their friends and families. Asians, she says, can sustain a successful church and spread the message of Christ themselves.
Tan knows it is possible because she has seen it happen.
She and her husband, Pastor Feng Tan, traveled across a swath of the Asian continent to share their spiritual knowledge with this tiny band of inexperienced Christians.
The Tans were accompanied by five other members of their church in Southeast Asia — a congregation full of believers of Chinese descent. The group encourages spiritual growth by teaching leadership and discipleship at three locations in southern Asia, but this morning, Tan feels her country’s Christian history might inspire her listeners more than her prepared lesson. She wants them to know how God matured her own family of Southeast Asian believers.
Thirty years ago, Tan says, the government in her country deported all the American missionaries who had discipled them, leaving a leadership gap in congregations and seminaries. However, as time passed, the local believers appointed and trained their own pastors and carried on their own evangelism.
With God’s help, the church flourished.
“We feel for you because we know you may face a situation where you may not have outside help,” Tan tells her listeners. “You will be alone. Do not think God has abandoned you. He will be there for you because He has been there for [us].”
Tan’s story illustrates one of the reasons why American Christian worker Burt Gavin helped orchestrate the Tans’ leadership training and their long journey from Southeast Asia. He recognized a connection between Asian peoples that foreigners cannot replicate. “In some ways, I think the baton is being passed to the Asian church,” he says. “China is going to [produce] the next big wave of missionaries. … Not that Americans don’t have a place anymore — we have training, we have experience — but part of that needs to be to mobilize [the Asian] church to go.”
As the Tans conduct their leadership training, they realize that their audience has very little understanding of basic Christianity. The couple teaches rudimentary lessons dealing with Christian marriage and parenting as well as basic evangelism through Bible storytelling. The five other Chinese congregation members take turns giving their testimonies and demonstrating storytelling techniques.
Toward the end of the seminar, as the South Asian believers ask their final questions, the Chinese Christians speak to an issue all the believers face: persecution. In their world, following Jesus means being disowned by their families, so they understand the challenge like no Westerner could.
Tan makes sure her listeners know she prays for them. “I think that when a church or a people group is suffering,” she says, “they need to know that others empathize with them — that there are other Christians in other parts of the world who have gone through it and understand.”
That shared experience makes a difference to the South Asian believers. Although the Chinese team dresses differently and speaks a different language, at least one woman feels encouraged by their presence. After the training, she stops Gavin.
“Finally,” she says to the Western worker, “you brought people who look like us.” (BP)
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