Editor’s note: Yantai church leaders say believers in their city struggle with a weak economy that makes it tough to find a job, with educating their children, with poor teaching in some traditional churches, with persecution, and with the realities of a tired and aging population.
China Partnership: What are some common challenges, fears, and struggles that you and your church encounter as you minister to people in your city? How can we pray for you?
It’s the Economy
Zhang Anwei: The biggest challenge is probably still the economy. When we share the gospel and talk, most people in Yantai are preoccupied with falling wages and not being able to find work. That is what fills their minds. Of course, this helps them think more about the gospel – but money is still what they think about first.
Another thing is the pressure of schooling. Parents are caught in fierce competition over education, and this is a big challenge. The parent-child relationship is also a struggle. Both in the church and in society, this generation of children and their parents have enormous difficulty talking to each other. These days, many children –inside the church and outside the church – struggle with depression, rage, and emotional disorders. Every so often, we hear of high schoolers at some local school jumping to their deaths.
Brothers and sisters have no time. Everyone works overtime, and they are worn out. Even worshiping on Sunday is a challenge
This grieves us, but these things are happening right here. They drive us to pray about how to talk about the gospel with people in this city. We pray that we can go further into their hearts, and spend more time with them.
But, this is a challenge as well – brothers and sisters have no time. Everyone works overtime, and they are worn out. Even worshiping on Sunday is a challenge. Getting believers to, on top of that, share the gospel with their friends is even more draining. People have good hearts and intentions, but once they are inside a larger situation with unbelievable competition and small incomes – well, they just go drive for ride-hailing apps.
A Church that Can’t Adapt
Yu Kangxi: Young people are under a lot of pressure: the cost of living, of medical care, of housing, of raising a child – all these prices are high, and people’s income just barely sustains daily life. People are empty inside, and use the phone to meet the needs of their empty hearts – but the phone itself has no substance. People use it just for entertainment, and the effect of that emptiness is quite plain. People do not have a sense of inner satisfaction.
The challenge for the church is that our resources are thin. Churches are themselves aging, with few young people. There are especially few young people who could pastor. And we need trained ministers to pastor, because we are trying to establish church polity. We are also facing the influence of secular thinking, and trying to figure out how to keep standing in the faith under all the pressures of life. For all these things, we need pastoral care from trained ministers.
Once a church ages, it loses its ability to adapt. Its ability to influence young people weakens a great deal. This aging church cannot hold a conversation with young people.
If not, normal people are left with a sense of powerlessness: how do I use my faith to answer the hardships of life, to deal with pressure, to face troubles at home? All of us feel the persecution – it is getting worse in China, and everyone can see it. Under this persecution, we need to build a more solid faith to meet life’s conditions.
In our area, I see that people are aging. And once a church ages, it loses its ability to adapt. Its ability to influence young people weakens a great deal. This aging church cannot hold a conversation with young people. This is a challenge I see for our churches, especially churches in more rural parts of the county.
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Then there is the danger the church faces from persecution. That affects the church’s decisions, and what the church can and cannot do. That is another invisible pressure.
An Untaught Congregation
Sister Xuezhen: In our own church, 90 percent of the people are elderly. Only our family and one other family are relatively young; everyone else is old. There are a lot of people where only one spouse believes in the Lord, so there are conflicts at home, and there can be all sorts of strain in daily life – education, work, marriage, giving.
My relatives serve a traditional church which [does have more young families] – but that church is very traditional, and their proclamation of truth may be unclear or even wrong. In practice, a lot of people do not understand much of the truth.
Mothers don’t know how to bring up their children, and how to use the truth to discipline their children and lead them to faith. That traditional house church has children and even a Sunday school – but the children are chaotic and undisciplined. They don’t listen to their parents or fear God, and their mothers are troubled and don’t know what to do. The parents themselves may not have a clear grasp of the truth.
In practice, a lot of people do not understand much of the truth.
About ten years ago I used to teach Sunday school at that church. The children then are all grown up now, but only a small number of them still come to church. Even those who come seem to doubt that God really exists, and just attend church under compulsion. The teaching in that church is bound by legalism and separation from the world: no festivals, no celebration of Lunar New Years, don’t eat dumplings, and so on. [1]
There’s another church I used to attend that has no leader, but simply gathers and talks. They look things up online and fellowship together – but they cannot tell what is right and wrong. These days, a lot of traditional house churches teach that all ordinary believers need to do is read and study the Bible. They think they don’t need to learn anything else, and focus solely on personal devotions, personal experience. It seems the churches around us have all kinds of problems, and I think the preaching here in Yantai is a problem. All this needs prayer.
An Idol of Comfort
Sister Wen: Yantai has an idol of excessive ease and comfort. This cultural climate leads the church to be self-satisfied and self-content, to have a false sense that everything is okay. Because of that, momentum for evangelism is very sluggish. This leads to the church aging even more, young people leaving, and new people becoming scarce. It forms a vicious cycle.
Trying to raise up new laborers is very slow work.
With this cycle, there is a lot of pressure on ministers. There is simply no structure set up for normal people to share in ministry. Any one minister might be doing the work of many people, and it’s very hard to hand off any of the work, because others cannot rise to do it. The challenge I see is that trying to raise up new laborers is very slow work.
[1] Festivals and dumplings: Some separatist house-church traditions reject customary festivals and their associated foods as worldly. Dumplings are bound up with Lunar New Year family gatherings in northern China, so refusing them is a conspicuous act of separation.
Zhang Anwei, Yu Kangxi, Sister Xuezhen, and Sister Wen are pseudonyms for house church leaders in Yantai.
Pray for Yantai Christians to grow deep in their faith and to apply it to every area of life.
