My Chinese Church Away from Home

In some previous posts I described the circumstances under which I found myself with the opportunity to travel to Beijing, China on business on several occasions. See When do You Leave a Good Job? and Leaving the Comfort Zone to Experience God's Provision. I've also commented on my experiences attending Beijing Haidian Christian Church and some good news about the freedom of our Chinese brothers and sisters to worship openly and read the Bible. See China, Christianity, and the Bible.

I have enjoyed my worship experience at Haidian so much, I now think of it as my church away from home. (I'm not done yet with my travels to China.) Here's a picture of me and my new acquaintance and Christian brother Chuck who went with me last Sunday. (The English language service is now at 11 am in the basement. Enter from the rear of the building at ground level.) Haidian just moved in a wonderful new building which was dedicated on June 3, 2007.


One of the things which is so exciting to me is to see so many college age worshipers. Haidian has the lucky location to be a next door neighbor to two of the most prestigious universities in all of China, Beijing University which I've heard compared to Harvard in the US and Tsinghua University which I've heard called their "MIT." Note the young and standing-room-only crowd at the English language service below.



As you can see, they didn't start an English language service to reach out to Westerners like me, they started an English language service to reach out to the college students. If you are a bright, ambitious college student in China you want to go to graduate school in an English speaking country. All the top jobs and careers in the new China require regular contact with Westerners and good English language skills are a plus. The result, probably 250-300 Chinese college students worship in English in Beijing each Sunday morning.

See also the China Daily article Modern church, more religious freedom for more information and quotes from Pastor Wu Weiqing saying that over 70% of those attending the church are young people.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

Make a Loan and Change a Life - Part 2

If you are a regular reader, you may remember a couple of previous posts Make a Loan and Change a Life and My Career as a Financier to the Developing World in which I talked about making "micro credit" loans as way of helping people in the developing world help themselves. I am happy to report that I just received an email from Kiva.org telling me that Ariola Sánchez in Ecuador has paid her loan in full. Ten of us who signed up at Kiva.org loaned $250 ($25 each) to Ariola to "buy Bibles, clothing and other miscellaneous products to sell" in her neigborhood.

Shouldn't We Just Send Money?

(This is something I wrote back in 2005)

A friend of mine at work just returned from a church-sponsored mission trip to Honduras. He described it as “the best trip I’ve ever been on!” He showed me many digital pictures from his trip showing how they built simple houses for people there. People of all ages went including many retirees and teenagers with some doing construction and some teaching a vacation Bible school for Honduran children. One couple that went had been sponsoring a child in Honduras by mail for a while and got to meet “their” child in person. The smiles of delighted children were prominent in many pictures. He showed a picture of himself with his arm around a Honduran teenager with the teenager wearing his hat and sunglasses. My friend had given them as a gift to the teenager right before they left to return home. When was the last time you spent $900 dollars of your own money and used a week of your precious vacation time to go bang nails all day in the hot, tropical sun for people you just met? When was the last time I spent $900 of my own money and a week of my vacation time to go bang nails in the hot, tropical sun for people I just met? I know my answer is “never.”

My own church regularly sends people on mission work trips to a girl’s orphanage in Chile and I have only heard glowing comments from the people who return. If there was any sadness in their remarks, it was that they could not provide even more help. One guy told of eating a meal with the girls where the main dish was chicken. After dinner, he ventured back into the kitchen to find the girls and house mother picking the little pieces of chicken left uneaten off of the bones. Nothing could be wasted. They would put this small amount of left over in soup at another meal. This big, burly guy talked about how now before he goes to sleep in the States at night, he wonders if the girls (who he now knows by name) got enough to eat that night.

I can hear the naysayers now. “Wouldn’t those people in Honduras or Chile be better off if all those Americans did not go down in person but instead sent the cost of their airfare, hotel, meals, etc. to those people?”

I think the naysayers are missing something. Yes, from a short-term, purely economic point of view they may be right. However, their attitude seems to be based on the assumption that only the physical needs of the poor in Honduras matter.

What about the spiritual needs of the person who makes the journey? If they had only sent their money:

• Would they have learned how much faith other people around the world must have to face such hardship and still be happy?
• Would the traveler have learned to be grateful for the many blessings they have already received in life and so often take for granted?
• Would the traveler learn the lesson about what things really are necessities? and how it is possible to be happy with little?
• Would those teenagers be the same kind of husband, wife, or parent in their future if they had not had this opportunity to give to someone in person who really appreciates it... and cannot return the favor?
• How will the world be different if enough Americans have faces with names in their memories and wonder if the person they met had enough to eat today?

What about the spiritual needs of the people in Honduras?

• Would they have learned that when Jesus is actively at work in the lives of someone “rich” they don’t look down on the poor?
• Would those children in the vacation Bible school that week gotten the same life lesson if they had not seen that all those “rich” people who could have been lounging around at the beach for fun would rather come tell them about Jesus while swatting tropical insects?
• If the lady who had a house built for her were to improve her financial situation later in life, would she be as generous face-to-face to those poorer than her if she had not seen the example of those Americans coming to help her when they could have stayed home and pretended she didn’t exist from 2000 miles away?

I think I’m missing something. What about you?

Lost Boy of Sudan to Graduate

Some of my readers may remember a post A Prayer for Michael and the Lost Boys of Sudan in which I described a moving incident meeting a refugee from Sudan in the waiting area at a car dealer. Imagine my surprise when I open up the morning paper and find a whole article about the same young man. See One of Sudan's 'Lost Boys' finds calling, will graduate as nurse.
Apparently he is graduating soon and making a trip back to Africa to see his mother whom he hasn't seen in 19 years and hasn't spoken to since 2004. Let's all pray for a happy reunion.

My Career as a Financier to the Developing World

If you happened to read my previous post Make a Loan and Change a Life you learned that I made a small loan to an entrepreneur in Ecuador that sold Bibles and other retail items. I am happy to report that Ariola has made her first payment of $42 out of $250 or 16.8%. Since I was one of ten different lenders lending $25, my portion of her repayment was $4.20. Here's more about Ariola and her business.

Location: Guayaquil, Ecuador

Activity: Retail

Loan Amount: $250.00

Loan Use: Buy bibles, clothing and other miscellaneous products to sell

Loan Repayment Term Range: 6-10 months

Start Date: Nov 25, 2006

Amount Repaid: $42

Partner Rep: Luis Crespo, Esther Vasquez

Partner: MIFEX

Ariola is a saleswoman in her neighborhood. Primarily she sells bibles to the people from her church and her community. She started off with $50 of investment capital and has slowly expanded her businesses. She also sells clothing and other products targeted towards women. In order to make her products affordable to her clients she takes half of the payment at the time of purchase and charges the rest on a weekly or bi-weekly rate. She is eager to receive a loan in order to buy more products for her clients like more bibles, CDs and clothing. She hopes that she can receive the loan before the busy Christmas season begins. This business is a complementary source of income in her household of 6 children. Her husband works as a bricklayer but he does not make enough money to provide for his family on his own.

Go visit Kiva.org if you want to help a developing world entrepreneur.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

A Prayer for Michael and the Lost Boys of Sudan

I took my daughter's car to the dealer this morning to get it looked at. Then engine wasn't running quite right and it needed an oil change. I didn't have to work today so I just waited on the repairs in the dealer's customer waiting area. At one point it was just me and a young black man waiting on our vehicles. I remember noticing he was wearing a name tag that said "Michael". I was getting a little bored and I made some lame remark about "I hate waiting like this more than almost anything." He smiled and replied back to me in an accent that sounded foreign and I deduced that he might be here from Africa.

I always like talking to people from other countries an inquired with him "Where are you from?" He replied that he was from Sudan and I suspected immediately he was a refugee from the war there in which Muslims from northern Sudan have been attacking the Christians in southern Sudan. On talking to me a little more he described himself as one of the "Lost Boys of Sudan." (See also the Red Cross article on the Lost Boys of Sudan.)

I didn't know what that meant but I learned that when he was about four years old, his parents sent him away to Kenya where they hoped he'd be safe from the fighting in his own country. I think he said his mother was too sick at the time to travel with him. I didn't learn any details about his father other than he had learned later that his father had been killed in the war. He told me he spent 8 years as a refugee in Kenya before coming to the United States. His last contact with his mother was by telephone from Kenya two years ago.

I felt a little uneasy because I knew my life had been so easy compared to his. Whatever problems I have seemed small in comparison to his.

He told me he is now living in the US under a refugee visa which allows him to work here on a green card. He told me after working here five years, he hopes to apply for US citizenship. He's going to school at a local university to become a nurse.

The customer service representative from the car dealer arrived about that time and he had to go pay for his repairs and I never saw him after that.

God, I want to lift up Michael in prayer tonight. I pray for all the refugees of Sudan and especially for the "Lost Boys of Sudan". Bless them and show them Your provision for their needs. I pray that he will reunited with his mother soon or at least be able to contact her to know how she is and where she is. I pray for an end to the bloodshed in Sudan. I pray that we here never forget the bloodshed and suffering in that part of the world that seems so remote to us. I know that somebody's mothers and fathers and children are fighting just to survive while I am so comfortable. Forgive me when I am too complacent about the needs of my brothers and sisters. Amen.

(March 11, 2008) see the followup at Lost Boy of Sudan to Graduate

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

Make a Loan and Change a Life

A few weeks ago I was reading my local newspaper, The Tennessean, and saw an article about the most recent Nobel Prize in Economics. I learned that Muhammad Yunus, who got his Ph.D . from Vanderbilt University here in Nashville in 1971 received the Nobel Prize for his work combating poverty through the use of "microcredit" or "microloans".

Yunus’ concept of microcredit – small loans to poor villagers in Bangladesh to help them buy livestock or fund an enterprise, has grown from $27 he loaned out of his own pocket into the Grameen Bank, which has loaned more than $5.7 billion to 6.61 million borrowers. Despite lack of collateral or signed loan documents, 99 percent of the loans have been paid back. The Grameen Bank provides services in more than 71,000 villages in Bangladesh through 2,226 branches.

Just a few days ago I was channel surfing and stumbled upon a Frontline story Uganda: A Little Goes a Long Way which showed how an organization called Kiva was using the internet to connect people like me with deserving entrepreneurs in far away places. The response to this TV show was overwhelming as their website was swamped and inaccessible for several days. The website finally came back up and I was able to make my first "microloan" Saturday night. I used my credit card to loan $25 to Ariola Sánchez, a retailer in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Kiva pooled my $25 along with loans from 9 others to fully funded her request for a $250 business loan to purchase an inventory for resale.

Kiva is not a religious organization but I could tell that many of the entrepreneurs who benefit from the loans are Christian. One of the items Ariola sells, for examples, is Bibles. I encourage my readers to visit the Kiva website with their credit card handy.

Christian Lending Library in India

Back in March 2006 in my post Hungry for Books Overseas, I raised the issue of Christians in far away places where Christianity is not the dominant religion who are hungry for Christian reading material. I mentioned that there is a whole warehouse of books at the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge just lacking the money to ship the books to those English speaking Christians who desire the books. I am sure their are books on your shelf or entire libraries of books from retired pastors that could be put to great use overseas.

The Christian Communication Centre, for example, offers lending libraries to Christians and seekers in many cities in India. Check out the Christian Communication Centre's new blog to see how you can support their efforts. For your information, it costs about $1 per pound to ship a "book bag" by surface (ship) to India. Please contact me by email if you feel lead to support this effort financially.

Hungry for Books Overseas

I had a conversation with Patti Joy Posan, Executive Director of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge a while back. It helped illuminate a need that I would like to share with my readers. Perhaps someone can offer a solution. Everyone can pray about it.

I know that there are Christians in far away places and in countries where Christianity is not the dominant religion who are hungry for Bible-based, Christian reading material both for their own spiritual growth and for sharing with others. I've been trying to help just such an organization, the Christian Communication Center in India, which operates lending libraries for that very purpose.

Through Patti Posan, I discovered that there is a large supply of Christian reading material (about 8000 books as of about a month ago) sitting in a warehouse in Sewanee, Tennesse just a couple of hours from me. These books have been donated to the SPCK over the years from church members and pastors. The only thing which keeps the books out of the hands of the eager souls overseas is money to ship the books to them. Books are pretty heavy and the cost to ship them half-way around the world is not trivial.

I was wondering.

• Is there someone out there in the business world who happens to have a shipping container headed towards India or some other country where English is reasonably well known who might be able to slip in a shipment of books inside for no additional cost?
• Is there someone out there who has a heart for overseas missions and has been blessed financially who could donate out of their abundance to help finance a shipment?

Anyway, I ask that my readers to please pray for a solution to this transportation problem. I'd love to hear from readers via email or through comments to this post.

Copyright © 2005 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

Jesus Never Fails

Jesus Never Fails - On the back of a three-wheeled taxis in Bangalore, India. Picture taken in October 2004.