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- New Series: 30 Days on the Chinese Church
- The CFC Story: Developmental Stages of a Chinese Church
- The CFC Story: Moving toward Maturity
- The Resource Pyramid
- Why Translated Services Don’t Work
- Growing Pains
- Models of Ministry in Chinese Churches
- A Tale of Two Mailboxes
- Unity and Diversity in a Chinese Church
- Why we don’t have a Senior Pastor
- Maintaining Unity in a Chinese Church
- Why Leadership Training is Job #1
- How to Equip Spiritual Leaders
- Leadership and Culture
- Leadership and Culture (Part 2)
- The Jerusalem Council: Consensus Decision Making in Acts 15
- English Ministry Pastor Shortage
- Reaching Young Adults: The Importance of Ownership
- The Power of Vision
- Caring for Co-workers
- Culture and Biblical Truth
- What about Asian American Churches?
- Advice to a Young ABC Pastor
- Advice to an OBC Senior Pastor
- » Reflections on a Series
This will be the last post in the series “30 Days on the Chinese Church,” but it won’t be the last time I have something to say about this topic. Today I want to pause and reflect on what it has been like to do this series.
As I shared in the first post of the series, I got the idea of doing this series because I needed to do some writing on the topic in preparation for my D.Min. dissertation. I wanted to challenge myself to write every day. It was indeed challenging, but I did succeed in writing something almost every day (except Sundays), which was my goal. On busy days it was not easy to squeeze in the time to write something, but I’m glad that I did. I have a new level of respect for bloggers who post 2 or 3 substantive posts every day. Of course some of them are professional bloggers. . .
I hope that you have found the series to be helpful. I have been sharing many of these things verbally over the years with different people, but this is the first time that I have tried to write them down. Now on to the much larger project of doing my dissertation. Meanwhile, I will return to my “regular” blogging schedule, which includes trying to write 2-3 substantive posts each week.
In doing this series I also hoped to stimulate a discussion among those who who are part of a Chinese or other bilingual immigrant church. I was disappointed by the small number of comments that I have received so far on these posts. I know that there are plenty of others out there with experience serving in Chinese churches, and we can all benefit by pooling our ideas. Probably there are not that many people who even know about this series, and many of you are very busy. My hope is that even though the series is completed the discussion can continue. If you have found this series helpful, why not share it with a friend?
9 Responses to “Reflections on a Series”
Thank you for being diligent and finishing out this series on the intergenerational Chinese church. I think it is helpful to get these issues out in the open and there’s nothing like the internet to document the experiences that you’ve had (and many others have had too) in that unique ministry context. While the issues are challenging at times, without the documenting of these issues, I think, it’s hard to get these issues worked out and developed further.
So, for the work you’ve done in documenting it for the benefit of others on the Internet, with a potential reach all over the world, I hope it will help others to not reinvent the wheel, and to have a reference point to learn from what’s worked and what hasn’t worked, and perhaps to develop new solutions too.
(as an aside, typically there’s a 10 to 1 ratio of readers vs. commenters, and often times, that ratio is even higher among certain groupings; all that to say, don’t be overly disappointed at the lack of comments.)
DJ, thanks for the encouragement. I think that the reader to comment ratio for this series is more like 100 to 1. But I do hope that now that this series is available on the Internet it will be helpful to others for quite some time to come. A significant percentage of the readers of my blog come via search engines, so perhaps over time more readers will discover this series.
I think the biggest issue I had was that I wanted to post something substantive in response, and a lot of your questions weren’t something that really merited a thirty second breeze by “hi PK!” response.
The second thing is that I go to your church, so it’s not like I have anything new to say about our church in particular. “Have you ever served in a church like ours?” Well, yeah…
I think I do want to go back and comment on some of the posts, but it will unfortunately need to wait until I’m not running around like that proverbial chicken…
Thanks for saying “hi PK!” We have had many substantive discussions on ministry issues in the past. Feel free to go back and comment when you have the time.
thanks so much for dedicating yourself to writing these posts (and more so, to the kingdom!). I have lots of thoughts/comments that I’ll post when I’ve processed through. One immediate question does come to mind: what advice do you have for ABC lay leaders/deacons?
Tony, thanks for the question. I think that my advice for ABC lay leaders would be similar to my advice for ABC pastors. I probably need to think about this question a little longer. When you have time, I would like to hear your thoughts.
Dear PK:
I have been studying your 25-lesson-series by taking two lessons per week. So it took me 13 weeks to complete and today I just finished Lesson #25. I have learned a lot and greatly appreciate your effort. I took notes and wrote summaries every week. I plan to spend the next two weeks to review what I have learned and write a report to our church deacons. I would like to send you a Word file if you would kindly tell me your email address.
(Brother TC Lo, Mid-Hudson Chinese Christian Church)
I’m glad that you found the series to be helpful. I will contact you by email so that you can send me your file.
Thanks for the thoughtful series. Wish I had read through alot of this probably 1 year earlier as it helped explain alot of the cultural issues we have seen at our church between the english and chinese deacons on a combined board.
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