When did you go to Taiwan?
I arrived in Taiwan on August 1st, 2009. After nearly 1 year in full-time language study, I moved to Taipei to begin working at the Pearl Family Garden.
How long will you be there?
I am a long-term worker, and plan to continue working in Taiwan until retirement or God directs me otherwise. Every two years, I return to the US for a few months to visit supporters at home.
Are you there alone or are you part of a team ?
When I became a member of OMF International, I joined a group of veteran missionaries that have been committed to working in Taiwan. OMF first began work in Taiwan in 1951. Check out more about OMF-Taiwan HERE.
Why did you choose to go to Taiwan?
Some factors in my decision:
- Seeing, especially through Scripture and various experiences I had in Taiwan, God’s love for the people I met, and His intention to heal and bring wholeness to their communities.
- Desire to be involved in community development in Wanhua, the low-income neighborhood where I will be based, and a sense of compassion concerning the brokenness and poverty there.
- Lack of Christian workers and presence in Taiwan, especially among those of working class background, who comprise 2/3 of the nation’s population. Less than 0.5% of working class people in Taiwan are Christians. For this reason, OMF (my sending agency), has focused its work on reaching the working class.
- The unique suitability of a person of my background (in culture, temperament, ministry experience, and particular convictions) for the work that OMF is doing in Taiwan.
- There are sharp barriers that keep people of working-class background in Taiwan from having access to the gospel.
- A strong sense that God is calling me to go there.
Brokenness and poverty? I thought Taiwan was rich.
Taiwan is, as a whole, rich (although not nearly as rich as the United States – see their comparative GDP’s here). Taiwan’s wealth has fed a culture of materialism that has grown bitter in the mouths of the Taiwanese. Many Taiwanese speak of the nation as being spiritually and morally bankrupt, as can be seen in the movies of the late Taiwanese filmmaker, Edward Yang.
Just as there are the haves and have-nots in the wealthy US, the same thing exists in Taiwan. My work in Taiwan will be in a low-income neighborhood of Taipei called Wanhua, where I stayed when I first visited the OMF team in Taiwan. The public housing projects are in Wanhua, and with concentrated poverty has come many of the social ills that we associate with our own inner cities. Wanhua is a center for gangs, prostitution, homelessness, drugs, and crime in Taipei. The conditions that Taiwanese associate with the working-class are particularly stark in Wanhua: juvenile delinquency, divorce, child abuse, dysfunctional families, and promiscuity.
Why are there so few working class Taiwanese who have heard the gospel?
Most Christians in Taiwan come from the middle or upper class. Taiwanese churches heavily borrow from Western culture and the culture of education. These factors create major barriers in reaching the working class:
- Language gap – Working class Taiwanese prefer to speak Taiwanese, while most churches in Taiwan use Mandarin Chinese, which is preferred by the upper classes.
- “Churches make me feel like a failure” – Taiwanese culture highly values education and performance in school is used as a measure of one’s value in society. Working class Taiwanese are not highly educated and consider themselves failures for that reason. Taiwanese men often call themselves “Taiwanese cows,” having no brains, only brawn. Being mostly middle and upper class, churches are filled with the highly-educated elite. Also, the services resemble a school lecture: the room is arranged in rows and the focus is a sermon. For these reasons, working class Taiwanese who visit churches commonly feel a sense of shame and inferiority.
- Literacy gap – Most working class people are not highly literate because they do not continue to read books after finishing their middle or high school education. Because reading Chinese requires you to know the individual characters that represent each word, one quickly loses the ability to recognize the characters once out of practice. Churches in Taiwan are book-heavy. When you walk in, you typically receive a bible, hymn book and the church bulletin… spend the morning reading from a confusing combination of the three books.
How much do you need per year for your work?
A little over $29,000 per year covers everything from my daily living expenses to funds that allow OMF to operate and support all its members internationally. Click here to see the details of my budget.
More questions? Please feel free to contact me.
–Last updated Sept 4, 2009
