I like to take this opportunity to personally thank you for taking your time to read this current issue of What’s Going On in the Chinese Language Service. Your interest in our ministry is a personal encouragement to our Chinese staff members. By connecting with us through your reading, you are serving us as we serve our Chinese listeners. This is special to us. Thank you for your love for the Chinese people and for your interest in our radio ministry. Feel free to contact us. We like to know you and tell you more about us and what we do.
February 12, 2021, marks the beginning of Chinese New Year 2021. This is the year of the ox according to Chinese zodiac. Oxen have been loved by the Chinese throughout centuries because they help farmers plow the soil, they provide a means of transportation and a source of food, and they were also used occasionally in ancient military combats. The ox’s quiet, enduring, hardworking, humble, gentle, various benefiting characteristics encourage Chinese in the year of ox to face everyday life with these same attitudes.
With a new year ahead of us, we realize that the challenge of Covid-19 of 2020 is still with us. For about two weeks this month our Chinese website features a video presentation by Middle Tennessee Chinese Church of Christ in Nashville, Tennessee. Through the video, website visitors get to learn what Chinese Christians in Tennessee do in connecting people with God and with others during the pandemic, through services of love, visitation, sharing the word of God, and prayers which were depicted beautifully by a Chinese poem written by Dr. Jingqiong Kang of Vanderbilt University in the midst of the pandemic. The poem illustrates how busy was the church making masks and giving them free to people far and near who did not have any when masks were unavailable on the markets, visiting the sick and those who were locked in, repenting to God humbly of our sins, coordinating members to serve the local Chinese nationals as a team, praying weekly for people around the world, lifting up medical professionals in local hospitals with refreshments and words of affirmation, inviting people worldwide to worship and to praise God on the Zoom platform with us, studying God’s word and sharing insights together daily on social media platform, keeping Jesus’ command to love each other, being a living testimony before the world for God through Jesus. With the video, we present to the world a small window through which viewers worldwide get to know how active God has been during the pandemic leading Christians to serve, to love, to connect with those outside of church community, to learn of God and to bring people back to him.
Through our daily radio programs Chinese listeners worldwide get to learn about God and his plan for the ancient patriarchs and Israelites in February as our Bible reading programs went through the first five Books by Moses. Christian writers such as Short, Chen, Fang, Bian, Lee, and Ho contributed their understanding to explain, to illustrate, and to throw light on important concepts such as creator God, sins, consequences of sin, God’s promise of salvation, covenant relationship, laws of Moses, sacrifice and forgiveness, holiness, a nation of priest among idolatrous people and cultures. We work together to help listeners knowing God through patriarch’s encounters of God and Israelites’ exodus and wilderness experience. We highlight the law of Moses and prophecies to promote understanding the nature of God.
Please do pray for our listeners and website visitors. They are precious. Pray that God enables them to understand God. Pray that they would develop a listening habit to our broadcast. Pray that they would introduce our radio program and website to their family and friends. Pray that God increases our listeners and the quality and quantity of our program production.
Thank you, and may God bless you.
