Brother Hamburger and A-What?

The night I arrived here in Chiayi, my hostess, Lu, and I were walking down to a neighbor's house to drop off some bamboo. Suddenly we heard a loud voice behind us shouting. We turned around and there was this rough-looking guy with wild, disheveled hair and torn tee shirt leaning out of a battered old box of a car. My muddled brain picked up something like, "EEEEEYYYYYY!!! [Blah blah blah]...been shouting for you and you didn't see us! [Broad grin] ...[blah blah blah blah]...where are you going? We're going fishing! Here's [so and so next to him - big slap on his back] we're going together!! Want to come? ...Oh, going to visit my wife? She's home! Go on and stop by!" After some friendly banter, A-What (as his named turned out to be) zoomed off with his buddy and we went on our way. On the way back, Lu and I bumped into a gentle old guy and I swear she said, "Oh, hello Brother Hamburger." We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes and then promised we'd be back in the morning for breakfast. Well, I hadn't heard wrong. Lu said that everyone goes by nicknames around here. They call her "Wife of the English guy" b/c she's married to a Brit. This was my introduction to working class culture.

One of the two main groups that OMF Taiwan focuses on is the working class. Less than 0.5% of working class people are Christian even though they comprise about 70% of Taiwan's population of 22.5 million. Only 3% of the total population is Christian. To the average Taiwanese, Christianity is a strange foreign religion. Most Taiwanese churches have simply copied the ways of doing church brought from the West at the turn of the century by S. Baptist and Presbyterian missionaries.

For the average beer-swilling, betelnut chewing, chain-smoking working class person. You'd have to be a masochist to go to a Taiwanese church. He probably read his last book in high school, was labeled a massive failure by a culture that measures your value by your performance in school exams and works until 9 or 10 PM every day. There's no appeal to going into a sanitized, lecture-type setting where you have to dress up, get up early in the morning, hear an authority figure tell you to get yourself cleaned up and read from a barely intelligible book. (The translation of the Chinese bible that is the standard in most Taiwanese churches uses archaic and sometimes downright weird language.) Add fear of the spirits, family pressures and deep brokenness, and you begin to see why for the average Taiwanese person, Christianity, as the churches have painted it, simply doesn't work.

For these reasons, "church planting" with the OMF team in Chiayi looks like going shrimp fishing, meeting late at night over tea, house churches, and, oh yes, karayoke singing. K-TV is huge with the working class, especially the guys. They LOVE belting out traditional Taiwanese folk songs to the whine of computer-generated pop, all directed by the ever-so-friendly bouncing ball. Okay, now get this - the team tried karayoke worship last week with their little band of new believers...and it was a big hit! You see, these guys feel really uncomfortable singing in a group setting, but give them a K-TV machine and a mic and suddenly the whole group is bringing the roof down. There's a drug-recovery group here in Taiwan that takes Taiwanese folk songs, fits Christian words to them, and goes around singing the songs. One of the OMF guys borrowed one of the songs and made his own homemade karyoke video on his Mac and voila!

Who says that the cockroaches are the scariest part of missions in the tropics? ;) Well, Luther would have been proud.

How do you Make the Gods Talk?

I mentioned in the previous post that we've been concerned about Lady Di. M was able to connect with her mom yesterday afternoon. As it turns out, she really opened up during the conversation and shared that she's in a lot of trouble. She told M that she's been wanting to know more about Jesus but felt awkward about asking. It's very difficult for a working class Taiwanese person to show interest in Christianity or do anything else that might draw attention to you as being different from the community. She asked M to keep her interest a secret. M shared the gospel with her and in the end, they decided to start meeting weekly to talk about Jesus.

Taiwanese religion is all about using the right technique to get the gods to help you, or at least to not harm you. It can be the cause of a lot of anxiety and uncertainty. During their conversation, Lady Di's mom asked M what method one should use to get God to talk to us. She was shocked to discover that a person could simply talk to God. So she decided to try for herself, and she said a very simple, childlike prayer to the God that M talked to her about, asking for His help if He is really out there. I'm sure the Lord was pleased.

Actually, I had an almost identical conversation yesterday too. One of my uncles treated me and a few close relatives to dinner to celebrate my visit. We started chatting about life in Taiwan, family, and life in general while we were walking home afterwards. I think he's been feeling rather sad and alone. When I mentioned that I was going to wait to see what God says about whether to move to Taiwan, he very earnestly asked what method I use to find out what God is saying. It began a conversation about how God is different from all other gods, and how He is a God who forms relationships with us.

It's absolutely stunning that Almighty God is pleased to talk with us, and that He makes us His children, heirs and friends. O for a thousand tongues to say it all...

Wanhua Kids

I have internet again! Today, I got to take the train cross-country to arrive at my current location, a city in the middle of Taiwan. The train went along the route by the sea. It was so nice to travel out in the country - rice fields, palm trees, and veggie gardens ringed by mountains in the distance. And how lovely the flowers are here! I hardly recognize any of the plants, but things just grow and bloom and thrive like some remembrance of Eden, even in the thick of Taipei's concrete jungle. The produce is out of this world. *sigh* Then when I arrived at the train station, this cute little gramma was standing out back selling guava that she'd grown herself. (These are moments when I'm so happy my parents spoke Taiwanese to me growing up) I bought a couple and boy, were they sweet! If I move to Taipei, I will need to take a break from the city every so often.

I want to introduce some more of the folks I've met...this time, the little ones. Because Wanhua is a low-income district with lots of at-risk kids, OMF has been working to reach these kids and their families. Every other Saturday, the kids gather around when the OMF workers show up at the local park to play games with them and tell a story from Scripture. Some of the kids also participate in an afterschool kids club that OMF runs through one of the local schools. They've built strong bonds with the kids and some of the families. There's a kid I'll call Lady Di (I think I'll go with nicknames from now on instead of initials) who asked to become a Christian at a kids camp over the summer. Lately she's been acting up and there are signs that all is not well at home. More on her later. Then there's Chuckles, who lives with his gramma and has the most winsome, cheeky smile. I'll also miss Sparky, who comes running at top speed as soon as he spots us, shouting and laughing boisterously. He seems to have bonded especially with a guy I'll call Ansel, who's an intern with OMF. The kids really need male role models who'll take an interest in their lives. M says that Taiwan's young people have become a fatherless generation in the last few decades because of the high divorce rate, intense work ethic and changing economy.

Tea Houses by The Spring

OMF started a church years ago specifically for the homeless here in Taipei. It's called "The Spring" and the group of regulars has grown into quite a vibrant group of folks, though they are really a sight to behold to outsiders. Most of them have a disability of some sort, have an addiction or are very elderly. They are linguistically separated from the mainstream of Taiwan because their first language tends to be Taiwanese instead of Mandarin, which is the official language. The language issue served me well, because I speak Taiwanese a bit better than Mandarin. I hit it off with the folks. One of the guys offered me betelnut with a mischievous grin while teaching me to play some inscrutable Chinese chess-like game. Betelnut is this mild narcotic that turns your mouth bright red and makes everyone look like they have a BAD case of TB b/c of the torrents of red stuff that they spit up. Yuk. Perhaps an American cultural equivalent would be dip or snuff. Well, it was nice to be accepted.

The Spring was turned over to Taiwanese leadership last year and one of the OMF missionaries, T, who helped to start the church, now serves simply in a supporting role. This has given her the opportunity to begin a new outreach. The evening I first visited The Spring, she met me at the subway station to bring me to the church. We walked into the busy marketplace, crammed with snack carts, shopkeepers hawking their wares and just crowds and crowds of people out for the night life. Then suddenly, we ducked behind a street sign into a dark alley, walked under a shrine to the earth god, and found ourselves in a lane lined with dingy tea shops. T greeted two ladies who were standing outside and they invited us in to sit. We chatted aimiably over tea and snacks for about 20 minutes. It wasn't until after we left and a few words from T that I realized that they were prostitutes and that "tea houses" in Taiwan are actually brothels. T is praying for workers to join her in reaching out to this population.

Mediums and the Mob

Sorry, gentle readers, for being AWOL for so long - my housing situation and schedule here in Taiwan makes internet access scarce. I will try to catch up in bits and pieces.

I'm staying in Wanhua, the oldest part of Taipei. Some of the most powerful temples are located here, and by "powerful," the locals mean it in the spiritual sense, i.e. that by making your case with the spirits at this temple, you'll be more likely to see results. Temple processions, invocation of the gods to posess a medium and even the bloody spectacle of tang-ki, who pierce themselves with spikes and clubs under the influence of the gods, are not uncommon sights. The mafia is also serious business here in Wanhua, and they operate in close association with the temples. The connection between spiritual and physical violence is much more blatant than in the States, and there is a very real fear of evil spirits that pervades all classes of society. So much for Taiwan's slick, Westernized appearance! I've been very surprised to discover how non-Western the worldview of the average person is.

I visited a boy's juvenile detention center last week. M, who has been working with them for years, says that they are eager to accept bibles and prayer beads from the Christian and Buddhist volunteers who visit them. Reason? Many inmates have had experiences with ghosts there, so they are afraid. When they go to sleep at night, they stack bibles all over their bodies and ring their arms with the Buddhist prayer bracelets. They figure this may serve as protection against the spirits.

I had the privilege of worshipping with a woman who was delivered from multiple tormenting spirits when she met Jesus. In the end, they tried to kill her by throwing her off a cliff. Now she's one of the co-workers in the church I was visiting. The joy in her face was really something else. I couldn't help but think of Mary Magdelene. Another one of the co-workers was a spirit medium before her conversion. This is really a community of folks who know themselves to be delivered and healed by Jesus.