Growth of Chinese missions

Cross-Cultural Mission

Written by David Hall Thursday, 18 June 2009 09:08

The Call2All Congress early this month in Hong Kong, was organised by about 17 of the world's largest mission agencies, which is estimated to represent about 85 per cent of the world's missions force.

David Hall, the director of visionnetwork's New Zealand partner Missions Interlink who attended the conference, commented: "I may be wrong, but my guess is that history will likely record this as the launch of the Chinese missions movement. He said others expressed similar thoughts: Just as the UK served as the catalyst for North American missions, so today Korea - which sends out more missionaries than any other country apart from the United States - is serving as the catalyst to ignite a missions movement from China. "Who knows the long-term impact this could have around the world in the years to come?!" Mr Hall said.

More than half of the 3000 ministry leaders from more than 100 countries who attended the congress were Chinese, with over one-third from mainland China.
Call2All President Mark Anderson said there is a growing sense among Christian leaders that God is calling the Chinese church to take a new place in world missions.
"I believe we are going to see the destiny of the Chinese church moving into a new phase. Great numbers of Chinese missionaries will help lead the way in the next phase of world missions."

The congress focused on prayer movements; reaching unengaged unreached peoples; the oral Bible (two-thirds of the world's unreached cannot be effectively reached through written communication); evangelism; church planting; and compassion (poverty, injustice, illiteracy, water, medical and crises response).

After four days of presentations, discussions, workshops and plenary presentations, the delegates made written commitments to the seven main areas related to the Great Commission. These commitments represent hundreds of organizations and denominations and represent the largest body of commitments ever made to achieving the Great Commission.

1 Comments

David Hall makes this comment

Friday 19 June, 2009

At the end of the first paragraph someone changed my report to read: "...85% of the world's missions." That should be "...85% of the world's missionaries." This may seem like a small thing, but it's actually a very important distinction. I would also like to note that my report did NOT include the stats of the commitments made. The reason is that, while the stats may be a good indication of what people prayed over and committed to, history indicates that often these are more optimistic than realistic. On the other hand I should point out two more facts: (1) these figures only represent 3/4 of the commitments made, and (2) many of us didn't even fill out a commitment. For example my roommate who works with Campus Crusade in Florida on an internet project that is reaching thousands each day (in what we would typically call a "closed" country), said he didn't fill out a commitment form because it would so inflate the numbers that it would make them look all the more unbelievable.