What can sending churches do for missionaries?

I just read a good post by a missionary in Honduras on what is the best thing that local supporting churches can do to be a blessing to the missionary.
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MIKE PETTENGILL|10:00 PM CT

What I Want for All Missionaries
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I have often been asked, "How can our church, small group, or family better serve missionaries?" I get lots of churches that ask similar questions. They start with great intentions but have poor follow-through.

Missionaries, obviously, are human; we miss home, we sin, feel neglected, raise our kids poorly, have bad prayer lives, and so on. Just like we did when we weren't missionaries. The hard-to-swallow truth is that we are out of sight and out of mind. Our friends, family, and brothers in Christ don't see us every day, their lives move on without us, and we become forgotten by those who used to care for us and love us.

Most missionaries knew this would happen when we left for the mission field. People don't sign up to be missionaries for the fame, glory, and additional friends. It is no surprise, but I am shocked at how much it hurts me. I am surprised how much it hurts to be forgotten.


If I could ask for one thing of a church or small group or a family it would be for them to show some interest in my family and me. Send a small care package of stuff we miss twice a year. Give me a call once every other month. Send my kid an electronic iTunes certificate on her birthday and Christmas so I can be reminded someone other than me cares a little about her. Ask me about my marriage and my spiritual life, because both are probably suffering. Send me an occasional e-mail and tell me you prayed for my family today.

That being said, my family and I would continue to do missions work even if we never heard from another person in the United States. And I know the same goes for all eight missionaries on my mission team. But we want to be loved, and we want to know people are thinking and praying for us. If my team members were reminded that others care and pray for them, they would have strength to endure the hard days.

As leader of a mission team and a former elder in my home church, I would love to see each missionary on my team have at least one church that loves them and shows interest in them. In my four years on the field, half a dozen churches have told me that their church has a new plan to better care for their missionaries. They explain, "I have been assigned to care for your family." And few have followed through. I pray that each missionary serving on the field has one church, or small group, or pastor that shows interest in them, their lives, their faith, and their struggles.

When William Carey volunteered to be a missionary, he implored those who sent him, "Remember that you must hold the rope." Missionaries must go, and senders of missionaries must remember to hold the rope.

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Mike Pettengill is a full-time missionary serving in La Ceiba, Honduras. He and his family left the United States in August 2007. Mike is a team leader of an eight-person mission team. To learn more about the Pettengill’s work in Honduras visit Pettengill Missionaries.

SRC: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/04/04/what-i-want-for-all-missionaries/

A Lost Generation

Please pray that Christians in Taiwan will better impact children in their formative years. Children will pick some role model to follow. Unfortunately, many role models on the internet are not good; there is a dehumanizing trend that distorts the way God created us.

"A recent poll in Taiwan of 13,000 students revealed nearly half started surfing the internet before the age of seven, and some start as young as three.

It found a correlation between the frequency of online social networking and the level of concern with appearance and self-image."

(Src: U.K. Daily Mail)

One fad driven by the internet is that children put on hours of makeup to make themselves look like barbie dolls.

Children are lost and need an identity as an adopted child of God.

Merry Christmas! Hope you enjoy more pictures from the year.

Hospitality: Some of the guests who stayed with us this year went for a walk around the college campus.

Even in north Alabama there are some Taiwanese families. We have been visiting a Taiwanese family who are pharmacists in a small town in Alabama.

It has been nice to begin to outreach to international students at the local university.

One of the classes I took this fall in my doctorate of ministry program, "Transformational Leadership in a Post Modern World," explores the leadership models of shepherding God's people in the Bible comparing them and contrasting them with secular leadership teaching. It was very interesting to see the both Alexander the Great and Queen Elizabeth I of England used many leadership elements that are found in the Bible, and modeled by Jesus, Nehemiah, Moses, and others.


Another class applies God's revealed Word regarding Biblical counseling. The Bible has a huge amount to say about depression and anxiety and other problems of the soul; and it offers real and lasting solutions. One key point for everyone to remember -- counseling is not solely for the "professionals -- whether you want to or not, everyone is a counselor; it is a question of whether the counsel you give is good and productive or bad and destructive.



While we are away in the U.S. New Hope has been well shepherded by our coworker, Rev. Daniel Cohee, along with the two ruling elders.
Daniel came back briefly to the U.S. to visit this summer.

We had asked your prayers for more Taiwanese men to join the church. God has raised them up.


New Hope members practicing Christmas carols.


Our apartment in Taipei is still being used for home fellowship groups.

The Tool of Hospitality; The Areopagus of Television; The Call of Continual Learning for Pastors

We have a few updates and prayer requests.

Visitors and More Visitors

This Sunday we are scheduled to have many students come to our house. Some are Chinese and Korean international students at the local university here in Alabama. We've also invited some young men, American college students, who are potential future pastors. This year, I have been mentoring one American and one Nepalese, and both of these men have been involved in the outreach and discipleship of the students whom we are hosting this Sunday afternoon.




Please pray for our time and opportunities to share the Gospel or mentor those who are already Christians.

The following month, we will be hosting visitors from Taiwan. Please also pray for our conversations, that we would make the most of every opportunity.

We have hosted quite a few people this past year, some from Taiwan, and God has already given us the opportunity to get into
several very good, deep spiritual conversations about the Gospel and God's plan of redemption through Jesus Christ. God uses hospitality, and He commands in the New Testament that as Christians we make it a practice in our homes.

My daughters get a picture with a Taiwanese graduate student at the famous well in Sheffield, Alabama where Helen Keller learned her first word, "water."

Christianity Communicated on Taiwan Television:
Although much of the younger generation in Taiwan spend hours upon hours on online computer gaming, the middle age and older generation have their televisions on, often all day. We've been considering how best to get the Gospel message into Taiwanese homes through television. As surely as Paul went directly to the middle of the ideas market place in Athens, we want to get our message smack in the middle of Taiwan's ideas marketplace -- the television. There are several video projects in process that could be used to reach especially the retirees who spend much of their time at home. Among them are converting the Children's Ministries International curriculum into an animated format where the lessons could be put onto DVD's or broadcast on the air.

This video is from a popular Buddhist television station in Taiwan called "Great Love" Television. Surprisingly this particular program is about a doctor who served at a Christian hospital in ChangHua.

Currently there are not many quality Christian programs on Taiwanese TV. New Eyes TV has produced a situation Taiwanese-language comedy coupled with a English language teaching that may reach the older generation. In Mandarin, there is a similar kind of program called "Let's Talk English." Other than these two English-language related outreaches, there is one television station almost exclusively devoted to Christian programming: Good TV. It is found very near on the dial to a Buddhist religious station with an extremely popular drama. One would hope that viewers would stumble upon GoodTV as they change channels to get to the Buddhist drama.

English Around the Block - New Eyes TV program uses Taiwanese to teach English to reach Taiwanese-speaking older generation and countryside population

Let's Talk English - ORTV

Good TV Taiwanese language program


Unfortunately GoodTV does not always practice much discernment on what is aired. Almost anything professing Christianity can be found. There are great interviews and good testimonies, good outreach programs like Let's Talk English. But there are also a plethora of health/wealth prosperity false gospel teaching including that of Benny Hinn. Such teaching appeals to the ears of traditional Taiwanese religion which often is mercenary in seeking a tit-for-tat exchange of favors with the god or goddess being worshipped.

There is one good recent development we have heard. The sermons of Rev. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City will be aired. The wife of one of the elders of New Hope, the church we started in Taipei, has been hired to translate the subtitles for Tim Keller's preaching. That's good because she is an excellent translator and would take care to accurately convey the meaning of what is said.

Please pray that there will be an increase of good, Gospel-message, programming on Taiwan's television. Pray that God will use it to open hearts, especially of the elderly who have little contact with Christians as they tend to stay in their homes much of the time.

Please pray for wisdom and skill as we think through and develop good teaching through video.

Please pray that Taiwan's pastors will be positively influenced by seeing good American preachers so that their teaching will be increasingly Christ-centered, Gospel driven, and expository.


Further theological studies
I've also been using my time before we return to Taiwan to do further theological studies. I am taking two classes this fall towards a doctorate of ministry in pastoral leadership at Birmingham Theological Seminary in Alabama. It has been really great getting to know the other pastors in my classes as well as the professors.

with Dr. Eyrich and two of my classmates in biblical counseling. One is a pastor from Tuscaloosa, the other from Huntsville

Dr. Howard Eyrich, one of Briarwood Presbyterian Church's pastors, is teaching both my classes this semester. It is great that I will be able to continue some of my coursework online from Taiwan. Beyond all the coursework and the writing that comes along with it, I intend to do my thesis focused on the special issues and needs of rural and small town churches and rural church planting. I chose this topic because it is often overlooked by church planting conferences and training, yet I plan to target rural areas in Taiwan that have few or no churches. Inspired by Tim Keller's success at planting Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, so many church planters have focussed on city-center urban church planting. However there is also as great a need for rural church planting, and so I hope my thesis will contribute to encouraging others to take up this labor.

Thanks for your continued support and prayers.

In Christ,

Joel (for the Lintons in Taiwan)

Pray for Taiwan's children and their parents

Please pray for Taiwan's mothers. There is a reason Taiwan has such a low birthrate -- abortion. To consider how many moms must have taken part in killing their babies is just heart-wrenching. Surely they are facing many deep down heart hurts from this act.

* Here is a link to Ray of Hope, a Christian crisis pregnancy center.
* Here is an article about how Taiwan's teachers are afraid for the future because there are increasingly fewer students each generation.
* Here is an article about how Taiwan's population balance is continuing to shift to a greater number of old people.

Judy has written two books that we hope will influence parents to be willing to have more children. The first one was on infant care; the second on child training.




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Following is the article from the Asia Sentinel.

Taiwan's Astonishing Abortion Rate
Written by Jens Kastner
MONDAY, 25 JULY 2011

These made it through


The island’s terminations appear to vastly outnumber live births

For every pregnancy leading to a Taiwanese woman giving birth, a remarkable three are estimated by a Taiwan pediatrician to have been aborted, a figure that others believe isn’t too far from reality.

When on July 17 the veteran National Taiwan University College of Medicine professor and pediatrician Lue Hung-chi told a forum that 300,000 to 500,000 abortions are carried out in Taiwan each year, he was seeking to send alarm bells ringing. If his estimate is true, it has to be one of the highest per-capita abortion rates in the world.

Statistics show that the country has one of the lowest total fertility rates in Asia, apparently driven at least partly by the ready availability of the abortion drug RU-486. The government announced earlier this year that the average number of children a Taiwanese woman would have in her lifetime was the lowest in the island’s history, at 0.91 per woman.

In fact Taiwan’s total fertility rate appears to be the lowest rate any country has recorded anywhere, according to the Population Reference Bureau, although 2010 was an abnormal year, since families were putting off having children because babies born in the Year of the Tiger are thought to be quick-tempered and willful. For whatever reason, the low birthrate was recently declared a national security issue by President Ma Ying-Jeou.

With only 166,000 babies born on the island in 2010, Lue said, the government should act urgently to tighten the island liberal abortion law, which stipulates that a woman can undergo an induced abortion “if the pregnancy adversely affects the psychological or physical health of the woman or her family life.”

Measures should be implemented to encourage people to have children, counseling should be provided and an environment created that facilitates adoption, Lue told Asia Sentinel.

“Children's health care in Taiwan is terribly underfunded. The national health system is not in favor of pediatrics,” Leu said, which he blamed as part of the reason for the low birth rate. “In over 30 percent of Taiwan's towns no pediatrician can be found.”

Lue made it clear that his estimate is just that.

“In Taiwan, there is no solid data available,” he said. “Of course, the figures I mentioned include pregnancies that are ended with the abortion drug RU-486.”

The most recent official data on abortion numbers is over a decade old. In 1999, 42,282 legal abortions were performed compared to 283,661 births. In the absence of authoritative statistics, what's left is anecdotal evidence and assumptions of those who work or do research in the field.

Some believe the figures are lower. Lee Mao-sheng, a professor at Chung Shan Medical University's College of Medicine, believes the figure could be 80,000-100,000 with the number possibly being as high as 150,000 if illegal abortions were counted.

Chao Kun-yu, deputy director-general of the Bureau of Health Promotion, said that including RU486, roughly 240,000 abortions are carried out legally per year. Pan Hun-shan, a physician with the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at Shin Kong Wu Ho-su Memorial Hospital, believes the 300,000 to 500,000 figure to be realistic, saying that one to two mothers out of every ten who visited his hospital were there seeking abortions. Pan suspects that the percentage is significantly higher in private clinics.

Taiwan's demographers agree that it's obvious that the birth-abortion ratio is dangerously skewed.

“Demographers in Taiwan can only do their best by conjecture,” Yang Wen-Shan, a professor at Academia Sinica's Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, told said in an interview. “The health authority may have some estimated number of aborted fetuses, but it is never reported in the public domain.”

Every year, Yang aid, “there are around 13,000 births given by teenagers. If 90 percent of the total number of teenage girls who become pregnant would not want to give birth before they enter into marriages, we estimate that there are around 130,000 aborted fetuses by teenagers alone.”

Social demographers commonly conclude that there are around 200,000 abortions in Taiwan annually, and suggested that the 500,000 figure mentioned by pediatrician Lue came about through the estimate that each of the RU486 pills sold is counted as an abortion.

Yang agreed, however, that the high abortion rate for a good part is to blame on the lack of an adequate adoption system.

“Many of my colleagues argue that if the government would change the child adoption system in Taiwan, every year we can save enough babies to make up the deficits of the lowest-low fertility situation,” he said.

“The abortion rates are higher for unmarried women,” he continued.”According to the statistics, approximately 90 percent of them will make a decision to abort the fetus. Also women with higher parity [the number of times a woman has given birth] have higher rate of abortion, women whose husbands have higher socioeconomic status, as well as those of older age that had already given birth to a baby boy.”

Gender-selective abortions -- aborting girls before their would-be mothers had their first boy – has also led to an alarming gender imbalance. The practice, found in much of Asia, is mainly due to the belief that males will carry on the family name. By regional comparison, only South Korea and China account for male-to-female infant ratios roughly as unnatural as that of Taiwan.

In 2010, in Taiwan 1.09 males were born for every one female, while in South Korea and China the figure was 1.07 and 1.133, respectively. Taiwanese health authorities estimate that last year alone more than 3,000 female fetuses were selectively aborted on the island but prosecutors have a hard time fighting the practice because doctors often have blood samples screened by outside laboratories, meaning there is no evidence.

Unlike in the West, abortion has never been a polarizing issue in Taiwan. Neither NGOs nor public advocacy groups vociferously discourage abortion, and even the churches are remarkably quiet. Abortion was legalized in 1985 and has been generally accepted, mainly because of the stigma associated with unwed motherhood. In recent years, however, the prohibiting cost of education is overwhelmingly cited as reasons for couples not wanting children. Some 75 percent of Taiwan's children visit cram schools where tuition fees for one child alone can easily account for 25 percent of a worker's monthly income.

“Taiwan's abortion rate is high mainly because the economic growth rate is low,” said Tim Wang, deputy director of the ruling Kuomintang’s (KMT) Youth Department. “As government debts account for NT$5 trillion [US$173 billion], we can say once the child is born, it owes the country NT$200,000. Under these circumstances, young couples don't want to raise children.”

In the past, to the Taiwanese, as for societies elsewhere, it was the more children, the better. This was because filial support formed the by far most important financial pillar of retirement. But also this rationale to bear offspring has all but ceased to exist.

“Few people regard children as a means of support after retirement. Most Taiwanese who want to have children do so because they love kids,” said Joseph Tien, an assistant professor at Tamkang University's Department of Insurance. Investment-linked insurance has replaced the traditional filial support as the main means to prepare for retirement, he added.

In the eyes of pediatrician Lue, Taiwan's suspected shockingly high abortion rate has to be taken on top-down by Taiwan's policymakers.

“We cannot demand young pregnant women to think of the nation; it's the government that must think of the nation,” Lue said.

Several BBC featurette stories on Taiwanese people with video:

* Street vender
* Tsou Austronesian tea grower
* Big city entrepreneur
* Foreign brides -- immigrants from China and Southeast Asia often move to Taiwan to marry Taiwanese men
* Hoklo Taiwanese -- democracy activist and civil engineering professor

New Report from Thomas and Jennifer McIntyre

Church planting in Zhongpu (中埔) from OMF Taiwan on Vimeo.

This video clip tells about Thomas and Jennifer McIntyre. [http://vimeo.com/31487451] Thomas was my first missionary intern back in 2006 when he was attending Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. Since then, Thomas finished seminary, got married, and was ordained. They moved to Taiwan, learned Taiwanese, had a baby, and finally have begun a church-planting work in a rural area of central Taiwan.

Here is an articles from the archives about when Thomas was a missionary intern.
http://www.taiwanchurch.org/linton/tpl8.2.html

surveying a region of the countryside


For general information on missionary internships, please take a look at:
http://www.taiwanchurch.org/intern/

If you look at the following map, ChungPu Township is labeled as number 201. The statistics are current through 2006, but do not include any changes in the last five years. Chungpu is shown as falling in the range of having 1 church per twenty thousand - thirty thousand people.