Mark's Testimony

I grew up in a Christian family, but my faith was never deep in our family. After a semester of college, I withdrew, moved back home and told my parents I was done with Christianity. For the next year or so, I worked and saved my money to go back to my university town, Tucson.

Within a month of moving back to Tucson, with God orchestrating events, I came to see how much He loved me in spite of my rejection of Him. It broke my heart and I gave my life to Him. I was back in church by Easter and from that time on, every time the church doors were open I was there. At the same time I had friends in a Navigator college ministry, so I also plugged in there.

I started reading my Bible without any instruction or advice, so I started at Genesis with the goal of reading straight through to Revelation within a week or so. That didn't happen! It took about a year, instead. But by the time I was into the minor prophets, I'd already become convinced that God's heart was for the whole world. So I volunteered to go anywhere to tell people about God's love.

Not long afterward I made a friend who was planning to go to China once he graduated from university. He had already been trained through the Navigators in evangelism and discipleship, so he began discipling me. About the time he graduated, I re-enrolled in university to get a four-year degree, then go off to China myself to work again with my friend. University was a chance to see a longer-term commitment through to the end, which could be a useful quality should the field get tough. (As it was, the Lord made the field easy, and more fruitful than anything I'd done in the States!) A four-year degree would also allow me to teach English, should my support be insufficient--something else I've never had to worry about!

What attracted my friend and I to Training Evangelistic Leadership was it's emphasis on large-scale evangelism and commitment to openness in China, which I felt was more Biblical than anything else I'd encountered. The two also end up working in harmony: You can't do a lot of evangelism if you want to keep secret about what you're doing. But if you're open, and the evangelism brings a lot of fruit, you don't have to worry about it, because you're not trying to hide anything anyway! And that really is how it has been for us in China. We've regularly seen at least 10 people make decisions for Christ each month, and often it's 10 a week! Desiring to ground these people makes it hard to hide what we're doing. And we've been blessed by our different (and unofficial) partnerships with various open churches in China. The Lord has also granted that we could be a blessing to them, in that we've brought so many new believers to their churches.

Doing this kind of open and fruitful ministry in China with TEL has made the last years exciting, to say the least. And Rachel and I are trusting that these years in Hong Kong will be just as fruitful and exciting. We're praying that God will raise up many of those we work with here to go into China in our stead. Our ministry in Shanghai will need more laborers to grow and expand, as we can no longer return and there are no other missionary staff at present. That leaves only three full-time national staff in Shanghai to carry on the work. So we'll be earnestly praying that God will allow us to quickly raise up more staff from Hong Kong to send to support and serve the work there.