Let's Open Our Eyes

There is currently a church plant conference going on here at Watermark.  They will be traveling to different recent plants and studying what effective church plants look like.

This is what I have just learned.  In 1950  Vancouver had 80% attendance in churches and less than 1% were proclaiming atheists...  In 2005 those numbers nearly flopped.  There was less than 5% attendance in church and 41% were proclaiming atheists.  That is an incredibly depressing statistic.

Next a quote appeared on the screen.  It said this,

"The Church is PERCEIVED as an island of irrelevance in an ocean of need." 

Whoa.  

That means the church is not irrelevant, but that is how the church is VIEWED.  What have we done,  or not done, as Christians to gain this view of the church?  The church should be the most relevant thing when people are in need.  Our churches should have doors wide open to help those in need.

So what are we doing?  How can we change this view?  When people are in a time of need will your church doors be open?  Will they even know where they are?

Starting the Job

Good night, good morning to everyone reading.  I just wanted to update everyone about what I will be doing at Watermark.

I have three main priorities.  Working with the summer youth program,  organizing events for the incoming English teachers, and working with the university students.  The youth program and university stuff is pretty low key since it is summer time but my job is to make connections with the students and try to build relationships with them. I love this part of my work because it is a great time to learn about this culture and the way other people live while trying to teach them about my  own life and how it is influenced by God.

The work with the incoming English teachers will also be exciting.  We are creating a few extra opportunities for the American teachers to meet with some of the Hong Kong students trying to learn English.  Basically, we are opening up the Community Center to have a gathering for everyone to interact.  I am organizing that.   Hopefully that goes well.

In my down time I will try to meet more new people and continue to make new connections.  I am also reading a few books to further my knowledge of missions and Christianity.  One book that has really caught my attention is "Emerging Worship" by Dan Kimball.  Check it out.  It is an easy read and it paints a great picture for where the church is headed.

6/25 Town Exploration

I want to take a moment and thank everyone who has found my blog and at least taken time to go to the link.  I hope some of you have read my blog but my "blogger stats" only show me how many pageviews I have had. I have had 48 pageviews so thank you to all those who have click on my site or may have click on my site twice.  Every click is appreciated.

My hopes for blogging is to write nearly every day.  I don't want to say I will do it everyday but I will try to add something in a few times a week.  My reasoning for this comes from a close friend named Mat Murphy. Mat at one time had a blog and he posted something new in it everyday.  I have learned a lot from Mat on how to better my Christian walk so I thought it would be smart to follow his lead in this as well.  He is also the one who first urged me to come on this trip. So thank you Mat Murphy.  You are a great friend.

Today in Hong Kong  was our day off.  Our work week will start tomorrow with my first staff meeting.  The goal I had for today was to learn more about my surroundings. I want you to know that there is a lot around me. Aldrin and I, the two interns who have only been here for two days, went exploring.  We did a great job of learning our way around our immediate area.

Our immediate area seems to be more of the residential part of Hong Kong.  I came into this trip thinking that Hong Kong would be the Asian New York City and this part of town is not that.  There is more forest that I think there should be in a large city.  But as I learned more about this area I learned that Watermark has a good foothold in Hong Kong.  However, I did not yet realize how gigantic Hong Kong is.

Aldrin, Jeremiah, and I went down to central.  This is the New York City part of town.  It is massive.  But what impressed me the most was the pier Jeremiah showed us.  This pier looked out from Hong Kong Island into the sea.  But this sea was more like a bay because as I looked around there was skyscrapers and city everywhere.  This city is big.  And I truly believe that Watermark has a great foothold here but there is so much that still needs to be done. There is ministry opportunities everywhere.  So what I want to ask for is prayer support.  There is an unending amount of ministry opportunities here and all around the world.  Pray that God will continue to lead us into more opportunities to share His Gospels.

6/24 The Beginning

Hello to everyone reading this. I have never blogged before so please bare with me.  My name is Jonathan. I assume if you are reading this you already knew that.  I am also a bad speller and spell check doesn't always help.  If something looks weird sound it out and that is probably what I meant.

I am in Hong Kong at this time in my life.  I will be here for two months and so far I have been here for two days.  The focus of this trip is to help out Watermark Community Church in any way I can.  I will be working specifically with the high school ministries and the university ministries.  Another project I will work closely with is the eli-.  Some people may have heard of this, some may have not.  I don't remember what it stands for but the basic idea is that university students from the states come here and teach English through culture (which is Christianity) to students here.  I will be helping with that group.  So those are the basic tasks I have been given.

I was given ideas to talk about for this blog and I believe my first topic was "hopes." So now I will talk about that.  I have been here for two days and that has not been enough time to meet everyone.  I have met with three other interns that are here with me.  I live with two of them and the other is a few floors above me.

The two I live with are Aldrin (from the Philippines) and Jeremiah (from the states).  Sydnie lives above us and she is from Alabama.  We all have very different lives but we also are at similar points in our lives.  We are all living our lives in a time of transition.  We are all interns and we all love missions.  One thing I think we are all searching for is placement.  We are looking to see what God has planned for us and where God has planned us to be.

My hope for this trip is to find out how I fit into God's plan. I know He has much planned for my life and I hope to gain a small insight of what that plan is.