FICCC English Ministry Vision
The purpose of the FICCC English ministry is “to develop humble servants who will love the Lord, the lost and the local church for the rest of their lives.” This vision is based on three standards that are stressed throughout the Bible. These are three standards that we desire to develop in the lives of people involved in the English ministry so that they will be equipped to be good managers of the bountiful blessings that God has given them.
The first standard can be found in the first phrase “to develop humble servants.” This standard is also stressed in Philippians 2:3,4: Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. The first standard that we desire to develop in the lives of people involved in the English ministry is a spirit of servanthood instead of a spirit of entitlement.
Many of the people involved in our English ministry are very successful. And it’s easy for this spirit of entitlement to seep into our spiritual lives. But to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, you should ask not what your church can do for you, instead you should ask what you can do for your church. And that attitude should seep into our interaction with our community. We should ask not what our community can do for us, but we can do for our community. And it should seep into our relationship with each individual in our lives. We should ask not what others can do for us, but we can do for others.
And that’s why we challenge people in our English ministry to get involved in serving while they are living in Ithaca. It might be serving in our church. It might be serving as a mentor for refugees. It might be serving in a campus ministry. Our desire is that by the time our people leave Ithaca that their lives would be characterized by a spirit of servanthood instead of entitlement. We hope that when they start attending a church in another city, they won’t ask, “Why am I not getting as much out of my new church as I was getting out of FICCC?” But instead, they will ask, “How could I share the blessings that I experienced at FICCC with the people in my new church?”
The second standard can be found in the second phrase “who will love the Lord, the lost and the local church.” This standard is also stressed in I Corinthians 13:3: If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. The second standard that that we desire to develop in the lives of people involved in the English ministry is a motive of love, instead of a motive of self-interest. According to this passage, it’s possible to do acts of service for self-interest rather than for love. It’s ironic when we serve others because we want to get something out of it, we get nothing out of it. But when we serve others because we truly love those we serve, then we end up getting much out of it.
There are three areas where we hope that our capacity for love will grow. The first area is in our love for the Lord. In fact, Jesus said that loving the Lord is the most important thing a person can do. Our desire is to equip people in our English ministry to have quality times alone with the Lord during the week in which they read the Bible and pray. And our desire is to provide quality worship services in which they can pour out their hearts in expressing their love to the Lord.
The second area is our love for the lost. God doesn’t want us to stay in a Christian bubble in which we have no contact with non-Christians. Instead, we should build friendships with non-Christians and tell them about the Lord. Our hope is that we will develop within the people in our English ministry a genuine love and compassion for those who are lost without Jesus, and that we can equip them to effectively communicate the Gospel to them.
The third area is a love for the local church. The local church is not a building or a worship service. The local church is a community of believers. If people’s involvement in the local church is only attendance in a worship service, they may end up feeling merely like a face in the crowd. We want the people in our church to regularly practice the “one another commandments” of the Bible with one another so that they can experience genuine community. That is why we challenge them to actively participate in our prayer groups, our Adult Bible Fellowship, our monthly brunch and our inreach activities. We also encourage them to take the initiative to meet with their brothers and sisters throughout the week.
The third standard can be found in the third phrase “for the rest of their lives.” This standard is also stressed in Matthew 13:20-23: The one who received the seed that fell on rocky places is the man who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since he has no root, he lasts only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away. The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful. But the one who received the seed that fell on good soil is the man who hears the word and understands it. He produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown." The third standard that we want to develop in the lives of the people in our English ministry is a goal of long-term growth rather than short term pizzazz.
During the high school and college years, some students lose their faith because of some sort of crisis of faith. Others keep their faith, but their involvement in church becomes very inconsistent because they become really busy and they prioritize their academic life over their spiritual life. But our desire is to do what we can to help students not only survive high school and college, but thrive during high school and college.
But just because student survives college doesn’t mean that they are home free. Some people sizzle in their spiritual life in college, but fizzle once they are out of college. They leave college and try to find a local church that provides them the same spiritual thrills that they had in college. So they try going to a Chinese church, but they get turned off with the leadership in the church because they practice too much church politics. Or they find the people in the English congregation are too Chinesey or too Americanized or too superficial or too serious. So they try going to a multi-ethnic church, but they find out that they are treated cordially, but they never feel fully accepted by the inner circle. And so after awhile, they either drop out of church or become faces in the crowd who only attend worship services on Sundays.
But our hope for students is that during their time in Ithaca, they will develop such a strong servant heart that their love for the Lord, the lost and the local church will continue to grow for the rest of their lives. Our hope is that they will not allow the failures of others to be an excuse to become failures. And so it is our duty to warn them of the potential pitfalls that are before them and to equip them so that they can avoid falling into those pitfalls.
Core Values of the FICCC English Ministry
The English congregation was started in the year 2000 based on several important core values. These core values continue to characterize our congregation today.
- Though our target group is Asian-Americans, we desire to reach out to all people.
- We desire to give people in our congregation an opportunity to serve in our church.
- We desire to motivate and equip people to serve in Chinese churches after they leave Ithaca.
- We desire to motivate and equip people to serve as cross-cultural missionaries.
- We desire to provide quality Christian education.
As an English Congregation in a Chinese Church in Ithaca, we have the first obligation to reach out to Asians, especially Chinese, who share similar background like us, i.e. being born or brought up in North America in families with Asian cultural heritage. Many of them may find our church the place they feel most comfortable in hearing the gospel as there are fewer barriers (culture, language, race, age, education background) for them to cross in their search for understanding Christianity which might be very foreign to them.
But we understand that God's heart is not that we only reach out to people who are like us. Although some people are more natural to be reached by us, we are also called to use every opportunity God gives us to share His love. Having a bi-cultural background might help us to be more sensitive and respectful to other people's culture, and therefore be more effective in sharing the gospel cross culturally.
So although we want the Chinese American non-Christians to be able to find in our church a lot of people with their same background, we also want this congregation to appreciate and celebrate diversity.
We wholeheartedly encourage every Christian to participate and serve in a parachurch campus ministry. Parachurch campus ministries can be very helpful for students’ spiritual life if they enhance their love for the local church, instead of replacing their love for the local church. Instead of developing a sense of entitlement to be served, parachurch organization should help develop of spirit of servanthood to serve the local church both before and after graduation. So we recommend students to evaluate their involvement in parachurch organizations in light of this ideal.
Many students stopped going to church after graduation because they only participated actively in on-campus fellowship while in school, and after graduation they found it difficult to find a fellowship that's similar to on-campus fellowship, with so many people sharing the same background. Some people even tried to attend a student fellowship on a college campus, but they found themselves not able to fit in because they had become an outsider.
Some students who attended local church regularly, but only sat in the pew and listened to sermon passively, had similar difficulty in fitting in a church after graduation. Without serving in ministry it's not easy for Christians to have a healthy and lively faith. But they didn't know how to find their roles in a local church.
FICCC stresses the importance of getting college students involved in ministry in a local church. We encourage Christians to serve in church's governing board and various ministry, in worship service, in children ministry, in youth ministry, in teaching Sunday school, in outreaching to other people, in helping others to learn English, etc.. We want to get students exposed to local church ministry and have the leadership experience while they are still college students. Through getting them involved in these ministries, we wish to see their spiritual gifts more clearly identified and developed. We like to help them to see what they could do in a local church no matter where God leads them to go after graduation. Most importantly, we wish to see some of them find their life-time calling while serving in these ministries in the local church. Several former members of FICCC's Chinese Congregation have found their life-time calling because of their ministry involvement in FICCC. We wish to see the same in our English Congregation.
One reason why we started English Ministry in FICCC was to help the college students see the urgent needs of workers who could minister to the children of new immigrants to North America in Chinese or Asian churches. These new immigrants are more easily reached by the Chinese churches because of language, but as their children grow unless the Chinese churches have workers who could effectively minister to them in English they won't be able to have solid spiritual growth before they grow up and leave home for college.
Right now there are already quite a few Chinese churches that have excellent English ministry, but many Chinese churches in North America either don't have any English Ministry at all or have rather weak ones. One major reason is a lack of workers.
FICCC wishes to keep Chinese American Christians stay connected with a Chinese church during their college years. We hope not only that they could find their roles in a Chinese church but also that their experience of serving in the Chinese church is so positive that they will be more willing to serve in a Chinese church after they graduate and move to a new place. Although many Chinese churches have not yet been able to provide good environment for English-speaking adults to grow and function, we wish that some of our alumni are trained to believe that God could use them to bring about changes and to make English Ministry in a Chinese church to happen, to grow, and to mature.
Although we see clearly that Chinese churches in North America is a big harvest field with great opportunity, but not enough workers, we also see many other needs in the world. We believe that more cross cultural missionaries, either as missionaries/pastors or as tent-making Christian professionals, must be raised up and sent to the fields. And we seriously pray that God will call and send many of these workers from members of FICCC.
We encourage and support members to go to mission conferences and to short-term missions so that they could know better God's heart for mission, and that they could discern better how God wants them to be part of His plan for world evangelism.
FICCC is in the process of establishing a quality long-term Adult Bible Fellowship curriculum for English-speaking adults. We will continue to make it a priority because we firmly believe that Christians should be constantly learning and equipping themselves so that they could be better used by God to do His works.
We encourage Christians to attend Adult Bible Fellowship with the attitude of not only to learn for their own understanding and growth but also to learn how they could use God's word to minister to others in the future.