William Chong

Ph: (09)535-7817; Cnr Picton St & Wellington St, Howick; Pastor: Wu Wen-Rui (吳文瑞); Sermon topic: One of life’s crucial questions (Job 1:13-22); 2pm, 18.5.08.

Rating: A
(A=return worshipper, AA=excellent and growing, AAA=must be my home church lol)

You’ll like this church if you: are most comfortable with Mandarin, appreciate a close-knit Chinese community, share close links with the Chinese Christian diaspora.

（這教會最適合如果你：只會聽動中文，喜歡一個密切的台灣社團，偏愛比較平靜和矜持的敬拜。）

You won’t like this church if you: couldn’t understand what I just said in Mandarin, would struggle integrating with a Taiwanese-dominant congregation, prefer a large church crowd.

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And now for something completely different (churchwise) – Kim and I dropped by to visit the Evangelical Formosan Church of NZ. It’s A Taiwanese church which meets in the Howick Baptist Church building in the afternoon. The disclaimer for this write-up is that my Mandarin skills are mostly conversational and my Mandarin vocabulary has deficits in the domain of religious terminology. Nevertheless I could still understand a sizeable amount, albeit with the help of Chinese-English dictionaries and some calculated guesses.

Worship: If you can understand worship music sung in Mandarin, the songs are actually pretty good in terms of content. Songs range in tone and subject matter but are all comfortable. The song leader was fairly encouraging and the 4-piece band adept. Full understanding or not, one can only admire the fact that the church on Earth is able to worship God in different tongues. Lyrical content was respectful, even if I couldn’t understand all of it.

Teaching: Pastor Wen-Rui Wu’s teaching focused on the Christian response to tragedy, citing the recent Sichuan earthquake in particular. I liked how the congregation read the Bible passages from Job 1:13-22 together, and Wu dealt with the delicate matter of suffering appropriately. While this oldest book in the Bible is a bread-and-butter consult in times of trial, Wu offered some extra insight into these well-quoted passages, for example:

• Some people dislike the story of Job because it seems like an impossible reaction to praise God in the face of his immense losses (Jb 1:21)
• Job’s 3 friends were exceedingly helpful with his grief, when they came from far-flung places and mourned with him for a week… but then they started talking.

Wu was also adept in drawing insights from Christian writers such as Paul Tournier, and he stressed that disasters weren’t always judgement for something in a cause-and-effect sort of way. I did notice that his preaching style was more family-uncle than motivational speaker, which seemed to suit the audience to a tee.

Church history: I wasn’t able to get much information on this, but their service programme notes that the EFCNZ have met in some form or another for over 10 years. The Evangelical Formosan Church in itself as a denomination seems to be based in the United States – the term Formosan is a reference to the Taiwanese origins of the church group. The service did include traditional elements such as reciting the Apostles Creed and a doxology, which suggests at least a Protestant lineage.

Other faculties: For a church with around 100 worshippers, there are plenty of ministries catering for different age groups. Bible studies and youth groups meet at 4pm after the service, and there are prayer groups and youth meets during the week. Outreach endeavours include contributions to the Manukau Institute of Technology as well as other Taiwan-related offerings, and the church did suggest making a financial contribution to the relief efforts in the Sichuan earthquake region.

Visitor treatment: Each visitor was greeted immediately at the door, and filled out a visitor’s information slip stating who you were, and which church member invited you to the church. Each visitor was then welcomed in a stand-up and clap approach, which other than being acutely embarrassing was otherwise quite warm and sincere. Great for those who find the anonymity in megachurches frustrating. I also enjoyed catching up with a few church members which knew my family in some way or another – one lady in particular was good friends with my mother when I learnt the violin with her son.

Conclusion: A respectable tight-knit Chinese church community, reaching out to the diaspora of the lost.

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(Disclosures: 2 friends are existing worshippers.)

(This review may not be representative of all of the church’s ministries, or their overall teaching. Opinions expressed in this review are that of the author, and may not wholly reflect all aspects of the church or its national body: nevertheless, comments have been humbly made in both truth and love as much as possible. Please contact the church for more detailed enquiries about their services.)

洪蒼蔚 – (Hong Cang Wei)

The only reason this person’s picture is gratuitously placed on this site is because of his slight resemblance to my dad:

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My Chinese210 lectures will be at a totally different level compared to last semester! My gosh – aside from the first 5 minutes, our lecturer spoke exclusively in Mandarin Chinese. Our handouts are also in Chinese, so I’m sure I’ll end up doing remedial studying to build up my reading, if not writing of all these as yet unknown characters.

Other courses starting off well – 305 and 206 are both reasonably interesting, and we’ll see what happens with the dreaded 304 – Sports Psychology come Friday. Going to breakfast with Aunty Yao tomorrow morning, other than that it’s a pretty cruisy week in.

Take care!