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.)

Website:�http://www.ecc.elim.org.nz;�Ph: (09)534-5142; 159 Botany Rd, Howick, Auckland; Pastor: Luke Brough;�Speaker: David Peters;�Sermon topic:�”The Father’s Love”�part 1,�11am service, 18.5.08.

Rating:�none given
(A=return worshipper,�AA=excellent and growing,�AAA=must be my home church lol)

You’ll like this church if you: enjoy contemporary music in worship, seek a well-tuned, vibrant atmosphere, believe in the continuation of spiritual gifts from the Holy Spirit, love the corporate�fellowship�across multiple�Elim churches on Sundays
You won’t like this church if you: hold beliefs of cessationalism, prefer smaller congregational sizes, question topical and seeker-sensitive sermons, prefer Biblically-thorough messages.

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In all fairness, I didn’t expect to visit Elim (ECC)�so soon – it was about 8th on my list of churches to see. In Christian circles, saying you’re from Elim will draw pretty strong debate. The strongest objectors treat Elim as a dirty word,�dismissing their beliefs on spiritual gifts and their fixation on the Holy Spirit as deceptive, or even demonic; others are genuinely passionate about fully enjoying God’s exciting healing and gifts from the Holy Spirit, and zealously love their church.

The church has also been in the media spotlight after the recent canyoning tragedy that took 7 lives. The fact is though that doctrinal differences aside, they all accepted Christ as their saviour and have a place in heaven. And with all the swirls of right-wrongs cast aside, and from testimony of people who “just don’t know enough”, I decided to see what it was like for myself.

Worship: Due to a misunderstanding on start time, we bundled into a rapidly filling 500-seater auditorium�a few minutes after 10, at which�a 7-piece worship band and a 10-person�chorus coordinated by�worship director Boyd Ratnaraja�was already getting things started and gathering up momentum with a couple of enriching Hillsong numbers. There’s no chance of hearing an organ hymn in here. I found the words�a bit repetitive after repeating the chorus line for the 10th time, but you have to admire their slick sounds and immense enthusiasm for singing God’s praises (complete with synchronised swaying from the chorus group). I did recognise delirious?’s “Majesty“, which was sang with much fervour by the congregation – much oranty hands all around. An old school colleague Amos Ling delivered a beautiful improvisation on Amazing Grace in a refreshing piece.

Speaker: David Peters runs his own prophetic and teaching ministry, and also teaches at the Elim’s Ministry�Training College�alongside a�busy schedule of�preaching at plenty of other�churches.�Other than that he’s a stalwart of the Elim leadership team, and we managed to catch his first message back from a 5-week trip to the UK.

Taking notes on�his 20-minute sermon (part 1 of 2) gave me the following: “We should rest in the Father’s love”, and not have a master-slave view of our relationship with God. Peters spent the rest of the time powerfully expounding on making “the Spirit real” and sharing his experiences of meeting people during his trip that were “digging a well in the supernatural”.�He’s got�the charisma and persuasion of a seasoned preacher, relating well to the audience. His oratory ranges from jokes on GPS navigational errors to thoughts on “not having all the answers”, and I appreciated how he humbled himself so.

Some concerns I did think of at the time were: sweeping�generalisations of revival movements during the 20th century, an almost blas� view of sticking to his notes, and a period at the end where Peters said: “I’m going to pray for the impartation of the Father’s love”. I was a bit wary about this declaration that anyone can “impart” the Father’s love on another – perhaps it’s hard to know what it actually means�when you’re�only given�Bible quotes about the Father’s love (Eph 3:17b-19; Deut 33:12; Col 1:21b-22) that don’t mention any sort of impartation. Nevertheless Peters was faithful to his message and effective in delivering new truths to an appreciative audience.

As a note: their statement of faith is pretty clear on a separate baptism of the Holy Spirit, with associated things like�tongues,�being slain in the spirit, prophecy and visions. These things do “freak people out” who haven’t seen it before, a friend shared.�He�added that�this sort of thing shows up more during more “revival”-focused services, and particularly when special guests such as Steve Foss come and do their thing (“You see like, half the church fall over and everything…”).

Church History: Elim is a Pentecostal church, and proud of it. The “Elim” term comes from the first Elim Pentecostal Church founded in 1915, strongly influenced by the Welsh revival. In 1949 the Pentecostal Church of NZ linked up with the rapidly-growing Elim Church of Great Britain – ECC’s site in East Auckland is the flagship church of a NZ-wide outreach that now extends to 50 churches.�Sunday teaching�is meant to focus�on what they term “practical life-related teaching from the Bible”.

Other faculties: Ads at church? Well yes – announcements of upcoming conferences and groups come in the form of video presentations between worship time and the message. Looking through the Elim information pack reveals a host of ministries and outreach groups, ranging from children, business groups, dynamic youth movements and so on. Elim runs a well-stocked Christian bookstore, and a Ministry Training College. Mid-week Connect groups are what ECC uses to foster closer study and fellowship together.

Visitor treatment: Crunchie bars. Yes, the chocolate favours are back in force, for anyone with special occasions and newcomers to the church. You raise your hand to indicate you’re visiting and you get a glossy info-pack with a monthly newsletter, feedback form and programme details (and the pheromonic treat). You can pick up sermon notes at the door from the hand-shaking greeters, but it’s probably easy to get lost in the crowd after the service.

Conclusion: Refreshing, energised and growing, though vague life-story messages didn’t work as well for me. Bring your Bibles with you to make sure everything checks out.

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(Disclosures: 3 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.)