Stewardship 2025
Dear church family,
It has been an eventful year for us at First Chinese Baptist Church. I am now in my fifth month of serving as your pastor and I am grateful that God brought me to this warm, healthy, and thriving church. My family and I have enjoyed getting to know you, and we love being here with you in Fresno. This is an active congregation with a history of dedicated, sacrificial service. We will continue to feed the poor, comfort the weak, and teach the Scriptures with all of our time, effort, and resources. We continue to work to see the kingdom of God come “in heaven, as on earth” (Mt. 6:10). That is the reason we exist and it is the singular mission we will continue to pursue.
In my short time here so far we have continued our longstanding ministry projects and have explored new directions. The Matthew 25 ministry remains a major part of our charitable work, and new volunteers continue to join us in it. It is difficult to communicate the scale of this all-volunteer ministry. In the month of September alone we collected 1,874 items of food. 809 of these were from the bakery at Save-Mart and 699 from the deli. In both cases, the items are often large enough to constitute a whole meal. If we imagine two items as a meal, then with a minimal amount of volunteer effort and coordination, we were able to provide around thirty meals to the poor every single day through the month of September at almost no cost to the church. With the impending reduction in food assistance to the poor nationwide, we should expect food insecurity to increase dramatically in our city. This means that our ministry will only grow in importance. More and more we will have the opportunity and duty to feed Christ as he wanders our streets (Matthew 25:34-40), and we are more than prepared with stocked kitchens when he knocks at our doors.
We have also continued to explore what international ministry work God has for us. We continue to partner with the Akha Youth Development Center in Thailand. Because the medical system in Thailand has advanced so rapidly and because there are more medical resources at AYDC, we have begun to look at more effective (and cost-effective) directions than sending medical teams. Right now we are exploring establishing an informal seminary program for Akha tribal pastors, who are called by God to lead their churches but possess no formal education. We are hoping to use my teaching background to provide them some of the educational resources they currently lack. We thus hope to be a force multiplier for the Akha church, allowing them to do their own culturally-specific ministry work while assisting them with the kind of resources with which the Western church excels. In so doing, just like in Paul’s collection for the saints of Jerusalem, we provide a tangible witness that there is only one church, faith, and baptism, and that we are all part of the one family of Christians. And we do so, again, at extremely little cost to our church beyond our specified monthly giving project.
Finally, we continue to teach and preach and live the Scriptures every day here in Fresno. We are constantly working to increase and expand our ministry outreach and impact, both in person and online. We have recently added another Sunday School class as well as Sunday evening classes, and we are currently investing in better technology to improve our online presence. The quality of our online services should rise dramatically soon, which will also allow us to advertise and do outreach online.
These are only the first steps in the plans that we are excited to explore in the coming days and years. If you would like to be a part of this mission, seeing the Kingdom of God advance in small and large ways, I would ask you to contribute financially to our work. When he wrote to the church in Philippi, Paul thanked them for their longstanding financial support of his ministry. Paul was grateful for the money, of course, but he insisted that God was his ultimate provider. God would provide what was necessary for the advance of his Kingdom. But if they chose to play a role, the Philippians would be blessed. Paul wrote, “Not that I seek the gift, but I seek the fruit that increases to your credit” (Phil. 4:17). He then called their gift of money “a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God” (4:18).
I believe that God will continue to provide for First Chinese Baptist Church. Even if the cost of electricity continues to rise (and rise, and rise), God will continue to keep our lights on. I am confident of this because we are doing effective work for the Kingdom, and God subsidizes Kingdom work. But God wants to provide for that work through you, the members of FCBC. When you give a gift to God—whether directly to a homeless person or indirectly, through the church—that is “an acceptable sacrifice” to God. When you sacrifice your own time, effort, or money to make life (or life-after-death) better for another person, God treats that as a favor done to him personally. As Proverbs 19:17 says, “Whoever is generous to the poor lends to Yahweh, and he will repay him for the deed.” According to the Scriptures themselves, God will—not might, but will—reward you for your generosity.
If you feel that you are able to invest some of what God has given you into the Kingdom work at this church, I encourage you to pray about your contribution for the coming year. I hope that you would explore your finances, seek God’s direction on how to budget them, and then tell us what you feel comfortable contributing this year. If you are able to predict your ordinary tithes and offerings for the year, that would help us in planning our ministry outreach. Thank you for considering your financial planning for the coming year and thank you for investing in the Kingdom of God alongside us.
Dr. Gerhard Stuebben
First Chinese Baptist Church
菲斯諾市第一華人浸信會
Newsletter for November 2025
The Ministries of the Church
Our new Sunday School schedule began on the first of this month. At 9:30 we have a time for fellowship with coffee, tea, and pastries before most Sunday School classes begin at 10:00. The two ongoing classes will continue and Pastor Gerhard will begin teaching a new Sunday School class on the background of the Bible. If you are new to the Bible, or want to study it more seriously, this class is for you. This change of schedule will also allow us to give the children’s Sunday School their own room, decreasing distractions and increasing safety.
We would like to reestablish a small groups ministry, to further the fellowship and deepen the discipleship at our church. These would meet in homes or in third-spaces, like the church or a café. If you would like to lead a small group, please let us know. These groups can meet any time, as long as we can coordinate schedules through the church office. My wife Kim has also volunteered to coordinate the small groups ministry, if we are able to establish them.
Our next major improvement to the ordinary ministry of the church will be a revitalization of our online presence. We are currently scheduled to meet with a consultant who will guide us to making a cost effective investment in our online video and audio production. We hope that those of you who primarily engage with the church online will have a substantial improvement to the quality of your experience soon.
The Holiday Season
The Christmas season begins this month, with the first week of Advent on November 30th. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus as a human, which set in motion God’s plan for the salvation of the world. On the Christian calendar it is the second holiest day, after Easter. In our society, it is the only religious observance many culturally Christian people participate in. Most churches have a swell of attendance during Christmas, with many attending only that one service in the year. I want to balance these two aspects of Christmas. I hope to make it a time of deep and holy introspection, as well as a time of evangelistic outreach.
My intention with Advent is to lead us theologically and emotionally through the biblical narrative that culminated in Christ’s birth. It took well over a thousand years from God’s liberation of the Israelite slaves to arrive at the birth of Jesus. Because of their own sin, the way was long and painful. But God planned their failure, to highlight his own goodness. They failed to live up to God’s demands, so God was born as a human in order to fulfill his own demands on our behalf. It is this biblical narrative that gives the Christmas season its theological depth. I pray that we would find ourselves in that story over these next two months.
Thailand Mission Update
On the 23rd of this month a small group consisting of myself and three others will leave for Thailand. We will be there for just under two weeks. We will fly back on December 5th and I will be back to preach on the 7th. In that short time we will be exploring what the future of the long-term partnership between FCBC and AYDC will look like. For now, it seems that I will provide some religious education to the Akha tribal pastors. We are looking at establishing some kind of online teaching program for these pastors who have no formal education at all. They only have the calling of God on their lives, and we will provide some of the support for that calling through my teaching.
Finally, as part of my project to aid the Akha pastors I was tasked with creating two documents: an introduction to the background of the Bible is intended to educate the pastors in the information necessary to “rightly divide the Word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15), and a version of the Gospel translated into Akha idiom is intended to guide the Akha pastors’ own presentation of the Gospel to non-believing Akha. Please pray for the success of both our educational and evangelistic ventures.