First Chinese Baptist Church
菲斯諾市第一華人浸信會
Newsletter for October 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.