To reach Chinese youth with the gospel, we at the Youth Awakening Movement (青少年唤醒) created the world’s first Chinese language youth ministry website (www.chinayouth.org).
The website was launched last year in November 2020. Since then, we have been amazed and excited to see that it is getting hits from all over the world—from countries as far away as South Africa, Thailand, and Morocco. We are connecting for the first time with Chinese Christians scattered all over the world who need youth ministry resources in Chinese.
Currently there are over 50 million Chinese living abroad.1 In 1980, the Chinese government once again allowed its citizens to go overseas starting a third wave of massive Chinese migration that does not seem to be slowing down any time soon. In the last 20 years, over one million Chinese have migrated to Africa. Recently, in some years there have been over two million Chinese living in Europe and 300,000 in Russia.2 As an ever-increasing number of Chinese families are living overseas, there is also a great need for trained Chinese Christian youth workers and resources in Chinese that they can use to reach the next generation.
We have visited Chinese youth groups in Hungary and Vietnam. Because many of their parents are first generation Christians who did not grow up in Sunday School or youth group, they do not know how to minister to their youth. Also, unlike the vast amount of Christian youth resources available in English or Korean, there are few resources available in Chinese.
With the creation of this website, we hope to fill that void and provide training and resources for Chinese youth workers and parents so they can minister to their next generation. Our dream is that it will lead to the development of a network of Chinese-speaking youth groups around the globe—a network similar to what the Korean diaspora churches have through the organization KOSTA (Korean Students in All Nation).3 Started in 1986 as a Christian conference for Korean college students studying in the US, KOSTA has since expanded to partner with Korean diaspora churches to provide Christian conferences in the Korean language to reach Korean children, youth, and college students around the globe. In 2020 due to covid-19, they held their conferences online for Korean students living in 19 different countries, meeting in 35 cities. We hope to see a similar global network for reaching Chinese-speaking youth.
The next generation of the Chinese diaspora church is a fast-growing mission field. It is going to take an army of those who have a heart for the Chinese youth to come together to reach these millions both in and outside of China.
Endnotes
- “Overseas Chinese,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese.
- “Chinese Diaspora,” Academy for Cultural Diplomacy, https://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/index.php?chinese-diaspora.
- KOSTA, Korean Students All Nations, http://www.mykosta.org/kostahq/webpage.
Images courtesy of YAM.
Director of YAM
The director of Youth Awakening Movement (YAM, 青少年唤醒) and her husband have been serving the youth in Asia for over 20 years. View Full Bio
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