Gospel Church of Dujiang County, Jiangxi Province, is dedicated on Dec 15, after the main building construction finished, with the internal decoration to go.
Date of Dedication has been moved up due to the limited gathering area in the county, says the Elder Gong, the person in charge of the said building project. There are two gathering sites in Dujiang County too damaged or too unsafe to use, thus the new Gospel Church is to be the main gathering place for Christmas here.
Located in the center of Dujiang County, the size of Gospel church is 4,000 square meters, including a mail chapel and a complex building, with a seating capacity of 1800. The project started in March 2015.
Elder Gong serves as the president of Jiujiang CCCTSPM, as well as chairperson of Duchang CCC. It’s not easy to build a church, especially for Christianity in Dujiang, which has about 15,000 Christians dispersed in the county. As an agriculture-based county with relatively sluggish economic development, most of the young had migrated elsewhere for work.
Before the project started in 2015, the Gospel Church had struggled 7 years to get the permission of land, as well as many kinds of approving, to build a church. The whole process has cost them 9.6m yuan. But even so, the construction once lay-off due to lack of funds. And this is when Elder Gong took over this project.
As the person in charge, Elder Gong managed an alliance with the local authority. The project was managed to resume.
On the funding part, Elder Gong went to some rich churches in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangzhou to call for supports. With their help, the project finally waned to the close, with the project funds well paid.
Recalling the project to GospelTimes, Gong says that the process taught his heart that “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit (Zec 4.6).”
On the day of dedication, in front of near 1,000 people including pastors in and out of Jiangxi Province with local believers, Elder Gong shared his experience of the church building.
In his opinion, it’s important to build the visible material temple, yet it’s more important to build the invisible church. Nowadays the rural church is so desolate. Besides migrating city for work, the pastoral word falls far behind the need of the church is another key factor. Shepherding failing to keep up with demand, seminary graduates losing, the sheep are so poorly guided by the blind.
Elder Gong adds that it takes many efforts to build the invisible church. An actionable strategy is “surrounding the countryside with the cities,” which means encouraging the knowledgeable and equipped preacher to serve in the countryside and feed the rural church.
The next step, says elder Gong, is to train young preacher, forming a pastor group to carry out the pastoral ministry.
Translated By: Alice Wang
