Stories
Lessons from a Short Term Mission
Birmingham Gospel Centre

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> Restaurant Ministry

A Chinese man living in France returned to China to get married and took his wife back to France. Although the couple didn't know each other very well they were happy and worked hard at their restaurant. After three years they had two lovely children and the wife took care of them at home. As the wife was no longer at the restaurant, her husband had to spend longer hours at work. And this meant the wife had to take care of the 2 children almost all by herself. As she could not speak French, she did not feel confident enough even to take public transport, she stayed home most of the time. Eventually she became so frustrated and depressed that one evening she locked all the doors and windows of the house and just let the children cry. When the neighbours heard the crying they knocked their door but there was no answer. They called the police and notified the husband at work. When he reached the scene, the door had already been broken down by the police and the children were still crying. The wife was crouched up in the corner of the room with no expression on her face. After medical examination the doctors decided that she had to stay in the mental hospital.

It happened during a busy evening at the restaurant. The wife had noticed that her 7-month old son had a temperature. But there were so many customers that she had no time to take him to the doctor immediately. She took him upstairs and went back to work, thinking that she would be free to take care of him in a short while. But once got back to work she had completely forgotten about him, until it was too late. The son was almost unconscious when she ran upstairs to see him again. He was sent to hospital at once but died four days later. The incident left the couple feeling sad, guilty and too ashamed to face their family and friends. They were very young Christians and questioned why God allowed this tragedy to happen to their son. They stopped going to church and had no further contact with the church members.

Most of the Chinese in Europe work in restaurants or takeaways. From the above 2 tragedies, we can see how difficult are their lives. It is estimated that there are 800,000 Chinese in Europe. Eighty percent of them are in the catering business and most of them are non-Christians. Their lives are simple. many come from the New Territories in Hong Kong. Most of them are not very well-educated and it seems that material gain is their major purpose for living, Christianity is naturally regarded as "totally unpractical" and placed at a low priority. In addition to this, ancestral worship or other forms Chinese religions (such as the popular version of Buddhism) which "promise" some kind of blessings to believers but do not require very much their repentance from sin, have quite significant effect on their lives. If they are to believe in a religion at all, Christianity is probably their 5th or 6th choice. They simply do not know that they are in need of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to bring new meaning into their lives.

Restaurant ministry has always been a main part of our concern and vision. It first began when Pastor Frank Cheung joined the COCM in 1969. By 1992, the Restaurant Ministry Department (RMD) was officially established under the leadership of Frank. Other staff members included Siu-Wah and Nancy Ng, Ho Mei-Chun, and Pang Tai-Ming. Visits were made by the team to takeaways and restaurants. Since then, the Department has worked in almost every major city in the UK including London, Cardiff, Bristol, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Exeter, Poole, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin etc.

The work of the RMD is also involved with discipleship training and literature work. The Gospel Centre in Birmingham has been set up to provide practical services and special classes of interest for the Chinese community with the purpose of witnessing the gospel.

The years of evangelism has brought forth some good results with new conversions. But there are still many unreached people as our workers are so few and there remains a great need for training, encouragement, and equipping of those new believers to carry on the work of evangelism. In view of the need, we tried to organised the Christians in the catering business together to learn to serve the Lord. And this was the beginning of the Chinese Christian Restaurant Evangelism Fellowship (CCREF). The CCREF in England was established in 1993 and in May and October 1995 also in Scotland and Ireland. Since their establishments, the members of the CCREFs have been going to various cities in the UK to do outreach work. They also organised joint functions. In 1996, the first combined CCREFs retreat was held and then it was proposed that special funds be set aside for those committed to participate in short term missions. A CCREF mission team, led by Rev Frank Cheung with 9 fellowship members will begin to work in Luxembourg and Belgium between 8-13 August this year.

Rev Cheung has also the burden of encouraging the Chinese Churches on the Continent to set up similar groups. In May 1996 He and Ng Siu Wah travelled to Belgium and Luxembourg to share the vision of this ministry with the Church leaders. They all acknowledged the urgency of this work. We hope the mission trip this month will also help the promotion of this vision.

There are many other areas of this ministry which we would like to develop but workers are few. We need the Lord to add to the number of our staff workers to do His work.