Church Planting

Since we believe that the primary locus for the fulfillment of the Great Commission is the local church, we have focused the majority of our attention on planting fundamental Baptist churches. But conditions are very different in Taiwan than on many other fields around the world. Our experience in Taiwan has led us to expect that planting a church from scratch, building the congregation, organizing them according to the Biblical pattern, and leading them to self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating status requires about 10 to 15 years to complete. A missionary in Taiwan can only hope to plant a few churches during his career at this rate.

We are about 7 years into this process at Cornerstone Baptist Church. We started in 2002 in a rented store-front with only our family attending. Now we are running about 80-90 individuals during our Sunday worship services and have a new, roomier facility. We also hold an English language fellowship service on Sunday evenings for the international community.

The burden of our ministry at present is to teach our people Biblical Truth so that they can develop a firm doctrinal foundation for life and ministry. We desire for them to understand from the Bible—and to hold from the heart—firm convictions about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Church, Man, Sin, Salvation, Sanctification, etc., so that they can truly perpetuate our fundamental Baptist heritage in a form that is faithful to Scripture and appropriate to Chinese culture. Such churches are so rare in Taiwan at present that they can almost be said to be non-existent. This leads us to ask, “And who is sufficient for these things?” Paul answers this question: “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament” (2 Cor. 2:16; 3:5-6).