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Greetings to you all, W family!

May you experience our Lord’s presence each day and know how deeply you are loved by Him. Last week I shared with you the reasoning behind upcoming changes that we are planning. Today I want to give a preview of the changes we will be implementing this fall.

But first a quick review of our objectives in making these changes:

• To adapt ministry direction to restore the home as the primary place for disciple-making.
• To build up small groups accountability and to empower groups to worship together and connect more deeply.
• To prioritize the needs of our children and youth ministry.

We said these objectives are aimed for the challenges we have always faced before but now further exposed by the pandemic. We want to overcome passivity, disconnect, and win the struggle for the soul of our next generation. For these reasons here are the first set of changes we are making for our fall ministry starting September.

First of all, we are going to move the Meta service Youtube premiere time from 11:15AM to 9:30 AM to align all 3 services’ starting times, and limit all three service lengths to 60 minutes. With that we are also moving starting time for the K to 5th children’s online Sunday School and our youth D-Group to start at 11AM.

This change is a part of the overall plan to strengthen our support for our children and youth ministry. Since we want to help equip and support families to make their home the primary place for their children discipleship, we want to encourage all our young parents, both Moms and Dads to get involved in their children’s Sunday School. We believe this will not only help with the volunteer needs in our children’s ministry, but also help more parents to prioritize and engage in the spiritual formation of their children. This change also gives a boost to our youth D-Groups so the youth will attend Meta service first and then attend the more interactive D-group.

Secondly, we are going to encourage all adults’ small groups to view the worship together via zoom or in some other manner instead of watching individually. We want to see small groups to have a 15 minutes (9:15-9:30) of meet and greet time before the service, and to hold an extra 15 minutes of post-service sharing time (10:30-10:45) for people to share their takeaways and catch up, just as people used to hang out after the service. We believe that watching and participating in worship together with small groups will help to restore a degree of community to the online worship experience, to bring a level of accountability so we can watch out for each other and not become too lax on Sunday morning. If you don’t see someone from your group you can text and check up on each other, which is what accountable spiritual community supposed to do.

A number of our groups are already trying this and reporting that it is better than watching worship at home alone. Another advantage of this change is that it helps us to rebuild our follow up mechanism as we can invite unchurched friends to our worship watch groups, instead of just telling them to watch by themselves. More details will be forthcoming on the implementation and technical support for this arrangement.

Third, we are beginning a gradual process of moving some adults Sunday School classes away from Sunday morning, even to other days of the week to take advantage of the flexibility of online learning. These changes will be tailor-made on a case-by-case basis depending on needs. For now, this will mean Meta Pathway class moving to Sunday at 11AM and starting a new pre-recorded online class that people can take at any time. Two of our Mandarin adults classes in the fall would be on Tuesday night and Saturday. The Cantonese classes would not be affected for now. The main purpose here is again trying to free up Sunday morning for young families to engage in their children’s spiritual formation, while opening up new possibilities in finding more optimal schedule for our adults’ equipping. We hope in time this would also begin a process of restoring more sabbath rest for our people.

Finally, we will be launching a new youth family service on the 4th Sunday afternoon of each month. This service would be led by our youth minister Kai Chen and his team, and it is designed especially for our youth and their parents to help build up youth families. This service will allow for a more creative, interactive, family-friendly experience, including youth breakout groups and parents’ breakout groups to experience life-on-life interactions as part of the new worship.

I know some of you are excited about these changes. I also know the changes may feel inconvenient to some of us, while still others may feel the changes do not go far enough or fast enough! I want to ask for your understanding, support and prayers. We often say that W is a like a big spiritual family, and individual family members thoughtfully support each other for the greater good of the family. W is a big family with wide age groups and diverse needs. Over the years I have never cease to be amazes by the way people sacrifice for their families, especially for their next generation. Many of our people immigrated to this country not for themselves but for their children, my own family included. I believe this is such a time when we all learn to flex and grow together as we adapt to ministry in the new normal.

These changes represent just the first steps we are taking to leverage our current condition to build up our people, especially for our next generation.

Even though we are not ready for Sunday reopening, we will continue to take active steps towards in person gatherings. A number of our groups are now experimenting with outdoor gatherings. We will be releasing guidelines to help small groups to have outdoor in person gatherings or covenanted bubbles for people to gather as safely as possible. We all miss each other, and we look forward to re-establishing in person fellowship responsibly.

Romans 8:28 says that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose (NLT). I believe that includes this pandemic. I believe God is using this time to reshape our church according to His purpose. Imagine how we can learn to overcome the isolation by becoming more connected and accountable than ever before. imagine our parents becoming more engaged in their children’s spiritual formation and truly accept their call to make the home the primary place for discipleship. Imagine our youth and family grow deeper together by worshipping together, and all of us come out of the pandemic as stronger followers of Jesus and a church more ready than ever before to transforming and reconciling generations for His glory! I thank God for you and I miss you all. I urge you to pray for our church as God works out His purpose for us and in us. God’s peace be with you.

Your brother in Christ,

David Hsu
Senior Pastor
West Houston Chinese Church

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