This paper condenses seventy years of OMF work in Taiwan, looking at innovative ministries driven by a desire to stay true to being a mission that focuses on people who are not being reached with the gospel by moving to new areas, addressing new people segments, and using new approaches.
David Eastwood
I have served with OMF in Taiwan for nearly three decades and the one thing that has been a constant during that time is that there are always changes. Missionaries are used to changes in housing—I have lived in three different cities in Taiwan—and changes in role—I have been a language student, church-based evangelist, team leader, and field director. The Taiwan field, however, has also seen significant changes in ministry focus during that time and with change has come innovation. After I became field director, I began digging into the field archives to try and understand the history of OMF’s ministry here and it seemed to me that Taiwan has been a field that has undergone significant changes in ministry focus throughout the seventy years that the organization has worked here. Each change brought interesting new innovations as the latest generation of missionaries adapted to the new ministry challenges they were facing.
Taiwan OMF: Seventy Years of Innovation to Keep on Doing the Same Thing
Mission Round Table Vol. 16 No. 1 (Jan-Apr 2021): 16-21
The early CIM missionary arrivals to Taiwan in 1952 had fled from China and came to Taiwan by invitation of Mr. and Mrs. James Dickson, veteran missionaries of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, who requested help reaching out to the large number of mainland refugees arriving on the island and secured the relevant visa invitations for the CIM. However, the move of CIM to Taiwan was by no means certain. In the May 1951 edition of China’ s Millions, it was announced: “Formosa. The CIM has no plans for undertaking work in this needy field, but commends to the prayers of God’s people others who are preaching the Gospel on that island as well as the church there.”[1]
At the time this was written, CIM missionary Ruth Nowack was already in Taiwan and Ellen Giebel, who had left China in February of that year, was asking for permission to go to Taiwan with sponsorship from Oriental Crusades.[2] By the time Gordon and Vera Dunn arrived in Taiwan in 1952 to be the first superintendent, both these ladies were teaching at the Kang Hua School for Girls in Tainan, Gordon Aldis had arrived and was living with a Chinese family he had known from the mainland, and Dr. Pauline Hamilton was working with a church in Taichung. Gordon Aldis suggested that the reluctance of the mission to formally send missionaries to Taiwan was because, “we still had a number of missionaries on the mainland and if it became known to the new communist government that we were officially sending CIM-ers to Taiwan it could well make things even more perilous for those still under communist control.”[3] Clearly, while the leadership were carefully considering their options, the pioneering missionaries of CIM were already seeking opportunities to continue the ministries that they had been engaged in on the mainland.
Walter McConnell, in his article in this issue of Mission Round Table, points out that sometimes innovation is necessary, not in order to produce change, but in order to keep some things the same. I found his reference to “traditioned innovation”, which recognizes “that organizations will change over time, but that the changes are anchored in tradition,” helpful in thinking about the history of CIM/OMF in Taiwan, where we can see this has always been the case.[4]
The 1950s—A new land and new methods
On arriving in Taiwan, CIM leadership decided to set up their initial headquarters in Tainan, the old capital that was no longer the seat of government or the place where most other missionaries were focused. Gordon Dunn, commenting on the reason for this choice, wrote:
True to its historic roots CIM’s vision was for the “interior.” The capital, Taipei, was already being chosen as a centre by many other incoming groups. Tainan was viewed as the “interior” that needed evangelists and church upbuilders. Tainan was the tragic scene of mass crucifixions of earlier Christians, and the centre from which revival once broke out and spread rapidly.[5]
Fifty years later, as the Taiwan OMF Field Council considered the direction of the field in 2003, it was decided that God was leading us to focus on reaching out to the working class, who were the biggest unreached segment of Taiwan’s society. It was noted: “There are many needs in Taiwan but the low number of Christians among the working classes combined with the paucity of outreach to this group of people leads us to feel that this is our “INLAND” upon which we as a mission should increasingly be focusing.”[6]
At these two points in time and during the intervening fifty years, the strategy and ministries of OMF in Taiwan changed numerous times. Even so, CIM/OMF missionaries made many significant ministry decisions based on the original concept that our mission was to go to the “inland” of China to reach those who were not being reached for the gospel. This value in OMF Taiwan is perhaps enhanced by the fact that in Taiwan, the Chinese name of the mission has not changed and we are still known as 內地會 (Nei Di Hui)—literally “the inland mission”.
The new arrivals to Taiwan in the 1950s were faced with a challenging situation and a host of opportunities. They came themselves as refugees from the mainland and their familiarity with the culture and language and their common experience meant that they found it easier to minister among the almost two million mainland Chinese who had moved to the island. Though they had come to work with the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church, they quickly discovered that this church, dominated by Taiwanese language and culture, was not the best platform for reaching out to the mainlanders. They soon began to work with mainland Christians who were establishing branches of the denominations to which they had belonged in China. However, there were also new unique opportunities for ministry among their target community.
Outreach to Soldiers
A number of officers in the military were Christians and invited missionaries to come and minister to the young troops who were exiled from their home and families. Dunn comments that “Naturally there were many ex-soldiers in Chiang Kai Shek’s regime now settling in Taiwan. Most had left families behind on the Mainland. Dispirited, discouraged, lonely, and unusually open to the Gospel such a milieu presented a unique challenge to many CIM/OMF missionaries already proficient in Mandarin.”[7]
Literature Work
The Dunns note that CIM had learned “bitter lessons” from the communists in China, feeling that in terms of Christian literature “we had done too little too late.”[8] A small bookshop was established in Tainan and, from it, missionaries loaded up their motorcycles with books to visit isolated churches. This led to the purchase of a small Mitsubishi van, imported from Japan, which was modified to become the bookmobile, the first mobile bookshop to operate in Taiwan for the distribution of Christian literature.
Success greeted every appearance of the bookmobile at night markets, conferences and even local churches. Although it was gratifying to see young people snapping up the books, it was even more satisfying to have the pastors themselves stocking up their libraries with quality research and Bible study material. We knew much of this material would come out in the form of preaching later on, to be used of God in correcting error and building up his people in the truths of scripture.[9]
The Dunns had attended a ten-day Bible school while on furlough and saw how important such training would be for the spiritually hungry Mandarin-speaking churches in south Taiwan, many of which had no pastor. A class was set up and only six nervous students attended, but the next day twelve turned up. As the Dunns reported: Bible schools
One eager man who had been converted after coming as an exile to Taiwan, not only completed the course with credit, but at the end stood on the platform reciting word perfect the entire book of Ephesians from memory – and this in front of a peer audience ready to pounce on the slightest mistake. Immediately on returning home he started a Bible study in his home. By the end of the year it had grown to a church with a crude building put up by their own hands.[10]
The OMF missionaries continued to see this as a key ministry for the next fifteen years. Allen Swanson, a key researcher into the church in Taiwan in the seventies and eighties, in his analysis of later problems in the Taiwan church, shows how this innovation by OMF leadership was so necessary but sadly went against the trend of ministry training in Taiwan. As multiple Bible schools were later started by different denominations, Taiwan experienced a shift from churches where lay leaders played a key role in the running of the church to one in which “many struggling small congregations, hardly able to afford their own Pastor, were granted a subsidised pastor by the parent mission.” This resulted in congregations assuming that all church work was to be done by paid pastors and that the pastors themselves were happy to assume the responsibility. Swanson comments that “Unskilled in lay training programs and often fearful less the laity ‘usurp’ authority, or even worse, preach the ‘wrong doctrine’, the pastors saw their own strong leadership as one sure way to secure a ‘sound church’, whether it continued to grow or not.”[11]
Moving towards the 1970s, Taiwan’s society was going through enormous changes. The Mandarin-speaking churches were better established and the growing population was moving to the rapidly growing cities to work in the large industrial areas. Old methods of doing ministry that had worked well in a more rural setting were becoming less successful. According to Swanson:
Over and over again the cry was heard, “What used to work does not work anymore”. Some churches, however, began to recognize new fields of ministry. The Presbyterians began to study the rising industrial community and the needs of the rural and mountain churches. Student work began to take root with new national leadership offering promising new breakthroughs.[12]
The 1970s and 1980s—Changing society and changing strategies
Again, the OMF missionaries were challenged to shift their emphasis to ensure that their ministry was reaching the unreached. The student work, which was to be so successful in the seventies and beyond, was started by OMF Taiwan pioneers, such as Gordon Aldis and Vera Dunn in Taipei, Pauline Hamilton in Taichung, Dick Webster in Tainan, and Wes Milne in Kaohsiung. They discipled many of those who went on to become key leaders in the Taiwan church. Lily Snyder pioneered a unique ministry to the wives of government officials in Taipei.
Initially, the CIM/OMF missionaries were prevented from ministering to Taiwan’s tribal people as they did not speak Mandarin. However, by the late 1950s some workers—notably Ellen Giebel—were training leaders and teaching in tribal Bible schools. Ellen would go on to serve for forty-one years in Taiwan with the main focus of her work being to minister to Taiwan’s tribal churches. Dick Springer, writing in 1964 about work among the Amis tribe, said: “Besides the help needed in preaching and administration there remains ample opportunities in literacy work, leadership training and much more could be done medically.”[13] In the seventies, a number of other OMF missionaries, including Bryan and Judy Dillon, began work among the tribal people. A survey conducted by OMF in 1971 concludes: “Apart from Mr. & Mrs. Bryan Dillon, there are no foreign missionaries working full time in any of the 98 churches in the three areas surveyed.”[14] Clearly, there was scope for more workers to join this ministry.
The OMF missionaries saw new opportunities for pioneering ministry alongside local workers and were willing to move to new cities or remote parts of Taiwan, such as the East Coast, the far south, or even the Pescadore Islands (between Taiwan and China), in order to meet those needs. The Dunns, writing in 1987, claim that these pioneers were “blazing the trail for a continued flow of Gospel entrepreneurs such as those in Industrial Evangelism today.”[15] Equally, as McConnell reminds us, innovation was also taking place as the workers turned ministries over to local Christians.[16] Student ministry was passed on to trained national leaders with a few missionaries remaining in support roles and new missionaries being trained by nationals. The Christian publishing houses and bookshops were entirely handed over to national leadership. This was in marked contrast to the approach of some denominational mission societies that had brought in and spent large amounts of money on properties and other material resources and found themselves reluctant to relinquish control to the hands of national leaders.
The Dunns’ comment above on the pioneers is helpful. They clearly saw that the flexibility and willingness to try new things is what led to OMF Taiwan’s next major shift in emphasis in the 1970s when OMF became increasingly aware of the mass movement of the population to the cities and the fact that around three-million young people were leaving poor rural homes to live in factory dormitories on the industrial estates. Some workers, such as Pauline Hamilton, switched from working among university students to working among problemed youth from the working class at this time.[17] Centres started to create Christian communities among these young people, many of whom were suffering serious emotional problems due to separation from their extended families.
This work led to the establishment, in 1979, of the Taiwan Industrial Evangelical Fellowship (TIEF—工業福音團契). An OMF book, Maid in Taiwan, written by Barbara North in 1984, led to many new missionaries coming to Taiwan in the 1980s to work among the factory workers of Taiwan.[18] When I arrived in Taiwan in 1992, a number of field members were working closely with TIEF in outreach centers set up in key industrial areas around the island, but again society experienced a rapid change. Many Taiwanese-owned companies shifted production to mainland China to take advantage of cheaper labour costs and fewer regulations, and many of those that remained replaced their Taiwanese workforce with imported labour from Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam. TIEF, as an organisation, showed that it had inherited adaptability from its OMF roots and today their workers focus on reaching cross-culturally to these foreign labourers in the same centers that once focused on reaching Taiwanese.
The 1990s—A time of decline and innovation
Arriving in Taiwan in the early nineties, I had only been in language school a few months when the Taiwan Missionary Quarterly (TMQ) published an article by Ralph Winter, in which he called for missionaries to focus only on pioneering new fields.[19] He asked, “Is Taiwan still a mission field?” and his answer to the question was “no.” He claimed that the work of evangelisation in Taiwan should be given to the national church and that “no one can deny them the privilege of reaching their own people.” It was rather depressing as a new arrival to hear a respected mission scholar saying that I should not be working in Taiwan. The Taiwan missionary community responded to the article with a full edition of TMQ in April 1993 entitled “Is Taiwan Still a Mission Field?” in which various veteran missionaries argued against Winters’s point of view. But Winter was raising an important issue that had always been at the heart of the CIM/OMF vision. Given the growth of the church in Taiwan and that many ministries started by missionaries were now being successfully led by national Christian, was pioneering work still needed in Taiwan? For many mission organisations, the answer to that question seemed to be “no.” During the 1990s, the number of missionaries in Taiwan dropped significantly, and some mission organisations withdrew completely. The number of OMF workers dropped from close to 100 at the start of the decade to around fifty by the close.
While many missionaries were working with existing churches and teaching in Bible colleges, some OMF workers continued to look for new areas of ministry. In Taipei, in 1990, OMFers Debbie Glick and Chris Hartley received permission from the Taiwan Field Council to “begin a shopfront ministry for inner-city dwellers” in the Wanhua district of Taipei, famous for being the red light district of the city, home to some of the most active temples, and a well known centre of gangster activity.[20] This ministry turned into The Spring (活水泉), a ministry to homeless people, which is still operating as an OMF ministry under the local leadership of Rev. Wu Der Li (吳得力牧師). Ministry at the centre of Wanhua made OMF missionaries aware of the needs of the women in Wanhua working in the sex trade and led to a further work started by Tera van Twillert in 2005 known as the Pearl Family Garden (珍珠家園) that focused on these marginalised women.[21] In both cases, this was clearly a new initiative for the OMF missionaries even though ministry to homeless and prostitutes had been carried out in other countries. It took faith and vision for the field council at the time to grant permission for these pioneering lady missionaries to start such work in an area where many Taiwanese Christians were reluctant even to visit, and courage on behalf of those who took risks to show God’s love to people whom society had cast aside.
Another missionary, Ina Van der Schyff—a nurse from South Africa—was concerned that there was a growing number of people contracting HIV in Taiwan, but that the Taiwan Government was not reporting many cases and little help was given to those with the disease. In 1992, she and some Taiwanese Christians began to visit AIDS patients in hospitals and realised that many had been abandoned by their families and, in other cases, the families did not know how to care for them. This led to the establishment of the Garden of Mercy Foundation (愛慈教育基⾦會) and, in September 2000, a hospice known as “The Home of Mercy” (恩典之家) where medical professionals and social workers could provide care for AIDS patients, support for their family, and train nurses and other professionals in working with HIV patients. Though OMF no longer has direct involvement with this organisation, it is an example of where, once again, OMF missionaries responded to a change in society that produced an obvious unreached group of people in need of the gospel.
Also in the 1990s, German missionary Elisabeth Weinmann began a church for shop workers and restaurant workers. However, she soon found contacts needing a place to live, a fact that led to OMF renting apartments to use as affordable dormitories where care could be given to some of these workers. Later, the ministry started a shop and restaurant to provide jobs for single mothers. The church today has multiple congregations, some meeting at 10:30 p.m. on Sunday night, as that is when many of the congregation finish work. Small groups meet at McDonalds and KFC near to the workplace. Elisabeth plans to officially retire in 2021 and the work will be led by Rev. Ker Kai Yuan (柯凱元牧師), who was converted through this ministry. The ministry continues to be innovative, recently starting two small groups for workers and students from Myanmar that are living in Taipei.
The past twenty years—If at first you don’t succeed!
By the time the Taiwan field officially decided to focus attention on the working class and marginalised in 2003, many field members were already engaged in this type of ministry. Perhaps the most difficult innovation for some older field members to accept was the willingness of the field council to allow members to begin church planting ministries without being linked to any particular existing denomination. Up to this point, on the field, it had practically been a point of principle that we were in Taiwan to work with or under local Christian leadership. Martin Symonds, writing in the April 1993 edition of TMQ mentioned above, made a very strong case against missionary-led churches, saying:
The greatest drawback with missionaries starting their own church in Taiwan today is the needless perpetuation of the Westernness of the church. When we run our own show, it is we who make the rules and it is up to others to fit them. A Taiwanese who steps into the church we are planting has the uncomfortable feeling that he is leaving Taiwan and entering a different and unfamiliar world.[22]
So, was this innovation ten years later a positive change or a step backwards prompted by a desire to be in control? The answer to that question is probably “yes”!
OMF workers had seen very clearly how—even for Taiwanese middle-class Christians—reaching the working class of Taiwan was a cross-cultural challenge, and one that required new approaches to evangelism, discipleship, and church structure. So often, attempts to plant new churches in working-class areas floundered because the mother churches attempted to replicate their church model and culture in an area where the local people were very different from those of the mother church. Freed from following the approaches set out by existing denominations, the last eighteen years have seen a variety of innovations by Taiwan field missionaries. A host of approaches have been developed and used by OMF church-planting teams over the years, including gospel materials designed for use with working class,[23] Christian karaoke, Bible storying,[24] tea drinking evangelism, use of an “office” instead of a church building, ministry in local parks, after school classes, cycling and evangelism, puppets, barbecues, birthday parties for Jesus, co-operation with local schools, stalls in local night markets, mini concerts, classes on parenting, classes on dealing with depression, ministry to (and by) disabled people,[25] crafts, games nights, art and music therapy, and many others. Some of these have even been successful. A lot, however, have not seen many results but have helped us, as a field, to begin to understand some of the unique cultural challenges of reaching out to the working class and marginalised.
Thomas McIntyre, for example, describes how in his experience of planting a church among the working class of Sanhe district in Chiayi, some of the missionary assumptions about the model of church planting that would work best for the working class were, in fact, rejected by the people they were trying to reach. As he says: “We began our work thinking we would have a house church. But we quickly realized that Taiwanese people did not see this as a legitimate model, so much so that it was a stumbling block for them. ‘Where’s your church? What? You meet in a house? Are you a cult?’ some would ask.”[26]
In the same article, he describes the partnership that developed between the team of missionaries and the Chiayi Baptist Church and how much he learned from local Christians who came to help with outreach and Bible teaching due to their fluency in the language and cultural understanding. He notes that “Years later, we realized that not only had they been helping us, but we had helped them by modeling relational and creative evangelism. One Baptist worker even shared a testimony during his church’s worship service of how the OMF missionaries had impacted his desire to reach out to his own people. The partnership had become mutually beneficial.”[27]
It is important to realise that the changes in the early 2000s were driven by the desire of OMF workers to reach out effectively to those who were not being reached by existing methods rather than any desire to cease co-operating with the national church. Martin Symonds’s warning against foreign missionaries going it alone was recognised very quickly as being apt by many of our teams who saw how much more effective our ministry could be when working with Taiwanese co-workers. This prompted us to take every opportunity to share our vision for the working class and seek to mobilise Taiwanese for this ministry. Key initiatives included working with the Lutheran seminary to teach extension classes on “reaching the working class,” which have involved around twenty field members and Wu Der Li and Ker Kai Yuan mentioned above. In addition, a fund was set up to sponsor seminary students to be placed alongside OMF ministries for work experience so that they will understand the cross-cultural challenges of reaching out to the working class. With a growing awareness in Taiwan churches of the needs of this unreached segment of the population, it is hoped that the next few years could see new approaches to ministry that represent a greater co-operation between OMF and local workers.
In this very quick review of the work of CIM/OMF in Taiwan, we have seen that, driven by a desire to stay true to the perception of OMF as a mission that focuses on people who are not being reached with the gospel, field missionaries have had to constantly innovate by moving to new areas, addressing new people segments, and using new approaches in almost every decade. The desire of the missionaries themselves to be strategic and innovative was supported by the field leadership. It is worth considering how OMF leadership structures contributed to this process.
In the 1950s and 1960s, as the new fields outside of China were established, there was much competition for new workers between the fields. The placement of new joiners was decided by leadership in Singapore and candidates arrived for the long orientation course often without knowing which country they would be sent to. It is difficult to imagine such a situation today, but a higher level of institutional trust and a strong sense of being called to CIM/OMF as a mission meant that the leadership was entrusted with making important placement decisions. Correspondence between field leaders and Singapore often included specific requests for new missionaries to fulfil a particular need. It fell to the field council and field superintendent in Taiwan to argue the case for assigning new workers to the Taiwan field. It was much easier to make the case if the new worker was strategic in allowing the field to move into new areas or work among a new people and so the field leadership was generally supportive of new initiatives.
Moving into the 1970s to 1990s, increasingly people were joining the mission with a burden for particular fields. This often depended on them having heard about the work through books, articles, and presentations. Field leadership knew that new and innovative approaches that were seen as focused on reaching the least reached would be more likely to be promoted by the home sides and catch the attention of potential candidates. Again, the desire for new workers was also likely to make the field council more supportive of new initiatives. In the later 1990s though, the opening up of new fields and a perceived lack of strategic focus of the Taiwan field meant that there was a dearth of new workers to Taiwan and the field numbers dropped significantly.
For the last twenty years, OMF fields have played a much more active role in their own mobilisation. Video and social media produced by fields instantly declare the strategic focus of the field and make prayer supporters aware of innovative approaches. This sometimes happens even before the field leader hears about them! Candidates joining OMF not only want to find out about mentoring, training, language learning, and educational options, they also want to know that they are joining a mission that is doing significant and strategic ministry and is open to innovation. For the Taiwan field leadership, it is seen as a positive step when a field member approaches us to ask about trying something new and it is tempting to immediately think about the Facebook post and video on Vimeo that might result. There is, however, a strong awareness of the need to stay focused as a field and that is why McConnell’s warning that we should not “advocate, much less legislate, unbridled innovation” is important.[28] Innovation needs to be focused on helping us as an organisation to fulfill the calling that God has given us, not simply to make us feel we are more at the “cutting edge” or to provide reasons to make more attractive mobilisation material.
Finally, as I consider the culture needed for the Taiwan field to continue to allow our missionaries the freedom to innovate, I feel that one of the values we have adopted as a field is important. In 2012, the field council adopted a set of values which includes the following:[29]
Boldness
Successful Christian ministry is characterized by a boldness from God (1 Thess 2:2, Phil 1:27–28). Like Timothy, we are called to avoid a ‘spirit of timidity’ (2 Tim 1:6–12). Boldness in Christian ministry is matched with personal humility as it is based upon: the power of God at work in us, not our own ability; the love of Christ which drives us, shunning pride and boasting (1 Cor13:14); and self-discipline, avoiding being driven by our emotions and desires, but instead focusing on the vision and mission to which Christ has called us. Our boldness will be characterized by 1. a willingness to pioneer new ministries, seeking to reach the hard places of Taiwan. 2. a willingness to be creative in ministry, trying new and untried methods. Personal humility means we give ourselves and others permission to fail, knowing that God teaches us through success and failure and that ultimately it is God who will grow His church (1 Cor 3:6). 3. a willingness to release control of ministries to others, including Taiwanese working-class believers, knowing that they too have the Spirit of God (1 John 2:20).
The important point is the interplay between boldness and humility. When we reject a culture of pride and success and accept that our results are in God’s hands, it takes away the fear of failure that is so often a barrier to innovation. As field leadership, we encourage our workers to try new approaches and ministries even if we are not certain of their success. We use the wisdom and experience God has given us to help members make right decisions, but we also encourage them to realise that some of that wisdom and experience have come through things we tried that didn’t succeed. I often remind our field members that even if something does not work out perfectly, they will learn and grow, the gospel will be shared, and perhaps God will do something new that we have not yet thought of.
It is impossible to know the exact changes that may occur in Taiwan’s society over the next decade, but it is inevitable that if God keeps us working in Taiwan, innovation will be needed to ensure that OMF missionaries continue to focus on reaching whatever the equivalent of the “inland” is to which God called us as a mission in 1865.
[1] “The New Outreach,” China’s Millions, North American ed. (May 1951): 66.
[2] Letter from Ellen Giebel (in Taiwan), 12 August 1987, OMF Taiwan Field Archives. Oriental Crusades later changed its name to Overseas Crusades, OC International, and is now known as One Challenge.
[3] Letter from Gordon Aldis to Andrew Butler in Taiwan, 10 August 1987, OMF Taiwan Field Archives.
[4] See Walter McConnell’s article “Christian Mission and Innovation: The Experience of CIM/OMF in History, the Present, and the Future” in this issue of Mission Round Table, 5.
[5] Gordon and Vera Dunn, “How OMF Began Work in Taiwan,” September 1987, unpublished paper, 2, OMF Taiwan Field Archives. The crucifixion of Christians that he mentions occurred in 1662 at the end of the Dutch occupation of Taiwan. The rapid growth may be referring to the growth of the church following the initial ministry of Dr. James Maxwell, the first modern Protestant missionary to Taiwan who arrived in 1865.
[6] OMF Taiwan Field Council notes, 9–10 January 2003, OMF Taiwan Field Archives. The writer was present at these meetings.
[7]Gordon and Vera Dunn, “How OMF Began Work in Taiwan,” 1.
[8] Gordon and Vera Dunn, “How OMF Began Work in Taiwan,” 2.
[9] Gordon and Vera Dunn, “How OMF Began Work in Taiwan,” 3.
[10] Gordon and Vera Dunn, “How OMF Began Work in Taiwan,” 3.
[11] Allen J. Swanson, The Church in Taiwan, Profile 1980: A Review of the Past, a Projection for the Future (Pasadena: William Carey, 1981), 28.
[12] Swanson, The Church in Taiwan, 27.
[13] Memo from C. O. (Dick) Springer to E. E. Heimbach on tribal work in Taiwan, 30 September 1964, OMF Taiwan Field Archives.
[14] Bryan Dillon, “Evangelistic Opportunities Among the Tribes of Southern Taiwan – Survey 1971,” OMF Taiwan Field Archives.
[15] Gordon and Vera Dunn, “How OMF Began Work in Taiwan,” 4.
[16]McConnell, “Christian Mission and Innovation,” 6.
[17] Some of this material regarding the 1970s to 1990s was previously prepared by the writer for a paper entitled “Social Care Practice from INGO in Taiwan—Case of OMF International (China Inland Mission)” for an international conference on social work at Asia University, Taiwan, 21 November 2019.
[18] Barbara North, Maid in Taiwan (Singapore: OMF, 1984).
[19] Ralph Winter, “The Mysterious Tension in Missions Today,” Taiwan Mission Quarterly 2, no. 2(October 1992): 32–3. Adapted from an article originally published in Mission Frontiers (January-February 1992), http://www.missionfrontiers.org/issue/archive/the-incredible-meaning-of-the-ad2000-movement (accessed 22 April 2021).
[20] OMF Taiwan Field Council Minutes, August 1990, OMF Taiwan Field Archives.
[21] See Tera van Twillert, “Our Journey in the Gospel with Women Working in the Wan-Hwa District,” Mission Round Table 5, no. 1 (June 2009): 25–27, https://omf.org/mrt-our-journey-in-the-gospel-with-women-working-in-the-wan-hwa-district/ (accessed 22 April 2021).
[22] Martin Symonds, “Over and Out?” Taiwan Mission Quarterly 2, no. 4 (April 1993): 16–18.
[23] See David Eastwood, “Mini-Bibles,” Mission Round Table 11, no. 1 (January 2016): 28–29, https://omf.org/mini-bibles/ (accessed 12 April 2021).
[24] See Christine Dillon, “A Journey Worth Taking,” Mission Round Table 11, no. 1 (January 2016): 22–27, https://omf.org/a-journey-worth-taking/ (accessed 12 April 2021).
[25] See Yea-Hui Wang, “Viewing Disability from the Perspectives of Chinese Culture and Christian Beliefs,” Mission Round Table 15, no. 2 (May-August 2020): 13–16; David Eastwood, “Interview with Yea-Hui Wang,” Mission Round Table 15, no. 2 (May-August 2020): 17–19, https://omf.org/resource/mrt-may-2020-ministry-to-with-and-by-people-with-disabilities/ (accessed 12 April 2021).
[26] Thomas McIntyre, “Let the Nations be Partners! Pioneering and Partnering in the Plan of God,” Mission Round Table 13, no. 3 (September-December 2018): 27, https://omf.org/let-the-nations-be-partners-pioneering-and-partnering-in-the-plan-of-god/ (accessed 12 April 2021).
[27] McIntyre, “Let the Nations be Partners!” 26.
[28] McConnell, “Christian Mission and Innovation,” 9.
[29] OMF Taiwan Field Vision, Mission and Values, 2012. Emphasis original.
