Hi Church!
My name is Eva and I serve in one of the local outreach ministries called the Bridge. Bridge is for people who are Bilingual Chinese speakers to share God’s Word through live interpretation or document translation to support other ministries to serve our neighbor.
To be honest, doing translation is not like other ministries when you see what God is doing in people all the time. It’s not like “wow, I translated this song from English to Chinese, when people see the lyrics, they are going to be so filled and so touched by the Holy Spirit!” A lot of work that we do are not necessary super exciting. Sometimes we don’t even need to go anywhere but sitting in front of the computer and translate lyrics or sermon messages, or interpreting during sharing time or church service for different Christian organizations.
Although my initial thought about the Bridge is not something that is very powerful or influential, but when I actually spend time to think about how the Bridge is being used by God, I realized that this is a very special ministry… You may think that there are tons of local churches that do evangelism, so why do we (as an international church) have to go, and have a translator to translate our messages? Wouldn’t it be more effective if we just let the local churches reach out to the local people?
When I see our SP family go out for an outreach, it is very special. When we minister to others, we have a unique “SP style”. For example, when we go translate for the drug rehab ministry, we would gather together “SP style”, lay hands and pray for our brothers, the team is very “SP Style” competitive when we play sports, we bring a lot of food every time we go, etc. This “SP style” way of love and charsima is very powerful to the local community! And as a person who is in the middle being the “bridge”, it is a blessing to see how God is using SP to share God’s love.
Personally, I also experienced the beauty of the body of Christ through one of my experiences. I was being asked to be the interpreter for YWAM this past summer. A missions team from the U.S. was hosting a Children’s English Camp in a village in the New Territories, so I got to be the “bridge” for these American brothers and sisters and the children in the village.
It was such an interesting experience for me, because I have experienced speaking in a foregin country with an interpreter. But this time, the role has changed. The focus was not on me, but on the speaker, and I was simply supporting the speaker to deliver a message so that the children in the village could understand.
This experience reminds me of how we really need to work as a body. Being a translater and interpreter, I might not be like the hand that directly touches people, I might be functioning like an albow. But a hand cannot touch without an elbow connecting the hand from the arm!
Through serving in the Bridge, I see that every role in the church is unique and important. We cannot be a part of what God is doing by ourselves. We need one another.
So if you are a Bilingual Chinese speaker like myself, I encourage you to join the Bridge!
