Editor’s note: The Seventh-day Adventist Church, in order to care for its worldwide mission, has 13 world administrative regions. Three of these regions—the Northern Asia–Pacific Division, the Southern Asia–Pacific Division, and the South Pacific Division—encompass the territories of the Pacific Rim. The editors of Ministry interviewed the leaders of these three regions—Jairyong Lee, Alberto Gulfan, and Barry Oliver, respectively—who addressed a wide range of issues.
Nikolaus Satelmajer (NS): What are some of the exciting opportunities in your division?
Barry Oliver (BO): Our division’s diversity is very exciting. In countries like Australia or New Zealand, we have a lot of Asians who represent distinct people groups. And we are thrilled that, in the major cities, we’ve been planting churches among various groups—people from Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Even among our own indigenous people of Australia, the Aboriginals, we have huge opportunities. We have established a college in Mamarapha in Western Australia that has been graduating people who can go back to their towns and villages and enter the ministry or become leaders, health workers, and teachers. This has been tremendously successful.
Probably the single fastest growing group in the church in Australia is the indigenous people. And that is exciting because that hasn’t always been the case. We established a fairly successful department at the division about twenty years ago when that aspect of the work just about died. But it has gradually grown until today when this ministry is progressing.
At the same time, you can go to some areas in the Solomon Islands where one in seven, one in eight-in some areas everyone-is a Seventh-day Adventist. You’ve got whole areas, political and geographic areas, where the population is Seventh-day Adventist. That has its unique challenges because there the emphasis is on nurture, and if people want to do evangelism, they’ve got to go somewhere else.
Jairyong Lee (JL): In our division we have many mission challenges and opportunities. We see the Lord opening doors wider, giving us tremendous opportunities. For example, Mongolia was under Communism for a number of years. They could not enjoy religious freedom, and we did not have any Adventists there. But somehow, the Lord opened the door in the early 1990s, and now the work has begun to grow.
And then there’s China. But we have tremendous opportunities in China. We now have about four thousand churches and meeting places there and nearly four hundred thousand Seventh-day Adventists. In many places, training centers, clinics, and health centers have been started. In Japan, Taiwan, and other places, we have many mission opportunities.
Alberto Gulfan (AG): We are excited about recently receiving a franchise for our television network in the Philippines. Now we can broadcast nationwide. We are also excited about the work in Myanmar. As a result of the work of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) responding to Typhoon Negress, the government of Myanmar is very much impressed with the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
The other area is the work in the small country of East Timor. East Timor has a population of about one million, and in January 2009, we organized East Timor into an attached mission of the division so that we can officially supervise it.
Willie Hucks (WH): What are some of the challenges you face and how are you addressing them?
AG: Our territory is so diverse. We have two Communist countries in this division. We have the largest country with the largest Muslim population, and we have Buddhist countries, so the challenges we are facing are how to reach out to these different major religions.
As far as Muslims are concerned, in many parts of our division, for example in South Philippines, we don’t have much of a problem because when they hear the word Adventist, they say, “You are our friends.” So we are very well accepted there.
But in the Buddhist countries, we struggle with helping Buddhists understand the need of a Savior. The Buddhist mind-set is so different. They don’t understand sin, so they don’t understand forgiveness. They don’t understand a God who was willing to come and die for their salvation.
The challenge in the postmodern city-state of Singapore is that, with almost four million people, it is highly secular. We have only seven churches, and during the past five years, our membership there has been declining . We have challenged the leadership not to concentrate just on the Singaporeans but on the large Indian and Asian populations as well. We are trying all kinds of methods of outreach, including the health message. We have opened a store in downtown Singapore that sells vegetarian food, and we hope that the people in Singapore, who are very health conscious, will come in, and we can start making contacts with them.
JL: In our division, of course, the great challenge is the huge non-Christian population. We have one-and-a-half billion people in our division, which is about twenty-five percent of the world’s population.
A special challenge is North Korea. There are twenty-two million people in North Korea; and for the last sixty years, we were not able to get into the country with our message. The Adventist message arrived on the Korean peninsula more than one hundred years ago, but since the start of the Korean War, the North and South are under totally different systems. Yet, we are doing our best to approach the North Korean government to open doors for us.
We have a different kind of challenge in other places like Japan, which is a highly secularized postmodern country. Christians comprise less than one percent of the entire population. Thus, planting the gospel in the hearts of the people in Japan is a real challenge.
BO: In our division, we also have a number of different challenges, depending on what part of the division we’re thinking of. In the Pacific, for example, the challenge there is that of providing adequate resources. Our people are wonderful and very generous, but their resources are extremely limited in places. If we had both the human and financial resources, we would be able to do many things that we now find difficult. I know that we’re not solely dependent on resources—either human or financial— because the work is God’s and He will finish it. Having said that, the work still continues to be challenging.
In other areas of our division, we, too, face the challenges of postmodernism, secularism, and post-Christian thinking. If you were to ask many people on the street about God, they would say, “Yes, we believe in God. We even believe in the Christian concept of God.” Research says that at least sixty or seventy percent of people in Australia or New Zealand would say that they have a Christian ethos. But they don’t want to know about the church. They’ve been turned off against organized religion. And it’s a huge challenge for us to not only share Christ but then to integrate people into the family of faith and have them become part of the church.
We’re facing something similar with our own young people. We have a very active youth ministry throughout the division. One of our youth directors is targeting university students, and we’ve established university associations in all of our major universities through the Pacific in which we have young people coming together to support one another, to have social times together, share in Bible conferences together, and provide mentors. We have conferences, youth camps, and training events.
All these things are helping. But we’ve got to continue to rely on the leading of the Holy Spirit to make sure that we are creating the church of tomorrow, not just preserving the church of today, and giving our young people the opportunity to own the church, to see the church in their terms, in terms of the way they are and what their needs are.
JL: We also have the challenge of training workers, especially in China and Mongolia. In China we have about four thousand churches and meeting places, but we have less than one hundred pastors who have received pastoral training. That means that there are thousands of lay leaders who were never trained to become leaders. This is a serious challenge.
Meanwhile, the churches in Mongolia are comparatively young, yet we have close to fifteen hundred church members there now. The problem is, though, that we have only two national pastors. So we need more trained pastors there.
WH: Amid your busy schedules, how do you take or make the time to nourish yourselves spiritually?
BO: If you’re not very careful, administration or ministry can totally absorb you. You have to be intentional; you have to make sure that you take time out. For me, I do a number of things. I like walking. As often as I can, I go walking and I’ll take my Bible with me, or I’ll simply walk and talk to the Lord and replenish my soul that way. Secondly, I have to drive an hour to work every day. On that drive I either talk to the Lord or I have a good supply of tapes and CDs that feed me intellectually as well as spiritually. I also have the Scripture on CD, which I listen to daily.
JL: I believe that leadership is spiritual leadership. The power, energy, knowledge, and wisdom that we need comes from the Lord. I’m consciously trying to take care of this in my everyday life. Of course, we come closer to the Lord in prayer. That is what I’m trying to do as much as possible in the morning when I fi rst get up. My goal is to read the Bible at least two or three times a year. The first time I read it in English, the second time in Korean, the third in Japanese. It is my rule that I conduct an evangelistic meeting at least once a year. That’s the way I renew my commitment to the Lord. That’s the way I keep my spiritual life alive.
AG: I agree with my colleagues. If we are not intentional in our devotional life, it’s going to be a catastrophe. So, I am grateful to the Lord for giving me a very supportive and spiritual wife who reminds me when I grow lax in my devotional life every now and then. I also conduct at least four—sometimes as many as seven—evangelistic meetings a year. The more I prepare for evangelistic meetings, the more time I have to study the Bible and other spiritual material. In the morning and just before bed in the evening, I will open the Bible and read several verses of scripture and meditate and pray, “Lord, what are You trying to tell me from the scripture? What is Your message for me in these texts?” These things strengthen me both personally and in my ministry.
WH: Thank you all so much. May God continue to bless your ministries.
