Dedication Service of the Puli Meng Ai Church (by Alain Haudenschild)

The Meng Ai Puli Church, Nov. 2010

As some of you remember before we moved to Taipei in 2002 our place of service was in Puli. The Church we helped to build had the name "Puli Christian Church", today its name is Puli Meng Ai Church which means as much as Puli Great Love church. The dedication of the nex church building at the special service on June 24th was a testimony of Gods amazing love in an area in midst of the mountains of Taiwan. It is also the area where God after the earthquake in 1999 poured out his spirit of repentance and called many to dedicate their lives to Christ.

Pastor You Bau-ping with his wife

The model of supporting a local minister with the vision and the fire to plant a church in a difficult place to built churches once again proofed to be working. - Pastor You Bau-ping and his wife over those many years of laboring have gone through a lot of trials and yet kept faith and endured the hardships of the struggles this challenge brought along.

The Gospel however was brought to Puli much earlier and has more to do with the history of the Christian Hospital in Puli, with which was built by Norwegian missionaries Bjarne and Alfhild Gislefoss in 1956.

2010 Puli Christian Hosptial:

Left behind trees: the chapel where the Meng ai Church started in the mid 90thies.

It was them who provided the first chapel to meet for Sunday worship and it was them who provided the church of the Aborigine (Defentang) to continue the meetings, when the growing Sunday worshippers grew in numbers.  In the meantime 20 churches in Puli help each other to reach the many still kept in the traditional Chinese Folk Religion mixed with ancestor worship (originating from Confucianism). - The LORD allowed rich Buddhists to build a big temple outside of Puli to remind Christians that there is a spiritual enemy who is most interested to keep people in darkness about the truth of Gods Love. - Pray that this church with its 200 seats soon already is going to be too small to accomodate the many who want to hear the gospel. There is enough place around to expand and the church already purchased the ground to build on it. As SEND we are most thankful, that this church has kept its bond with us and wants in a next stage develop its mission outreach capabilities! - Pray that this church can also dedicate missionaries for missionary service. - Looking back 15 years when the LORD lead us to help this church we had no idea what the Lord will do with our contribution to this church. -Those four years (1997-2001) were some of the most difficult years the church had gone through, not only because of the earthquake, which made it impossible for many days to find our members, it was also a time where the church through certain peoples effort behind the back almost split into three congregations. After all it was definitely worth the special experience to work with a local evangelist couple who needed encouragement and backing to execute what the LORD had put on its heart! - SEND decided to support this. Many more workers for Taiwan are still needed, because there are many such places with similar challenges, but without workers churches don't get successfully planted and rooted!