The second Retention and Reclamation Summit of the Northern Asia-Pacific Division (NSD) was blessed by excellent lecturers, good presenters and wonderful attendees from all over our division, but most of all by God’s grace.
NSD is one of the few most critical divisions in church’s retention rate in the world, according to the report of General Conference ASTR (Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research), which was made public at the first Global Summit on Nurture and Retention that was held in Silver Spring, Washington DC, 2013. However, NSD is the first division that is seriously tackling with this issue by holding division-wide summits in a series. By the presidential initiative of the division, the first Summit was held in Okinawa, 2014, and this time we held the second Summit on Retention and Reclamation of NSD, during March 2 to 5, this year, in Nagasaki, Japan.
In the city of Nagasaki, people are trying to retain the precious memories of irreplaceable historical events like Atomic Bomb or Christian Martyrdom. They are struggling against strong wave of vanishing memories by creating Museums, publishing books, holding programs and etc. But, our issue of retention and reclamation would be only solved by establishing the living image of Christ in our current leaders and members of the church.
The number of the attendees was 64. All three officers and retention coordinator of every union, the president and retention coordinator of every conference/mission, plus the theological chairs of our schools in division were all invited in order to share the issue with each other. Two special lecturers, Dr. Artur Stele, the chair of Committee of Nurture and Retention at GC and director of Bible Research Institute, and Dr. G.T. Ng, GC secretary, were invited to speak to the audience. Besides these excellent speakers for us, we invited 4 other excellent presenters, two Korean pastors, one Taiwanese pastor, and one young lay leader from Hong Kong.
Dr. Stele successfully appealed to the attendees not to make the numerical growth a primary goal, but growth of the word of God must precede anything else. Dr. Ng tried to stimulate the thinking of attendees to change our current system of Theological education, Training intern pastors, administrative evaluation of pastors, and Training of laity to better suit the issue of retention and reclamation.
Our special appreciation goes to Pastor Yoon HoYoung, Pastor Kim KeonSoo, Pastor Feng Sheng Chian, and Mr. Tommy Kwok, all of who showed us excellent reality of improving Retention Rate and all other indexes of evangelistic works. Now all of these pastors gave us the reports of their respective amazing ministries. Those excellent ministries inevitably increased their retention rates. Their reports impressed and encouraged all of attendees. Also, report of Tommy, the only lay person this time, gave us insights on how our young people are facing their problem, and leaving our church. He said, however, young members can train themselves and change themselves to active worker to harvest for the kingdom of God.
I wish to express our deep appreciation to the local pastors in Kyushu district of West Japan Conference, who joined not only for getting benefit from the summit, but also for supporting us to lead our meeting to success. May God bless us all to become faithful servants to the Gospel ministries in the last days.
Article by Teru Fukui, NSD Retention Project Coordinator