I’m late for church.

The worship service at Manhattan Chinese Baptist Church begins at 11 a.m., and I am already nine minutes late. Exiting the subway station at 72nd Street and Broadway, I run half a block to the Metropolitan New York Baptist Association and quietly open the double doors, hoping to slip in at the back. To my surprise, the service has not yet begun.

I am the fifth person to arrive on this cold Sunday morning in January, the sixth if you include Andrew Yu, the 77-year-old pastor of the church. The Reverend Yu is standing in the middle of the aisle with his hands clasped behind his back, chatting quietly with one of the church’s few regular worshippers.
Pastor Yu looks up when I arrive. He looks around at the sparse congregation, then nods slowly to himself. Speaking softly in Mandarin, he decides, “I suppose we’ll begin now.”

Manhattan Chinese Baptist Church, which originated in 1977 as a weekly Mandarin fellowship meeting held in the Yus’ apartment, has always struggled with low attendance, although lately the numbers have been especially dire. The reasons behind the church’s losing battle with growth are a combination of trials specific to MCBC as well as tribulations that face many ethnic churches in the United States. The latter type of burden often includes dealing with the instabilities of an immigrant population and building a religious foundation for a culture without a legacy of practicing Christianity. Yoking oneself to the task of helming a small ethnic ministry, then, calls into action a catalog of virtues: patience, perseverance, humility and, chiefly, faith.

“God gave me a message; I must speak it,” Yu says, noting he is not a saint but simply a man unable to deny the call of God. “When I started out, God gave me an affirmation from the Word: the book of Acts, chapter 20, verse 28.” Bearing this mission statement, which reads “Be shepherds of the church of God,” Yu has vigilantly tended his flock in an environment he characterizes as “unstable.”

The term signifies many issues. One is the heterogeneity of backgrounds present even in an ethnically Chinese church; MCBC’s Chinese worshippers have hailed from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore and the United States. “Their customs are all different,” Yu says. “Despite all being Chinese, it’s hard to find ways to unify the church.”

“Unstable” also refers to the church’s high turnover rate. Its Upper West Side location occasionally draws students from nearby schools like Columbia University, but even those who become regular attendees eventually graduate and move away.

MCBC’s high point, quantitatively speaking, occurred in the mid-1980s. The fellowship gatherings that began with door-to-door invitations in the Yus’ apartment building just south of Chinatown had finally outgrown the capacity of the couple’s tiny living room and had relocated to the Upper West Side headquarters of the Metropolitan New York Baptist Association, to which MCBC belongs. The congregation, then known as Mandarin Fellowship Baptist Church, was at an all-time high of 70 when major conflict arose.

The controversy surrounded one ailing woman in the church, whom Yu frequently visited during his hospital rounds. As the woman, who soon passed away, began expressing more and more affection for her pastor, rumors of impropriety between the two soon began to circulate within the church.
It didn’t help that one of Yu’s most vicious critics was his wife.

Yu Haiyan, who has suffered from a hormone secretion imbalance ever since undergoing surgery to remove a cancerous uterine mole in 1960, continues today to insist that her husband committed sin and had an affair. “That’s how the trouble started,” she says. “My heart was so bitter against him; you can see that such a sinful man is unfit to be a pastor.”

Despite Yu’s vehement denials, the church was torn apart. After a fruitless eight-month struggle to find new leadership for the decimated Chinese fellowship, the executive director of the Metropolitan New York Baptist Association approached Yu and asked him if he wanted to start again, and on Easter Sunday, 1986, Yu picked up the pieces and slowly began to rebuild the church.

During a sermon on God’s love and justice one Sunday morning 18 years later, Yu referred to that dark period, saying only, “Someday the lies will be revealed for what they are. I don’t need to write an exposé or anything like that. What God wants us to say, we say. What He doesn’t, we don’t.”

Away from the pulpit, Yu is soft-spoken. But during sermons his voice, carrying the provincial accent of his native Chejiang, takes on the universal cadence of the Baptist preacher, crescendoing to explosive sforzandos and abrupt forte-pianos while his arms strain heavenward, stretching his slight frame in exhortation. He has served God full-time for half a century on two continents, proclaiming the gospel as both a preacher and a prolific author.

Yu Chin-Chuen became a Christian in Shanghai at the age of 22. “Someone pulled me into church,” he chuckles. “Before I became a Christian, I was anxious because I couldn’t find work. The economy was tight… everyone was panicked. I was like a bird in a storm—I didn’t know where to hide.

But the first time I entered a church and heard the words of the Bible, I immediately believed in Jesus.” The major turning point in Yu’s life coincided with a milestone in Chinese history as well—it was 1949, and the country was embroiled in civil war. By the time of Yu’s conversion, the Communists had just gained the upper hand.

Yu joined the mass exodus of Chinese Nationalists to the island of Taiwan, where he put his teaching degree to work as assistant principal of an elementary school while attending evangelistic meetings in his spare time. The school soon offered to promote him to principal, but Yu had been moved by the words in Matthew 9:37—“The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few”—and decided to enroll at Taiwan Baptist Theological Seminary instead.

During his studies, Yu frequently traveled and eventually moved his family to nearby Green Island, where he witnessed to political prisoners who were exiled there. Life on Green Island wasn’t easy, however, and after his two children both fell ill due to the island’s poor hygienic conditions, the family moved back to Taiwan. There, Yu’s clerical career took off. He was invited to be minister of various Baptist churches, as well as editor of the Taipei branch of the Hong Kong Baptist Press, thanks to the strength of his writing experience.

One of his old friends, Wang Dingjun, once calculated the productivity of Yu’s pen: At the rate of one 2,000-word article a week, Yu writes approximately 104,000 words a year, which, over the span of his 50-year career would culminate in a hefty volume of 5.2 million crafted characters. In addition, Yu has authored several Chinese-language devotional books and pamphlets, and even a few collections of poetry.

In a speech commemorating the half-centennial of Yu’s career last October, Wang compared Yu’s work to a 2,000-year-old lotus seed that had been found and replanted in Liaoning province. The seed soon blossomed into a pondful of lotus flowers, Wang said, noting that each person in attendance that day, several of them ministers, was a product of Yu’s faithful work.

The octogenarian Wang, who was baptized in China as a teenager, includes himself among the fruit of Yu’s labors. Having fallen away from God as a result of the turmoils of World War II and the Communist Revolution, Wang’s faith was restored decades later after meeting Yu in New York. “The first time I heard Pastor Yu preach, I was weeping as I listened,” he tells me. “The seed that was sown 40 years ago had germinated again.”

And Yu is the first to marvel at the ways in which the Lord has used him. “God has given me this great opportunity to use words to serve Him,” he says. “I can’t preach to 1,000 people at a time. But one book can be printed in 1,000, even 2,000 copies. One cannot understand how God works. We’re such a small church; what could be worth writing about? And yet God uses our history in miraculous ways.”

The latest blow to Yu’s ministry occurred last spring, when a young Caucasian minister appeared and offered to oversee the church so Yu could finally take a sabbatical. While Yu vacationed alone in Taiwan for three months, the visiting minister convinced about half of the congregation, at that time composed of approximately 40 to 50 people, that Yu was too old and should retire from the pastorate. Unable to defend himself from abroad, Yu returned to find his church leadership once again split.

“That’s [Western] culture,” Yu says of the necessity of retirement. “In Chinese culture, we venerate our elders.”

But the doubt had grown in the minds of many of the church’s attendees, primarily the families with younger children. This time, around twenty people left the church in 2003, although Yu acknowledged that about half of the departures were because of his wife’s poisoning of his reputation, a constant thorn in his flesh.

“Because of her hormone imbalance, she has an unstable emotional state,” Yu explains, rubbing his face tiredly. “When people know that, it’s okay, but when they don’t, it affects my ministry a lot.” Yu calls the situation “a learning experience from God.”

“Actually I’m not bad to her; I let her [criticize me] because she has trouble expressing herself, she’s not well.”

Constantly having to pick up the pieces, Yu has learned to make friends quickly and encourage them to take an active role in the church. The current lineup is a combination of around 15 old faithfuls and new arrivals, who are quickly absorbed into the church family.

When Lisa Wang (no relation to Wang Dingjun) arrived in New York from Beijing
for graduate school several years ago, she experienced the classic feeling of loneliness in a foreign city. “In the United States, you’re always looking for home,” she explained. “First I found God here, then I found church.”

One attraction for her was definitely the familial warmth she found at MCBC, and from Yu, whom Wang called, distraught, when her first dissertation meeting went badly. “You can talk to the pastor directly, and he prays for you, and since the church is small everyone gets closer attention,” said Wang, now a postdoctorate fellow in hematology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Yu is planning to retire in 2005, when his chaplain’s license expires.

In preparation to hand over the pulpit, he invited Elisha Lin, an earnest young preacher who emigrated from Fuzhou four years ago, to start attending services the first week of April. Yu and Lin met just earlier this year, at a city-wide prayer meeting for Chinese evangelical leaders. Yu plans for the younger man to take over ministerial duties gradually, to ensure as smooth a transition period as possible. One thing is clear: even after Yu retires, he intends for the church to continue and sees the trials it has experienced as even more reason to press on.

“We cannot waste God’s investment [in this church],” he says. “The gospel must continue to be spread. We can’t close our doors just because there aren’t a lot of people here.

“The gospel brings hope to the hopeless—that’s what it’s for.”

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