Cayards work to strengthen local churches in China through a
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or many people living in the Sichuan province of southcentral China, life has been delineated between life before the earthquake and life after. For Hu Xianhui, the quake ripped a physical and spiritual fault line. She was retired at the time, dancing and playing Mahjong to fill her time. When the magnitude 7.9 quake struck on May 12, 2008, killing approximately 70,000 people, she was spared. The brush with death caused her to think about what would happen after she died. “I didn’t know anything about Jesus at that time,” she wrote in her testimony. “I didn’t know what will happen after death. I heard that people will turn back into a chicken or cow. So scary!” After the quake, one of her friends told her about Jesus, and she became a Christian. “I’m not afraid of death anymore,” she wrote. Hu is now a participant in the Mianyang Lay Training Center, located in a small village perched on a riverside hill in the Sichuan province. Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel Bill and Michelle Cayard serve at the center, teaching classes several days a month and offering encouragement to the students. Gifts from Fellowship Baptists help provide tuition and living expenses for students. Like Hu, many of the students are retired and have recently become Christians. Other students are subsistence farmers, who work the terraces and fertile basins, and others are small-business owners.
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Some students come from the city, but most travel up to eight hours from countless small farming communities throughout the province. “This training center is a wonderful example of the Chinese Christians doing their best to provide leadership for the many churches that are growing all over their province,” Bill said. The overall goal of the Cayards’ ministry is to strengthen the local church. They support new churches, facilitate partnerships between CBF and Chinese churches and train church leaders. In their view, for any evangelism or discipleship efforts to be selfsustaining, those efforts must be rooted in the indigenous, local church. “We can think of no higher expression of this goal than helping prepare leaders for local Chinese churches,” Bill said. It’s a particular joy to learn each student’s individual story, he said, and to see them grow in knowledge and confidence. During a nine-month period, between 20 and 30 students attend classes at the center for three months, then go home for three months and later return for a final three-month semester. Students also pitch in to meet basic needs at the center. A chalkboard keeps track of their donations — one student brings a 100-pound bag of rice, another contributes $20. The students work the garden, clean and cook. Area churches also give generously to provide the majority of the center’s funding. Pastors from Mianyang each donate two days a month to teach at the center. The message of Christ is spreading rapidly in China — so quickly that the number
Carla Wynn Davis photo
lay training center
(Opposite) Some students at the center come from the city, but most travel up to eight hours from countless small farming communities throughout the province. (Above) Bill Cayard, right, teaches classes several days a month and offers encouragement to the students.
of new Christians outpaces the number of leaders able to shepherd these new Christ followers. The gospel’s growth in China is relatively recent. Almost all Christians in China didn’t grow up going to church, so there’s a great need for lay people who know the Bible and who can teach Sunday School classes and provide pastoral care. The students at the Mianyang Center are “folks that will never have the opportunity to go to seminary, and so they will never be ordained as Chinese ordained pastors,” Bill said. “But they lead the church, they