A team of Asian women is taking God's love to illegal Chinese immigrants in one of New York City's toughest areas. They evangelize day and night in the streets and back alleys, plugging away 75 hours a week for meager wages.
Vicky Liew, 37, who works with evangelist Bill Wilson's Metro Ministries organization in Brooklyn, encounters spiritual darkness daily in this underground community. When she first arrived in New York City from Malaysia in 1999, she cried when she saw the needs of Chinese immigrants.
"I felt like it's so hopeless because they don't know God," Liew told "Charisma" magazine in the December issue, out now. "They are slaves, and they don't know how to come out."
Thousands of illegal immigrants from China toil long hours at off-the-books jobs in sweatshops and restaurants. Many are literal captives trying to work off an impossible $50,000 to $60,000 debt to a loose band of smugglers known as the Snake Heads.
They fear deportation by U.S. immigration agents and worry about relatives left in China. In the United States, they live like animals. Several families squeeze into tiny apartments in shabby tenements with outside public toilets. Gambling is endemic, and women are forced into prostitution.
New York City has the largest Chinatown in the United States, with an estimated population in excess of 100,000, excluding undocumented illegal aliens. Counting the illegals could easily double that number.
Liew pilots Metro Ministries' Chinatown division with a team of young women from Taiwan -- Kitty Chuang, Maggie Haung and Barbara Lin. Other staffers and interns from Wilson's Sunday school ministry aid them.
The Sunday schools attract 900 to 1,000 children weekly. Parents or other adults might also attend and watch from the sidelines. An estimated 2,000 conversions to Christ result annually. Ministry workers follow up on converts and help them become part of local churches.
Prayer and home visitation are vital legs of the Chinatown ministry. "We spend a lot of time prayer walking in different areas," Chuang says. "We just go to a park and walk and with faith we pray and proclaim this is our land, just like Joshua. The heart of the people is much softer now."
The young women visit homes to share the gospel, pray for needs and distribute boxes of food. Sometimes it's long after dark when they do because they try to reach parents who work late.
They must overcome traditional Chinese beliefs such as Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. "Every single family we are working with, there is an idol in their house," Chuang says. "They are all idol worshipers."
The Chinese immigrants also worship their ancestors. Becoming a Christian means cutting off family roots, a painful step that assures persecution. "When your parents die you are not going to worship them [if you are a Christian]. But that is the biggest sin of a Chinese," Chuang says.
She overcomes objections by persuading parents that their children will love them much more if they become Christians. To explain the doctrine of salvation, she compares Christ's shedding His blood on the cross with the Chinese practice of sacrificing chickens and dogs.
The full article on Metro Ministries' Chinatown division can be found in the December 2003 issue of "Charisma" magazine.
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