Completed my assignment at 13th district church

For the past two days, I`ve been helping Pastor Ho with the church library. The background of the church is that it is located in Chinatown. Every week they receive around 80 to 110 people for their service. Languages spoken by those who attend are Mandarin and Cantonese. I learned that the challenges facing the Paris Chinese churches are the cultural differences: Although we all speak the same language, some of the chinese come from Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, China and Hong Kong. Also, there is a lack of `brothers and sisters willing to step up` within the church so the Pastor ends up doing EVERYTHING. In Pastor Ho`s case, the church library has been neglected in that the books are not in order and new books have not been properly labelled and placed onto the shelves. No one manages the church library. Finally, there are a lack of pastors for the Chinese churches. Apparently there are a lot of churches without pastors so the pastors end up preparing multiple sermons and travelling to different services. They seriously lack mandarin speaking pastors. So what you have are cantonese speaking pastors trying to preach in mandarin.

For the past two days, I would show up at the 13ieme arrondisments and rearrange the books or label the books for a few hours and then I had the rest of the day to do sightseeing. Another interesting thing is that I found out that Pastor Ho used to be a restaurant worker and then he saw the need for a Pastor and so he decided to study to become a pastor. He has now been a pastor for 5 years.

Tomorrow, I am off to helping Pastor Nguyen at St Maur church for Thursday and Friday.

I don`t want to return to normal life.