Mark Dawes, Religion Editor

Paula Wong of Paula Wong Harvest Ministries addresses pastors and business persons during a seminar sponsored by her ministry last Thursday at the Shang Hai Restaurant, Liguanea, St. Andrew. - Contributed photos

A new parachurch organisation, Paula Wong Harvest Ministries, was officially launched last Thursday. It has as its aim helping Christians and churches to better position themselves to effect individual and community transformation through effective and authentic discipleship.

The new ministry is founded and directed by Paula Wong, an accredited/ordained minister of Swallowfield Chapel in Kingston.

The launch took the form of a two-day training seminar. The first event in the launch was held at the Shang Hai Restaurant, Liguanea, where about 110 persons, mostly pastors and business persons, heard Robert Levy, chief executive officer of the Jamaica Broilers Group, and the Rev Dr Stephen Jennings, president of the Jamaica Baptist Union, and Wong speak.

Wong holds a master's degree in intercultural studies from the California-based Fuller Theological Seminary. Her ministry experience includes preaching, planning and implementing conferences and teaching seminars in various local and overseas churches, team-leading, training, cross-cultural evangelism, caring-ministry services, individual counselling and consultations.

She and her husband Calvin are successful business persons. But, for the last 10 years, she has been absent from the day-to-day operations of her business to devote herself to full-time Christian ministry.

Cross-cultural evangelism

Paula Wong

In local church circles, she is perhaps best known for her work in promoting cross-cultural evangelism. She was director of mission at Swallowfield Chapel and executive director of the Networking Equipping and Sending Team (NEST) - an interdenominational organisation that promotes cross-cultural evangelism. She has gone on short-term missions trips to Tanzania, South Africa, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Cuba.

Noting the nation's rising levels of murder, ever-increasing levels of births outside of marriage and dysfunctional family life, Wong is of the view that churches are not strategic enough in their witness to the communities in which they are located. Accordingly, her ministry offers various diagnostic tools to assess effectiveness in ministry to community and also for the effective discipleship of Christians. In addition to diagnostic tools, her ministry offers 'a tailor-made tool kit' for the churches that engage her services.

Paula Wong Harvest Ministries, she said, has a network of trainers drawn from the Christian community. They will work with her to offer various services to churches.

At the launch, she told participants that the Church needs to embrace strategic prayer. In so doing, she explained, Christians, on reading about violence in the newspaper, will pray for all parties affected - the victim, the victim's family, the perpetrator and the perpetrator's family. She asked: "How many of you know the names of the dons in your area so that you can pray for them?"

Radical community transformation is possible, even in the short-term, she said, while describing historical precedents in India and Sheffield in England. In those communities, she said, the Christians took discipleship seriously and strategically prayed. They also strategically served their respective communities - and change came virtually overnight.

Churches, she lamented, are too driven by its programmes. Oftentimes a church, she said, foist a programme on a community when that might not be what God wants. In this way, the programme she said, becomes man-driven instead of being God-driven. Churches need to pray more to discern from God what is best for communities.

Influential persons

Paula Wong talks with Janice Lee of the Jamaica Broilers Group following last Thursday's seminar launch of Paula Wong Harvest Ministries. The launch took place at the Shang Hai Restaurant in Liguanea, St. Andrew.

In addition to praying, she told the audience that it is her belief that some churches are raised up to do one thing and sometimes this involves ministering to one community.

Some churches in Jamaica, she said, have too many activities going on each week. Christians will not be properly discipled if they never get out of the walls of the sanctuary to interact with the community. This, she said, was the legacy of Jesus, who spent most of his time among both the despised and ordinary people. He did not spend most of his time in the temple, she pointed out.

She told the audience that churches should strategically reach out to influential persons in a community and disciple that person in Christian ethics and values. Then, the church should offer support, as those persons in turn influence the rest of the community.

If the church wants to see a positive transformation in family life, it should identify a household in a community and work with that household to help it to become a model for the rest of the community, she said. Thus, the community would see, up-close, wholesome exchanges between husband and wife, and parent and child, she said.

Turning to matters related to how the Church disciples its members, Wong decried the tendency of pastors who "try to do everything" instead of allowing their members a piece of the action. "I believe, in Jamaica, that a lot of the problems is that we are too pastor-centric. We have the don in the church and the don outside. They can't do everything. We need to go back to the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers."

Business people in the Church, she said, don't often see how they can become an effective witness for Christ while on the job. She has plans to train business people to better penetrate the business world with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Discipleship, she said, involves training in small groups but it is not limited to it. "We spend too much time in the classroom. We need to let people learn and make mistakes as they do evangelism. Don't wait for perfection. We must take our young converts and put them to work and let them make mistakes".

Evangelistic crusades

Speaking with The Gleaner, Wong, while acknowledging the prevalence of evangelistic crusades in Jamaica, asked: "If everybody is converting 300 and 400, why is our birthrate like that, and why is our murder rate like that? We need to be realistic. I am saying let us acknowledge where we are and say: 'How, together, can we move from where we are?'"

Her ministry offers diagnostic tools to help churches understand where they are and where they need to be.

"We need more action and a change of heart, not more Bible-teaching. If you look at the statement of faith at a lot of the churches, we have it right. We have everything on paper right. But because we have everything on paper right we make the assumption that all is well. All is not well when you look at our society.

Paula Wong Harvest Ministries, she said, offers weekend retreats, or work with a church over a few weeks. "I can come and sit down with a church, do some research, interview the members of a congregation, try and get a plan and get the leaders together, and start. My training is never going to be just books. We are going to be engaged in a classroom setting then we are going to go out and do it. It will not be me coming up with all the ideas, for every congregation is different. I will work to see a coming together of all the giftings in the Church to bring about individual and community transformation."

Paula Wong may be reached at harvestmin@flowja.com. Send feedback to mark.dawes@gleanerjm.com.