Tom Leland, pastor of University Baptist Church in Charlottesville, leaned back in his swivel chair in his spacious office and smiled broadly. Clearly, talking about the church and it's ministries is a topic in which he is well-versed and one in which he takes great particular delight.
Leading with a report on a one-day ministry blitz called “Operation Inas-much,” Leland is obviously proud of the achievements of his congregation's efforts. “Social agencies kept looking for the hook,” he says of their determination to make a difference in their community by attacking needs with a huge number of people on a single day in the spring. “When they saw there were no hooks, they embraced the church's efforts enthusiastically.” The next day the church received front page coverage in Charlottesville's Daily Progress. This year, Leland says University Baptist is coordinating with several area churches to create synergy.
But what really causes Leland's face to light up is the church's ministry to international students who attend the University of Virginia. While the students are in Charlottesville, the church seeks to connect with them and plant the seeds of the gospel.
“We seem to be connecting very well with Chinese students,” Leland reflects. “Many of them are very open to finding out about Christianity despite the [Communist] Party's official teaching that there is no God.”
The church provides English classes on Sunday morning during Sunday school and many stay for church. Leland makes a point to send them an email of the sermon before Sunday so they can read it before they come to hear it. Not only does this facilitate their understanding of English, but, more significantly from the church's perspective, it helps them understand the gospel. He still sends sermons to some Chinese students who have returned home.
Leland loves to give examples: “A lawyer from China came to the UVA law school for a one-year program they have for international attorneys. The man was an honest seeker who left his wife in China to come here and study. When his wife visited, the three of us had several conversations about faith and Christianity. When his wife returned to China, she continued to seek. On her second visit to Charlottesville for her husband's graduation, she accepted Christ and was baptized the Monday morning after her husband's law school class graduated on Sunday. Although her husband has not yet been baptized, he has become a believer because having access to God through his Son, Jesus Christ, made sense to him.
Because she is with Chinese public television, the names have been withheld, but in China they are in church every Sunday.
But University Baptist's Chinese connection flows east as well as west. The church has developed a relationship with Yunnan Nationalities University in Kunming, China, where they traveled each of the last two years.
They got connected through the associate dean of the university during a year's study at UVA. Through a mutual friend, Leland arranged to visit Kunming with a group from the church to teach English in the university's classrooms. While there, they visited a number of churches.
On their second visit, they continued teaching and visiting churches, but wanted to find a Christian heroin clinic they had heard about. “You talk about our understanding and appreciation of God's grace—the Christians in this center were incredible. When they start singing Amazing Grace it just about blows you away.”
Members of the church plan to return next month to China, where they are hoping to take advantage of an offer by the dean of the university to visit a remote mountain spot where the current generation has never seen a westerner. Despite this, the population of the village is 90 percent Christian.
“All over China the moving of the Holy Spirit is obvious,” asserts Lynn Yar-brough, who works in China in partnership with the Baptist General Association of Virginia and Woman's Missionary Union of Virginia. In addition to the power of the gospel and the empowering of the Holy Spirit, Leland believes it also shows how critical was the witness of missionaries who ministered in China before the Communist Party came to power.