Since its beginning, GLEC’s purpose has been aiming to start ministries in countries which had gone through rapid changes or societal transitions such as Russia, Hungary, Serbia, China, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey.

Because of the changes in these countries, we had the opportunity to preach the Gospel in a timely manner and witness people there transformed by the good news. We started to cultivate leaders and plant local reproducible churches to for the needs of pastoral ministry among the believers.

Before the rise of local church leaders, GLEC sent long-term missionaries to shepherd the local churches. Once the local church leaders are mature and ready, the church leadership responsibilities have been handed over to local trained pastors and GLEC continue to support and mentor the local churches to engage in cross-cultural missions.

For instance, in Russia since GLEC had succeeded the Chinese church ministry at Moscow, the training of local church leaders was one of the primary goals. The Global Enrichment Theological Seminary (former name of Global Mission Seminary) was founded for this purpose. After four years of training, many graduates started to serve in capacity of church pastors. In 2012, after six years of ministry experience, four of them were officially ordained and became the primary leaders of the Chinese Church of Moscow. Currently the Chinese church of Moscow has over 300 Chinese church members and oversees seven parish regions in Russia. In addition, there is a separate Russian speaking service for local Russian congregation and second generation Chinese-Russians.

The case in Eastern Europe is very similar. GLEC started seminary training at Budapest, Hungary and trained local pastoral co-workers. In Serbia, GLEC established Chinese Church of Belgrade. And this church had become independent in financial and administrative structure in a few years. Moreover, they have extended the evangelistic and pastoral ministry to other surrounding countries and Roma people group as well. Myanmar is also similar. We started our ministry there in 2008, and four years later, the country opened up to the outside world. We used Yangon Theological College as our training base to cultivate local pastors, and now there are churches in Myanmar that speak Burmese, Chinese, and Wa languages. In 2021, there was a coup in Myanmar, and the whole society was even more turbulent and uneasy. People were in fear and needed the peace and blessings of Jesus Christ.

The same goes for our ministry in Central Asia. We use education platforms to cultivate leaders and hope to change local values through education, allowing the love of Christ to flow naturally in the hearts of students across language and culture in sharing the Gospel.