04 Feb Macau: Report to the General Conference

On the first day of General Conference (January 11, 2010), Karis Vong reported about the ministry in Macau. Karis is pastor of the Living Water church, the first UB church in Macau, which this year is 22 years old. Here are some excerpts from her verbal report:

• “When people ask me, How big is Macau?’ I tell them they need to ask, ‘How small is Macau?'”
• “Identity is a big issue in Macau. People know Macau because of the casinos. Since 2003, Macau has become just like Las Vegas. Young people graduate from high school and want to immediately go to work in casinos. So they will stop studying, which isn’t good for the future of Macau.”
• “In Macau, churches and numbers are very small. People in Macau think small is okay, it’s good enough. Most churches have 40-50 people, and no church in Macau has over 1000. You can pray that we’ll have the confidence to become bigger. Being small, we have a lack of people to do ministry, lack of money.”
• Karis gave each delegate a music CD produced by the Macau churches in 2007. “We hold a concert, and have people buy tickets to come hear Gospel music. In Macau, we don’t have our own Christian music. We encourage our people to create their own music.”
• “Having to work on shifts affects churches.”
• Of its 550,000 population, only 4108 people in Macau attend Protestant services each week (up from 3106 in 2003).
• Prayer request for Macau: “How to prioritize our lives.”

The land size of Macau keeps expanding, as they reclaim land from the ocean. Look at these statistics:

Year	Square Kilometers	Population
1989	17.4	440,500
1999	23.2	437,455
2009	29.2	549,200