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Reaching shopworkers

In the intense summer heat of July, wouldn’t you like to have a nice, cool, air-conditioned place to go to? I invite you into Taipei’s modern department stores, not to go shopping, but to get to know the shopworkers.
About three years ago some coworkers and I left the shopworkers’ fellowship in the Taipei suburb of Panchiao and moved to Taipei City in order to start a new outreach. There are some forty major department stores in Taipei City and many churches, but almost no church meetings that shopworkers can attend. They finish work at 9:30 or 10:00 in the evening, and the weekends are the busiest and most profitable times for them. They have to take their days off during the week. The doors of the department stores are open eleven or twelve hours a day, seven days a week – open also for people who want to take the gospel to the workers inside.
When I make contacts among the shopworkers, I typically take my bag with evangelistic magazines, put it on my motorbike, and drive through busy city streets to one of the department stores. A coworker might accompany me. We start by meeting in the department store coffee shop. While drinking a cup of iced coffee, we decide on which floors we will distribute our magazines and which shop girls we know already and want to meet again. We also take time to pray for our visits. Then we start to go from counter to counter, from one shop girl to the next, introducing ourselves and the magazine we are passing out. Because they are at work, we can’t talk to them for very long. After an initial few words, we wait for their responses. We receive lot of courteous rejections – “Sorry, I am Buddhist,” or “If I find time, I will go to your meetings,” etc. – but after one or two hours of visiting, we might have the names of a couple of shop girls who want to have more contact with us.
Sometimes we find a contact who really seems to be interested in the Christian faith. We invite that kind of person to our weekly worship service after working hours at 10:15 on Sunday night or to another small group meeting. The locations of our small group meetings have to be places shopworkers can easily reach after work and are still open after 10:00 in the evening: a coffee shop, McDonald’s, or Kentucky Fried Chicken. Our dream is that each shopping center or bigger department store in Taipei City and the suburbs would have its own small group meeting.

Miss Huang is one of the shop girls we got to know once while we were out visiting. She started to come to one of our small groups, but after several months she told us, “I can’t come any longer. I also work as a fortuneteller, a job that gives me an even better income than my regular job. How can I continue fortunetelling and worship the true God? I need the money!” For several months she insisted that she couldn’t come to our meetings. But the Lord was greater than her heart. She gave up fortunetelling, and presented herself for baptism very soon afterwards. Since then she has become a coworker in the ministry, bringing along her colleagues and reading the Bible with seekers. But recently she once again told us “I can’t attend the meetings and be involved in the ministry for the next year. I am still deliberately committing a sin that gives me the income I need to meet some large financial responsibilities. I have to keep earning a lot of money for my family until the middle of next year. After that I will give myself totally to the Holy Lord.” Miss Huang is typical of many shop workers. She struggles to allow the Lord to become the master of all of her life.