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David Pressgrove: Asian adventures

David Pressgrove/For the Daily Press

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Follow David's journey through his online blog or his videos documenting his travels.

I’m writing two days into a trip to Taiwan and I feel like it’s been a week. To try to go through everything I’ve done in two days would make for a lengthy, possibly boring, summary.

First, I should answer the question of why I’m sitting in a hotel in Taipei, 13 hours ahead of Craig and half a world away. I’m the Young Life Director in Craig. Our mission statement is “To introduce adolescents to Christ and help them grow in their faith.”

Young Life is an international ministry. Ten years ago, my boss TJ Dickerson was asked by an international Young Life director to visit Taiwan to start discussions about youth outreach in the community.



At the time, the small island south of China inhabited by 9 million was about 2 percent Christian. TJ formed some relationships mostly with Taiwanese who have some experience living in the United States. The relationships provided opportunities for him to come back for at least a week 10 times since 2001.

Our guide for our trip is YiPing. She grew up in Taiwan and earned a master’s degree in social work from Washington University in St. Louis. During her time in the U.S., she volunteered for Young Life. When she returned to Taiwan, her passion was to find a way to carry out the Young Life mission through her job.



The annual trip that TJ takes doesn’t look like what one usually imagines as a “missions trip.” Instead of building a school or feeding the poor or helping a village, we meet with youth leaders across the country and talk to them about the “Young Life” approach to ministry.

During our first day here, we talked to 15 college-age students who will be putting on weekend camps this summer throughout Taiwan. The organization they are working with has a heart for the aboriginal tribes of Taiwan. We met with two board members from the organization and they compared the aboriginal tribes of Taiwan to Native Americans today. They said the aborigines are a people who are having a hard time fitting in and that they struggle with alcoholism and abuse in their families.

The entire purpose of our trip was summarized well when one of the college students stood up to tell us what he had learned from our seminar Saturday. He said: “I learned that I have to show the youth that I care about them. That they learn about Jesus just as much from my actions as my words. Before, I thought I was supposed to be mean to them and show authority because I’m an adult. Now, I know that’s not what Jesus did.”

The Asian culture is not one where teenagers and adults interact in a manner of friendship. As one youth leader we had lunch with said: “The pastors of churches only talk to the adults. They don’t notice kids until they are no longer kids.”

Our approach hasn’t always gone over well.

Two years ago, we had people walk out of a session. They told YiPing that entering into a child’s world as a friend, not as an authority figure, went against everything their culture taught. It taught children to be disrespectful and make the leaders look like fools.

In between sessions we spend a lot of time eating. It seems like our hosts get plenty of pleasure from us being stuffed. They also like to see our faces when we try something a bit too adventurous.

There are too many details to fit into one 20-inch column, so I have been posting video and blogging on Facebook, YouTube and through Craig Daily Press. If you’re interested in more, take a look at those sites.


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