We first met new LBIM Director Dan Venberg in person in 2017—at the emergency room. Nancy was being treated for pre-term labor. Dan encouraged us. He shared about his life as a missionary kid, and how God led his family to the mission field. We knew then in our spirits that God was giving us a clearer vision of the mission field. This vision had already led us to prepare for mission in college.
Growing up in Hsinchu Victory Church in Taiwan, I spent most of my life in the Chinese Lutheran Brethren Church (CLBC). This is where I rooted my Christian belief and formed my mind for mission to the world. Nancy came from the Alliance Church in eastern Taiwan, with a multi-cultural background, and she also gave her life to respond to mission since childhood. Nancy and I met each other in college, as we were both engaging our lives in campus outreach, overseas mission trips, etc. Nancy spent her senior year in Paris, France as an exchange student in 2008. One year later, I started working as a product designer in a Taiwanese company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
After spending our first year of marriage in Vietnam in 2011, we decided to go to the CLBC seminary for three years’ theological study. We joined the CLBC church in Chupei, Taiwan so I could serve as a youth minister. During four years of serving in this growing church, planted by Hsinchu Victory Church, we had the privilege to serve not only the youth, but also the whole congregation.
During this time, we experienced how CLBC exemplifies a church’s engagement in the great mission. One day my pastor asked me to enter his office, and he told me that it was time to make a decision. He knew that we had the burden to be missionaries since we were college students. He told us that Taiwan would have a brand-new mission training organization, Radius Asia, and asked if we were sure that God called us to be missionaries—if so, now was the time to take the next step.
A week later, after a period of prayer with Nancy, we were convinced that this was a call from God in our hearts, so we shared it with the elders and deacons of the church, and it was also unanimously approved by everyone. At the same time, the leadership committee of the synod were also thinking about how to participate more in missions. Knowing our church was ready to send us to the mission field, the synod decided to support us as a missionary family to Chad. During the one-year training in Radius Asia, I also had opportunities to visit different congregations and preach the message about mission throughout the CLBC. Many brothers and sisters were deeply moved and inspired by the mission in Chad.
The senior pastor of Chupei Victory Church invited all the congregations in the synod to join together in sending us, regardless of how much financial support they could provide. As long as the elders and deacons of a church were willing to pray for us for the long term, they were welcome to become one of the sending churches.
God is working in his Church. He caused 13 of the 18 congregations in the synod to join Chupei Victory Church as sending churches. We will become the first missionary family supported by the synod and sent by the churches during CLBC’s seventy-year history. God is calling the CLBC to respond to the mission with their mother church, the CLB of North America, and to walk along with the sister churches in Chad to finish the task.
God is leading our family and the churches, opening the way for them to go to the nations. It is not about how brave the missionaries are or how faithful the churches are. It is all about the Lord.
“May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us, so that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations” (Psalm 67:2).
Because of his grace on us, we can be a testimony for the nations. Because of his command and love for the Church, we have the privilege to be sent and to preach. It’s him who starts, it’s him who guides, and it’s him who will complete the mission for his glory. Amen.
Daniel Wen and his wife Nancy Wu have been called and commissioned by the Chinese Lutheran Brethren Church of Taiwan as missionaries to the unreached peoples of Chad, Africa.