ABOUT
US --- ISU
Chinese Bible Study Group
(CBSG)
In
the summer
of 1970, three Chinese Christian students of Illinois State University, two brothers and one
sister, went to the Campus Crusade for Christ summer camp held in Arrow
Head, California.
The fall of that year, they felt a need for a fellowship, which
would use Chinese as the main communication language.
The use of Chinese would help ISU Chinese students to understand
the gospel better.
The
ISU Chinese Bible Study Group was officially formed in the fall of 1970,
which had 3 members to start with. They
used a lounge in Waterson Tower as their meeting place.
At that time, Waterson Tower had a couple floors allocated for
foreign students. At the end of the Spring semester, 1971, the
fellowship had 7 members, 5 from Taiwan and 2 from Hong Kong.
By the Spring of
1972, the ISU CBSG membership increased to about 20~30 people.
This number maintains through out the all these years up to now.
The fellowship experiences a turnaround of its members every 2~4 years as
the result of graduation.
It is sad to see dear brothers and sisters leave us, but we know
God will use them somewhere else.
During
the year of 1978, Illinois Chinese Christian Fellowship (ICCF) was
established. The organization
serves the purposes of supporting and organizing the College Bible Study groups at
Illinois State University, Illinois Wesleyan University, University of
Illinois, and Bradley University in Peoria. The ISU
CBSG started to have chances to attend special meetings held in other
areas, and having broader fellowship with Chinese Christians from other
campuses; from 1980-1986, the majority of members
were from Hong Kong. Since
the Cantonese language is hard to learn, the fellowship used English
during the meetings; During the years of 1987~1994, we welcomed more
Chinese students from mainland China.
The Chinese language again was used for the meetings.
Starting
from 1994, the Lord answered our prayers by having more working Chinese
families to join our fellowship. We
now have less students from ISU and IWU; but we are still trying hard to
evangelize to them. During
this time period, we also started a children program.
Although our
group is relatively small, we had four members go to serve the Lord as
full time ministers, two in United States and two in overseas.
Illinois
Chinese Christian Fellowship (ICCF) welcomes Chinese churches and Bible
study Groups from Peoria, Springfield, Champaign/Urbana, and
Bloomington/Normal to support this ministry.
ICCF is the sponsor of large retreats and evangelical meetings for
the Chinese from central Illinois.
The name of the
fellowship was officially changed to "Holy Light Chinese
Christian Fellowship" in the Spring of 2000.
The
fellowship is currently meeting on Fridays from 7:30pm to 9:15pm with
refreshment served between 9:15pm to10:00pm.
The fellowship
is holding Bible study, Children
programs and prayer meeting every week.
We
thank the Lord for letting us serve Him here, and especially want to thank
First United Methodist Church in Normal for letting us use its facilities
to make our services possible. ( By Daniel Liu )