Mission Monday: John McCall

Each of the six Mondays in March will feature a mission that is directly connected to St. Mark Presbyterian in some fashion.

The Rev. Dr. John McCall, a Presbyterian missionary to the Christian community in Taiwan, will be a guest speaker for our worship services on March 30 and 31. A long time friend of our Pastor Steve Ranney and his wife Pastor Kim Skilling (of Affton Presbyterian Church), John spoke previously a few years ago at St. Mark.

Here is a glimpse of John’s work in his own words from his Winter 2013 letter published in the Presbyterian Mission Agency newsletter:

“This past semester I taught 60 students a course on “The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life” at Tainan Seminary in the south of Taiwan. The role of the Holy Spirit is an important topic in the Taiwanese Church and often a Taiwanese Christian’s questions about the Holy Spirit can be very different from an average American Presbyterian’s questions. Every Tuesday after class a different student would volunteer to take me to the train station on the back of a motor scooter. And I quickly discovered that they wanted to use the time on the road to talk about the Holy Spirit. Often at a red light they would turn, their helmet hitting mine, and ask some question that was burning within them about the way the Holy Spirit was at work in their lives, in the life of the church, or in the world. One student bought a platform ticket at the station so he could accompany me to the train to keep talking about his questions. Nothing thrills a teacher more than students who want to keep pondering what we talked about in class.” http://www.presbyterianmission.org/ministries/missionconnections/mccall-john-2013-01/

St. Mark has invited the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church of Greater St. Louis, in Ballwin, to hear John at our Saturday evening service and to stay and share dinner afterwards with our congregation. (More details to come later.) Perhaps by worshipping and eating together we will discover Christian unity as it expresses itself through different cultures.