From September to December last year, I had an opportunity to go to Guangdong Province's Zhongshan University Faculty of Religion's Graduate School to teach "Studying the Christian Scriptures". The course that I taught in covered not only reading the Christian faith's original scriptures, but also a selection of writings by Christian theologians on this topic. I was responsible for teaching the part on original scriptures, and chose the Book of James as the main teaching text.

The students from Zhongshan University's Faculty of Religion come from very different backgrounds. Eight students chose to attend the course I taught in, of which six were studying Buddhism, and two were studying Christianity. There were also over ten auditing students from different other Faculties.

The biggest challenge in teaching this topic was that the students had varying levels of understanding of the Bible, had very limited knowledge of the Christian faith, and even had difficulty finding passages in the Bible. Some knew of Christianity only through one or two Christian books. One student even mentioned E. Renan's Life of Jesus (1863), calling it an authoritative text (the book is available in Chinese in Taiwan and in Mainland China). This mid-19th century work represented Liberalism's understanding of Jesus, was criticized by Schweitzer as lacking in sincerity, and demonstrated little knowledge of the New Testament. I felt deeply China's urgent need for quality evangelical writings in biblical studies, to help those interested in Christianity to have an accurate understanding of the biblical gospel faith. In all, this overall experience has been a very precious one for me, and has helped me to better understand Mainland China's needs.