A healthy relationship of the families to all ACEM Pastors

By Rev. Dr. John Kao

A certain Brother in the couples Fellowship boasted how much he loved his wife. He said, “it will be our 25th wedding anniversary this year, I will take her to Beijing.” Another brother was very curious and asked him, “How nice of you. What about your 50th anniversary? ” “Oh, I will go back to Beijing and pick her up!”

How can you say that you love each other, yet you don’t want to stay together? The most important church ministry is the couples ministry, although youth ministry and seniors ministry are also important.

Couples ministry is the most important ministry because you depend upon your couples to serve on your deacons board, and serving as counsellors in your various fellowships. Are they not the couples who make the majority of the church financial contributions?  If the couples don’t stay together and they are talking about separation all the time. How would they continue to serve in deacons board and the church ministries?

If they were talking about separation all the time, how would they be able to continue supporting the finance of the church?

Therefore, a healthy church ministry depend upon a healthy relationship of the families. The stable loving family depend upon the couples fellowship that “pray together and stay together”.

How could the couples ministry be healthy and stable in real loving relationship together, if the pastoral staff don’t love one another and don’t want to stay together? How could the couples stay in loving relationship together if the pastors and his wife talking about separation all the time? Unless they are accepted by people with understanding.

I am most grateful to my wife Esther, we have been loving each other and staying together and serving the Lord together for more than fifty years. Even now, my wife pushes a wheelchair to pick me up at the hospital 3 nights a week after my hymnal dialysis. I thank my wife for setting good example for all the wives of ACEM pastors. I also thank God for all the pastoral couples of ACEM for setting good examples to the couples ministry of all our ACEM churches. “Pray together and stay together.” This is why we set “Unity and Love” as the foremost important priority for our ACEM vision and mission.

Among our ACEM churches, we join our hands together in our world missions program, our church building program and our pastoral benefit program. “Unity and Love” become one of the most effective testimonies to attract outsiders to come to ACEM churches.

Our dear pastoral colleagues, how can we say that ACEM set our most important priority to be “Unity and Love” yet our pastors don’t set example to pray together and stay together?

ACEM organizes pastoral fellowship meetings seven times a year. We would like to take this opportunity to gather together and pray for one another. It is also an opportunity for us to network with one another. Therefore, we urge all our ACEM pastors to consider these seven pastoral fellowship meetings as the top priority in your schedule, although I know your schedule is very busy indeed. Thank you for your attention and your very serious considerations!