The Catalytic Courage of Sharon Chan: The path to Roma Networks

by | Mar 25, 2024 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Movements are usually created from a number of tiny tributaries that begin to intersect with each other to form a congruent stream—this stream has the potential to become a powerful river, shaping the landscape in its path.  Usually, however, there is a critical tributary, a catalyzing force, which carves the path for the other tributaries to follow. Undoubtedly, every movement has its own compelling story as to how this dynamic process happened, and the formation and evolution of Roma Networks is no exception. Roma Networks is a grassroots movement in Eastern Europe, started in 2014, stating its vision on its website: “to network, connect, and research for the sake of sharing the gospel and seeing transformation in Roma communities throughout Europe.” Currently, the energy behind it emerges from its six board members, who all have their own full-time ministries and work, and yet voluntarily participate on the board. Although the board members are all European—three Roma and three non-Roma—the catalyst for this movement came from a Chinese-American woman who was praying for God’s direction on where to focus her ministry.1  This grassroots movement illustrates the power and possibility of healthy, creative partnerships in which locals collaborate with Christians from other parts of the world.

Sharon Chan worked for the Great Commission Centre International (GCCI) for twenty years, becoming the president in 2008.  GCCI was a Chinese mission organization based in Hong Kong and California and existed from 1993-2017.  Started by Reverend Thomas Wang, it was birthed out of his concern for global mission and his desire to stimulate the Chinese church towards cross-cultural mission.  Beginning with evangelism in the former Soviet Union, GCCI subsequently organized conferences in the Himalayans, Eastern Europe, and among the Chinese diaspora in various locations. The original plan was to equip the Chinese church to engage in cross cultural mission, especially pioneer mission, all over the world.  After ten years, however, the Chinese Church was still resistant to this vision, so the GCCI began to focus on mission education, translating Operation World and the Perspectives course into Chinese, as well as developing contextual mission for Chinese churches (Chan 2017b).

At GCCI’s twentieth anniversary in 2013, Sharon believed that it was time to return to the original vision of pioneering mission fields for the Chinese church and helping them focus on global mission, particularly among the most ignored and neglected groups of people.  She began praying about whether GCCI should focus on one group of people.  Soon after, she read a news article in Christianity Today about the Roma people.2 She was intrigued and moved by the article, and was interested to learn more about the Roma, whom she knew only from Operation World. In another few weeks, a different article in a Mission Frontiers came out.3  This further intrigued Sharon, and when a third article came out by the same author  in International Bulletin of Mission Research a few weeks later, she asked herself, “What is happening? What is God telling me about this?4  The Roma people must be important!”5  She began to pray about it with her three staff, and the next time Thomas Wang came in, she broached the subject with him (Chan 2017a).  He read the articles but did not say anything.  She asked him if they could consider reaching out and learning more about the Roma people.  He began praying about it, and eventually agreed, ‘We can try’.6

Three weeks later in June of 2013, Sharon went to Hong Kong, where GCCI also kept an office maintained by three staff.  The GCCI Board asked for an updated ministry plan, and Sharon shared the articles with them and her desire to learn more about the Roma.  She also decided to translate all three of the articles into Chinese and contacted the author of the articles for permission.  The GCCI Board was willing to press forward and see if it was God’s leading.  They agreed to have a prayer meeting and invite Chinese churches, but even if no churches participated, the GCCI Board already decided to pray for the Roma.  They planned to host the prayer meeting in September, so Sharon travelled back to Hong Kong again.  Up to this point, Sharon’s interest in the Roma was fueled only through reading articles and browsing websites. Consequently, the board decided that there needed to be a scouting mission in November.  One of the board members had a connection to a Serbian pastor, the late Viktor Sabo, who helped organize the first trip which included Sharon, Thomas Wang and his wife, and two more individuals (Chan 2017a).

On the trip, Viktor Sabo shared his own story with the group, how he overcame his prejudices and became connected to the Roma people.  He took them to an open market in his town of Subotica where Sharon was astonished to see all the Roma market sellers.  She was immediately transported to 1950s and 1960s Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong when Chinese who fled Communist China were the market sellers, living in wooden huts on the surrounding hills.  Her mind kept returning to this—as she visited the homes of Roma families, she saw the huts of the Chinese refugees and the children who would do their homework as they were selling newspapers.  She also thought back to the Chinese migrant workers in Southeast Asia and America, who were forced to work incessantly in order to survive and were frequently discriminated against.  Because of this, Sharon felt a strong sense of empathy at the apparent outsider status of the Roma and she had a desire to help the younger generation with their education.  She saw education as key to gaining more self-confidence.  Because of these connections she made in her mind between the Chinese experience and the Roma, she had a sudden realization that the Roma could be the people group with whom God was inviting GCCI to become involved.

As this clarity began to emerge on the scouting mission, Thomas Wang suggested that the next step should be to host a conference. Hosting conferences was something he had frequently done in other contexts in order to provide a platform and build relationships in a given region.  For example, in the early 1990s, he had hosted a conference in Eastern Europe with local leaders in order to provide a time of praying and encouraging one another, bringing unity and a sense of shared vision (Chan 2017b).

Meanwhile, Sabo took the visitors to nearby Apatin, Serbia to visit another Roma church.  They invited Peter Kuzmič, a well-known mission influencer in Eastern Europe, to come meet with him. In the course of the conversation, the group spoke of the three articles that had motivated Sharon, and mentioned the author’s name, Melody Wachsmuth.  Kuzmič told the group that Melody lived in Eastern Croatia and she was in fact on her way to visit the Chinese group with Roma church leaders from Darda Pentecostal Church in Croatia. On her part, Melody only knew that the group from Croatia had been invited by a church in Serbia to come have fellowship with American guests. Consequently, she was completely shocked to find Sharon Chan, a person only known to her in a brief email exchange about the articles’ translation into Chinese some months ago, in the tiny home of a small town in Serbia.7

That evening, Thomas Wang cast their vision for the conference and asked if she would help with the conference, and Melody hesitatingly agreed, not having any idea of what was involved.  For Sharon’s part, she was a little bit frightened as she knew what was needed to plan a conference and Wang had already told her that he could not help her. Wang suggested that the conference should take place in September of 2014, less than a year away.  Sharon felt the task enormous—if it was planning a conference for the Chinese, it would be no problem for her.  This, however, was a new people group and a new context.

After they flew back to the USA, Sharon began to pray about where to start.  She decided she needed to meet more Roma leaders and share the vision for the conference, so she contacted Melody again and asked for introductions.  Sharon planned to return to Eastern Europe for three weeks in 2014, traveling and connecting to different Roma leaders. Melody drove her and another Chinese colleague on a journey through Serbia and Romania, and then turned the two women over to Nina Jankucić nee Vujić who led them through Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro (Wachsmuth 2017).

When meeting the many Roma pastors and leaders over the three weeks, Sharon noticed their heart for their people. She was very encouraged by local pastors, both Roma and non-Roma, and their faithfulness in the midst of struggles and hardship.  Often, the women sat at the tables as the only women in the middle of many male leaders.  This was nothing new for Sharon— she was well used to this in the Chinese context when she was always the sole women in the middle of male leaders.  In one incident, the women were at a round table with around 10 male pastors in Bucharest, Romania, and skepticism was written blatantly on everyone’s face.  Sharon was very nervous but felt strongly it was her duty to present the vision of the conference, even though she struggled to express herself in English (which then had to be translated to Romanian). “I needed to try my best to share with them about the conference and how it could benefit them.  It seemed to me that some of them responded okay, while others were skeptical of the idea” she remembered.8

This three-week trip was challenging on many levels, and included translation problems, snowstorms, doubt, and many long hours in the car.  Although for the most part, Sharon was received well, she did not know if this was just characteristic of Eastern European hospitality or if people really would come to the conference.  She was filled with uncertainty regarding the conference itself and the program, concerning which speakers and which topics would be the most beneficial.  There were other challenges as well: raising money amongst the Chinese churches who had never heard of the Roma, logistics of organizing the travel from so many countries, as well as the fact that  numerous speakers cancelled a few days before the conference.  Sharon also invited Chinese churches to come to the conference, but only 20 people came.  She decided that the conference would be in Budapest, soliciting the help of a Chinese church in Budapest.

Sharon remembered being apprehensive and very nervous before the conference with all these challenges, but she had faith the conference would happen. However, she had no idea what the result of the conference would be because of so many unknowns; for example, not knowing exactly on what theme the conference speakers would speak.  However, at the beginning of the conference, she began to see people connecting with each other, and from that point, believed the ministry would continue. “This is the right step for them to get to know each other,” she remembers thinking.  “And then pray that God will work among them, to have a movement among the Roma people”.910

Near the end of the conference, Thomas Wang was strongly pushing the idea to appoint a steering committee to build on the momentum of the conference and organize the next conference.11 Six people from various European countries—three Roma and three non-Roma— were appointed.  As the conference ended, God provided for all the expenses, but it took the GCCI ministry account to zero, not even leaving anything to pay for staff salaries for the next month.  For Sharon, however, she was used to operating this way on faith: “I think I got used to this in Rev. Wang’s 50-60 years of ministry.  He will spend everything if he thinks it is God’s will to do it”.12

Sharon felt initially skeptical that the six appointed people would follow up, but after a few months, she began receiving emails from Nina Jankucić nee Vujić, a Croatian woman who was appointed chair of the steering committee. From the content of the emails, Sharon believed that she was the right person to take it forward.  One of Nina’s emails expressed her worry regarding finances.  Based on decades of experience, Sharon’s advice was: “No problem, God will provide”.13

Sharon organized a conference in 2015 for Chinese pastors in Budapest to continue educating them about the Roma and trying to mobilize them into mission. The Board of Roma Networks organized two more conferences in 2016 and 2019.14  More than this, they are working on building a platform to connect and empower Christian workers to bring about transformation in Roma communities.  They have encouraged various trainings, encouraged short term missions, appointed country coordinators and conducted regional meetings, and most recently tried to organize help for needy communities during the COVID crisis.15 After GCCI closed its doors in 2017, Sharon handed over the idea of Roma ministry to Alin Lin from the Global Life Enrichment Center, and he embraced this mission with enthusiasm, partnering with different Roma communities to develop preschools and businesses.16

When Sharon looks back at this process, she sees how God was working step by step, through one relationship at a time.  They would meet one person, and then that person would introduce them to another person.  She believes God brings people together and encourages ministry in this way.  She thinks it is better for Roma Networks to be a movement rather than an organization, to continue this ‘one-to one’ way of ministry.  She attests that this whole process was not easy, but she was convinced that God was leading the people that he would bring into her path, so she continued moving forward, despite the discouragements, lack of interest in the Chinese churches, and the challenges. Without Sharon Chan forging a new path and reshaping the terrain around her, there would not be a Roma Networks—which means that the numerous personal relationships and ministry partnerships formed as a result of this platform would not exist.

Footnotes

  1. The primary data for this article came through a virtual video interview conducted between the author and Sharon Chan on May 29, 2020.
  2. Wachsmuth, Melody J. 2013. “God Among the Roma.” Christianity Today 57(4): 17.
  3. Wachsmuth, Melody J. 2013. “Loving our Unwanted Neighbors.” Mission Frontiers 35 (3): 32-35
  4. Wachsmuth, Melody J. 2013. “Separated Peoples: The Roma as Prophetic Pilgrims in Eastern Europe.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 37 (3): 145–50.
  5. Interview of author with Sharon Chan, 29th May 2020, conducted over Zoom.
  6. Interview of author with Sharon Chan, 29th May 2020, conducted over Zoom.
  7. The author documented this account in a 2016 EMQ article, “An Unlikely Confluence for the Roma Church,” listed in the references.
  8. Interview of author with Sharon Chan, 29th May 2020, conducted over Zoom
  9. Interview of author with Sharon Chan, 29th May 2020, conducted over Zoom
  10. The 2014 conference in Budapest, Hungary was attended by 160 representatives from 16 countries, 100 being Roma leaders (Roma Networks 2016).

References Cited

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *