Program
Doctor of Ministry
Year Approved
2021
First Advisor
McNeff, Michael
Abstract
This project established that the love of God is the foundation of mission and evangelism. God loves people and calls Christians to participate in His redemptive mission. God calls Christians to bless them and make them a blessing to others. The church is believers who are gathered to bring nonbelievers to God. The nature of the church is missional. A missional church engages every believer to participate in the Great Commission. The incarnation of God demonstrates God’s love and reveals the model of mission and evangelism. The incarnational approach is entering other people’s worlds as Jesus Christ entered the world to identify with them without compromising biblical convictions, values, or standards. This project introduced a new evangelism approach, the “Happiness Groups” (HG) strategy. HG is a love-based incarnational group evangelism strategy developed to send Christians to their community to demonstrate God’s love to nonbelievers by loving them in their real-life settings and telling the gospel in their understandings. HG is the central ministry of the church to align the rest of the ministries toward fulfilling the Great Commission. It also is an on-the-job training platform that trains ordinary Christians to become effective gospel messengers to accomplish the extraordinary for God. Finally, this project adapted HG to transform the attractional evangelism strategy of a Chinese immigrant church in Southern California to an incarnational, missional strategy. This project conducted three rounds of HG (two rounds in person and one round in virtual). The data were analyzed, discussed, and evaluated. The result indicated that the HG strategy is effective in the North American Chinese church cultural context both in person and in virtual settings. The conversion, baptism, and coworker’s involvement were all improved significantly. The transformation successfully solved the low-effectiveness and low-involvement problems of the church. Recommendations and suggestions were provided.
Degree Name
Doctor of Ministry
Document Type
Doctoral thesis
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Qin, M. (2021). Happiness Groups as a Strategy for Transforming a Chinese Church from Attractional to Missional [Doctoral thesis, Bethel University]. Spark Repository. https://spark.bethel.edu/etd/524