Evangelize China Fellowship

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Evangelize China Fellowship

Founder(s)	Ji Zhiwen (计志文), aka Andrew Gih
Founded	1947
Headquarters	Monterey Park, California
Origins	Shanghai, China
Website	http://www.ecfusa.org

Christianity in China Portal

The Evangelize China Fellowship (ECF) Chinese: 基督教中國佈道會 is a non-profit 501(c) organization, originally founded in 1947 by 20th-Century Chinese revivalist Andrew Gih. The fellowship is comprised of churches, missionaries, and affiliated organizations that attempt to bring Christian beliefs to China and persons of Chinese descent.

ECF carries out programs of evangelism, education, and relief work in Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, Burma, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, the United States, and China. Programs are primarily conducted in schools, orphanages, and churches; with the educational programs focused on providing middle- and high-school English teachers training. ^[1]

[edit] History

The ECF founder, Dr. Ji Zhiwen (计志文, anglicized as Andrew Gih), was born in Shanghai and became a Christian while a student at Bethel School in Shanghai. Moved by the preaching of Paget Wilkes, he became an evangelist at the age of 25. In 1928 he joined the Worldwide Evangelistic Band, led by George Rideout of Asbury College, Wilmore, Kentucky. While on a preaching tour in south China, he met the famed evanglist John Sung (Song Shangjie). They formed the Bethel Worldwide Evangelistic Band in 1931. After Sung left this work in 1933, Gih continued it under the name of Bethel Mission until July 1947 .^[2], when he founded the Evangelize China Fellowship (ECF) as a Mandarin Church in Shanghai. After Shanghai fell to the Communists, Gih moved his work to Hong Kong, and appointed Paul Shen to open ECF work in Taiwan, resulting eleven years later in seven churches and an orphanage.

In addition to the building of churches, orphanages, and schools; ECF was credited with creating a vast network of Chinese Christians in the Diaspora, and helping Gih attain a level of "notoriety [that] placed him in the company of fellow revivalist J. Edwin Orr and Billy Graham." ^[3]

In the first 31 years of ECF, the organization opened 375 churches, seven schools, and two seminaries. ^[4] As of 2007, ECF comprises one-half of the global organization ECF International which conducts charitable and evangelical activities in 18 countries.

[edit] References

^ Allbusiness.com profile of ECF. Retrieved on 2007-08-12.
^ 計志文 (chinese). Retrieved on 2008-08-17.
^ Paul Spickard , "Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America" p. 259, ed. Jane Iwamura (Routledge, 2003) (ISBN 0-4159-3808-2).
^ Donald E MacInnis,, "Biographical Directory of Christian Missions", ed. Gerald Harry Anderson (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999) (ISBN 0-8028-4680-7).