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Local pastor John Tsen has done this successfully with the working class. About 30 years ago, after meeting a Baptist missionary, Tsen felt led by God to leave his job as a university chaplain and pursue grassroots ministry among the Hakka, a minority group in Taiwan.

Now, about 50 people regularly attend the Hakka fellowship of his church in Zhudong. About half of these people reluctantly attend other churches on Sundays, but they prefer the style of Tsen's fellowship: worshiping with Hakka music, learning about God through simple three-character maxims, and collectively repeating short Bible verses to encourage memorization.

"We've found that these methods work for teaching uneducated, elderly Hakka," Tsen says. "People from other churches come because they think the music and the way we teach is more understandable."

Tsen encourages church members to accompany him on weekly evangelistic outings. By developing relationships with grassroots nonbelievers in homes, hospitals, and parks, he sees about seven or eight people accept Christ each year.

OMF's Gibson spent six months with A-koan, an unemployed man and former gang member, before A-koan asked for a Bible and began to read it. The two men shared meals on the weekends, took their kids swimming together, and often chatted late into the night.

"My buddy Seann here is willing to be my friend, even when I'm drinking and smoking and chewing betel nut [a stimulant]," he said. "I figured it might be worthwhile to look into his Bible."

Lincy Tu's ministry has also required no small measure of perseverance. When she began to evangelize in a factory dormitory 22 years ago, its residents were initially skeptical. Despite their reticence, she continued to visit them weekly and even moved into the dormitory.

"They started to listen to me because they could see that I cared for them," says Tu, whose list of converts includes the daughter of a devout Taoist. This woman has since started a house church.

Ultimately, missionaries like Randy and Janet Adams hope to empower local working-class believers to evangelize their own people.

"Churches could train local people—not just pastors—to tell Bible stories and start fellowships in their homes, so that they could become reproducing churches," says OMF's Janet Adams. After she and her husband tinkered with the house-church model themselves, they started three such groups in Hengchun. "Small groups or working-class house churches would prevent working-class people from getting lost in larger, more impersonal church settings."

Missionaries are also experimenting with new methods of explaining the gospel to the working class. IMB's Hokkien Harvest has spent years developing a library of audiocassettes and cds in Taiwanese, the "heart language" of the working class.

"Although the problem of illiteracy isn't as prevalent as I had once expected, we have found out that you always need to have the right evangelistic tools in your tool belt that don't necessarily involve writing and reading," says Mike Miller, current strategy coordinator for Hokkien Harvest. "Otherwise, you'll miss reaching some people."

IMB missionaries in Kaohsiung have found that grassroots audiences particularly enjoy testimonies on tape. Even though one such tape is that of a doctor, "he talks like a taxi driver—kind of down home," Miller says.

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May 2006, Vol. 50, No. 5