Bianca Juarez Olthoff has a big dream.

“Everyone knows Billy Graham, but Billy Graham had a mentor and a discipler that made him who he was,” she says. “I’m not trying to be Billy Graham. I’m trying to grow 20 Billy Grahams.”

Olthoff—who founded and co-pastors The Father’s House OC in Orange Country, California, with her husband—has a heart for mentoring the next generation, particularly young women entering ministry. She says she never intended to start a church, and even revealed on the most recent episode of the Charisma News podcast that she hopes someone else will be leading the church in 10 years. She’s not interested in building one single church building as much as building God’s global church and equipping the next generation to lead it. In this Q&A, Olthoff shares her testimony, her dreams for the church and her heart for the next generation of leaders.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Listen to the full interview in the embedded podcast.

Berglund: Can you share your testimony?

Olthoff: I grew up in the church. My dad is a church planter and has served the local church currently for 30 years in East Los Angeles, California. I love the church. I love the call on my dad’s life. But I always said I would never work in a church, and I would never marry a pastor, and I would never church plant. So the best way to make God laugh is just to tell Him your plans.

My faith journey, growing up in a faith-filled house, was so fun. I got to see my parents express their faith and their walk. But my dad always said, “One day, you will make a decision on whether or not my God is your God.”

I never understood that because I was like, “Well, of course your God is my God.”

Around the age of 22 or 23, I had come out of a devastating three-year relationship. My mom was diagnosed with two forms of cancer. One of them was brain cancer. And I’d lost my grandmother. It just felt like everything was up in flames in life. And in full candor and disclosure, I was really upset with God. We had loved God, we served God, we did all the right things; therefore, our life should be OK. I thought, My mom shouldn’t be diagnosed with brain cancer, she should get a yacht and a six-month vacation in Europe. Don’t give cancer to my mom.

I had professed my faith at a young age, and I made a cognizant decision at 13 that God was my God. But I think at the age of 23, it was a pivot point of faith, where I realized that I have to put my faith through the fire and let the impurities and the dross rise to the surface so that only the purest thing remains. That’s exactly what my mom’s battle with cancer did. It was just a really crazy season. I had to come to a realization where, like, either I believe God is who He says He is and can do what He said He can do, or this is all for naught. That was my “come to Jesus” moment. That was when my faith became very real to me, and my faith became my own.

Since then, it’s been this adventure of daily fighting to discover a little glimpse of God more and more each day. Even my faith journey of just walking in the fullness of His Spirit has been such an adventure that I don’t take lightly. And it’s an honor every single day to tell people and point people to Jesus.

Berglund: You mentioned that you never wanted to become a pastor—and here you are. So tell me about how you got that call to ministry, and about your church today.

Olthoff: I think I’m a lot like a spiritual Gideon or a spiritual Jonah. I really want to be Paul. I want to be Deborah. But I think I’m the kid who just loves to have fun and run away from God’s call. And I always come back, and God is so faithful, and He’s so patient. He’s so gracious. So I think in this season of my life, I’m running headfirst into the full gales of wind saying, “OK, I’m just going to do it the first time that God asks me to do it.”

But long story short, I was working for an anti-human trafficking organization called A21 under Christine Caine, and I had worked alongside her for 6 1/2 years. And I felt like this nudge and call to go into prison. It felt foreign. It felt weird. Why would I want to leave the covering of Nick and Christine? And it wasn’t like a lead; it was like I felt this holy hunch, this Holy Spirit nudge, that I had to go into prison. I had no idea what that looked like. But God used that as my stepping out and stepping into, because there was even a greater sense of freedom. I wanted to bring spiritual freedom to the incarcerated.

I realized, living in Orange County, California, that there are people who are not in physical prisons but are in spiritual oppression. My husband and I were just hosting Sunday night dinners at our house to whomever: my gym instructor, people he met at restaurants. We’d say, “Hey, do you need community? Come to our house.”

The ambition was never to start a church. In fact, it was the farthest thing from my heart and mind. I just love cooking. We love hosting and entertaining. And we would have people come and sit around the dinner table, and we’d have some of the most life-changing conversations around the dinner table. I began to look at the life of Jesus, specifically in the book of Luke. Jesus was either coming to a party, going to a party or at a party in the entire book of Luke. And I realized, “Wait a minute, throwing dinner parties is ministry.”

One night, as he crawled into bed, my husband said, “Hey, I think we’re starting a church.” And I said, “I think you’re crazy. We are not starting a church. We are starting dinner parties.” And slowly but surely, we started seeing God do some amazing things in the life of people just having honest, earnest, simple conversations around the dinner table. And slowly but surely, the Sunday night dinner crew just began to grow from 10 to 12 to 30 to 50. We realized we couldn’t meet in our house anymore.

I travel and teach at conferences and churches. I was up in Northern California, speaking at a women’s conference, and I stayed through the weekend to preach at this very big church up in Vacaville, California. I’d never heard of Vacaville. I’d never heard of this church. But I still connected with the senior pastor. And before I was set to preach for the first Sunday morning service—I’d preached the whole weekend to the women’s conference—the pastor gets in front of this huge congregation and says, “I want us to welcome Bianca Olthoff. She’s going to be preaching with us. She and her husband are church planters in Orange County, California.” And I remember sitting with my Bible and my notes and thinking, Hold up. Pump the brakes. This guy’s a heretic. I’m not a church planter.

I flew home that night, and I was laughing. I was talking to my husband about it. I said, laughing, “Can you believe it? He said we’re church planters.”

And as serious as a heart attack, he said, “Bianca, we are church planters, and we’re planting a church.”

And my response wasn’t elation. It wasn’t a holy praise party. You know what it was? I cried. I said, “I think you’re right. We are starting a church.” And that is how our church was birthed: through laughter, through crying and through a prophetic word. So it’s all the gamuts of a crazy Latina woman. You laugh, you cry, you don’t know what’s going on, but you love to have a good party.

And those are still the values of the house. We laugh, we cry, we worship God and we love to throw a good party. And God has been faithful.

We have had some of the most crazy, insane church planting stories, like discovering a homeless person living in our venue for four months. … Some churches can say that they’re a home for the homeless, but we literally are a home for the homeless. We rent a venue for our Sundays, but we can’t control who’s there on Saturday. And we’ve had magic shows, or some adult entertainment like the Thunder From Down Under. So we come in on those Sunday mornings, and we pray over the venue with anointing oil and bleach. We just take claim over our venue.

But we’ve had some amazing, life-transforming stories, and we feel privileged to join the ranks of other church planters, bringing the Gospel to literally the least of these. So it’s been fun.

Click here to read more.

SOURCE: Charisma News

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Reports of escalating persecution and a crackdown on religious believers in China have been filtering to the outside world for months. In recent years nearly 6,000 underground churches have been shut down by Communist authorities, some leveled to the ground, and pastors and church members arrested for crimes such as “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegal business operations.” 

For two years, Stephen (not his real name) attended one of those 6,000 now-shuttered underground churches. On the day authorities raided his church in 2018, he was flying back from an overseas trip so he was not there when his pastor and other church members were arrested. He told his story of harassment from authorities and efforts to flee to the Christian Post last week. 

Before Stephen could get home, authorities came to his apartment and knocked on the door. Frightened, his wife locked the door and turned off the lights. Oddly, the police did not knock down the door. But when he next spoke with his wife by phone, he learned the electricity had been turned off and that there was no heat in the place in the middle of a freezing winter. He called the property manager who was able to turn the power back on for a short while. But it was soon shut off again and he was told he had to meet with authorities to get it turned back on. He went to the local police station expecting to be arrested and thrown in prison. He described the experience to the Post:

“I wore a very heavy jacket and heavy pants,” he said. “I go there and told the police officer, ‘Why you turn off the power? You can just call me. You have my phone number.’ And he said, ‘If we do not do that, you won’t show up.'”

Stephen said he was ordered by a police officer to write his name and government identification number on a piece of paper in addition to the names and ID numbers of his wife and kids. 

At that point, the police official introduced Stephen to three “community officials” who wanted to discuss issues related to the closure of the church and a school affiliated with the church that his children attended. 

The officials offered his children free seats in a public school. Although some Chinese families desire the opportunity to send their children to a good public school, Stephen refused the offer. 

“I said ‘Oh, thank you so much. I know this is a very good opportunity but please give to other people,'” he recalled. “My wife and I are Christians. We want to educate our children with God’s Word.”

The officials didn’t seem happy with his refusal and left the room. 

He was then asked to sign a document saying he would no longer have any contact with church members. The document also contained a gag order, which would prohibit him from talking about church affairs or street preaching.

Stephen refused to sign, telling officials that “friends and family need our support.” 

“They were scared about why we visit each other. That’s human beings doing natural things,” Stephen told CP. “I want the freedom to visit my brothers and sisters. I want to contact them. So I could not sign.” 

Stephen then said something that is often heard in report after report of Christians facing persecution. “I understood they are doing their duties. They are under pressure,” he added of the government officials. “As Christians, we pray for them. They have to do whatever they do to earn money. So they kind of surprisingly let me go home.”

Stephen says to this day he doesn’t know why officials didn’t break down the door to his apartment that first day, or why he was let go after interrogation. He wanted to stay in China, but Christian leaders urged him to flee for fear authorities would again arrest him and force information from him about the church’s ministry in order to build a stronger case against the church’s pastor. He finally fled his home city, going from city to city for weeks, knowing police were monitoring his moves. A month later he and his family flew to America where they live with a relative. 

As CBN News has reported, attacks against Christians and other religious groups have been increasing in China in recent years, including bulldozing churches and mosques, barring Tibetan children from Buddhist religious studies, and incarcerating more than a million members of Islamic ethnic minorities in what are termed “re-education centers.” 

One of the most obvious attacks on Christians happened last October when Chinese government authorities tore down a mega church’s building in the Funan, Anhui region, starting the demolition while the congregation was still in the church worshipping. The church’s pastors were arrested and detained, according to the international non-profit Christian human rights organization China Aid. 

Government officials did not show any documents ordering the 3,000-seat church building’s demolition. But they did produce arrest warrants for leaders Geng Yimin and Sun Yongyao. Both pastors were detained on the charge of suspicion of “gathering a crowd to disturb social order.”

Despite all his smiles to the US and the West, President and Communist Party leader Xi Jinping is behind the increasing persecution in China, and has ordered that all religions must “Sinicize” to ensure they are loyal to the officially atheistic party. According to Open Doors 2020 Persecution Watch List, this means they must make beliefs, including Christianity, “fall in line with [the government’s] interpretation of Communism…[and endure] a steady drip of pressure, where the government increases surveillance, control, and restrictions of believers.”

China ranks as the 23rd worst persecutor of Christians in the world, moving up from 27th last year, according to that 2020 Persecution Watch List.

As he released their newest report last week, Open Doors CEO David Curry warned that China, with its “social scoring” system where people get points for “good” behavior, and lose points for not strictly adhering to the government line, and with its increased facial recognition capability, it is creating a “system of persecution for the future” and is the “greatest threat” to human rights in the world today, according to CP. 

“I saw with my own eyes the surveillance on the street but also in the churches, watching their congregation,” Curry said. “Facial scans when you come in and then tracking you and generating reports with assumptions built into their artificial intelligence system that is tracking Christian behavior.”

Curry believes in the future China’s system could be exported to other persecuting rulers around the world.

As for Stephen, after more than a year in America, he wants to go back home to China. But Christian leaders there say it’s not advisable at this time. He continues to live in America where he and his family of six share a room in a sibling’s home. 

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