[Video] Your Story Time Episode 314: Pastor Yeh Kao-Fang on "Half a Century of Love, True Love for the World"
Episode 314 of "Your Story Time," the online interview program presented by the Jason Wang Foundation, was held online at 7 p.m. Pacific Time on November 2. Dr. Yeh Kao-Fang, president of the International True Love Family Association, was the featured guest. Speaking on the theme "Half a Century of Love, True Love for the World," he shared the story of his more than five decades in family ministry. The program was hosted by Liang Feng, and Yu-Hua Ding, who has served alongside Pastor Yeh for more than twenty years, gave the opening prayer.
Pastor Yeh holds a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, master's degrees in divinity and theology, and dual doctorates in family counseling and counseling psychology, followed by postdoctoral work at Harvard. A well-known expert in family education and counseling, he founded Asia's first organ donation center and association, and has served as a senior pastor, director of the Taipei Family Counseling Center, head of a hospital social welfare department, and president of a Christian college. He has promoted family ministry since 1972 and authored more than ten books. He and his wife, Huai-En Li, married in 1972 and have one son; for more than five decades the couple has often served together at speaking engagements.
Asked why he devoted his life to family ministry, Pastor Yeh said candidly that he did not come from an intact family: he was nine years old when he first met his father, and he grew up without a father's presence. As a boy he often crouched alone at his front door, watching a neighbor come home from work, wondering, "When will my dad walk home like that?" It was precisely because he had lived through a family's brokenness, he said, that helping families became his life's mission.
His coming to faith was also bound up with family. In his second year of high school, he spent three weeks in hospital with acute rheumatic arthritis. His elder brother, who had become a Christian first, arrived an hour early every day to feed him breakfast, carry him on his back to the hospital garden pond, read the Bible, sing hymns and pray for him. Three days before his discharge, the young Yeh told his brother: "Next week, please take me to church. I want to believe in Jesus, like you." His mother and siblings later came to faith as well — "one person saved, the whole family blessed," as he put it.
At Chung Yuan Christian University he studied chemical engineering, planning to set up a factory and improve his family's circumstances; a professor even promised to make him a plant manager within five years. But in his junior year, at an evangelistic meeting, he resolved to enter full-time ministry and declined the professor's offer; the professor's only reply was, "What a waste of talent." For years afterward, his wife would ask him, half in jest, whether he regretted the decision. His answer never changed. After seminary, convinced that family ministry was what the age needed most, he threw himself into it — and has never left it in more than fifty years.
The lowest point of his ministry came after nearly five years as president of the Chinese family association authorized by the U.S.-based Focus on the Family. Insisting that the work should "meet people directly and help families" rather than turn the organization into a publishing and translation outfit, he clashed with the parent organization's expectations and was forced out — the most humiliating moment, he said, of his fifty-six years of service. In that valley, his wife wrote him a card: "Dear Kao-Fang, I know these days have not been easy for you, but I firmly believe that this adversity is an opportunity in disguise." He has kept that card for twenty-six years; it still lies under the glass of his office desk. Speaking at the International True Love Family Association's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in May this year, he said: "If I had not left the family association back then, there would be no True Love Family Association today." The association now has ten chapters around the world, serving seniors, marriages and families, single-parent households and youth.
Pastor Yeh was equally frank about his own failures in marriage. In the early years of their marriage he plunged into counseling work, seeing four or five clients a day and coming home wanting only silence; his wife, meanwhile, had waited nine hours just to talk with him. She warned him solemnly that if things went on this way, "we will pay with our marriage," and said she would pray for God to change his ministry. It was then that he realized: caring for other people's families is not the same as caring for his own. From that day, he resolved to live out in his own marriage what he taught others.
As a father, he recalled the family worship on the night before his son's wedding at age twenty-five. He asked his son: "In these twenty-five years, has Dad ever hurt you?" The son brought up his seventh or eighth birthday: a friend snatched the three cherries from his cherry cake, the boy refused to let it go, and his tired father, in front of everyone, tapped his bottom with a plastic punch spoon as a token gesture — and the spoon snapped. What the son remembered was this: "Not only did you not speak up for me, you disciplined me in front of everyone." Father and son embraced and were reconciled that night. What Pastor Yeh treasures is that his son has always called him "a good friend" — and in time followed him into full-time ministry.
On the troubles of modern families, Pastor Yeh summed up decades of counseling in five phrases: modern life is lived at high speed; happiness is pursued through material things; satisfaction is sought individually; communication has become a matter of tools; and human relationships have become dehumanized, with people treated as objects. "If there is no God in your heart," he said, "there will easily be no people in your eyes." Human love, he said, is like a battery that one day runs out; only love connected to God's love has an inexhaustible source.
To younger workers entering the helping professions, he stressed that how much you can help others depends not on how much theory and technique you have learned, but on the kind of person you are: "Life influences life; family influences family." He closed with two sentences for the audience: "A home is not a warehouse for storing wealth; a home is a dwelling for enjoying family love"; and "No success can make up for failure in the home, and no achievement can compare with the happiness of a family."
The video of this episode was provided by the Jason Wang Foundation and released by GSM on its official channel. Related: Your Story Time Episode 314: Pastor Yeh Kao-Fang on Marriage and Family, Free Online November 2 at 7 p.m. PT
(Source: Jason Wang Foundation)
Source: Jason Wang Foundation
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 《小人物大故事》第314期官方海报，主办方王澤麟基金會（Jason Wang Foundation）提供。 / Official poster for Your Story Time Episode 314, courtesy of the Jason Wang Foundation.
