An Unequally Yoked Small Group

About 14 years ago, Mun Kit Au and his wife, Josephine, were in a church small group they loved. They group had been meeting for years and felt comfortable together. It was easy to laugh, to enjoy each other, to share prayer concerns.

So the couple left.

“We decided maybe we were getting too comfortable,” Mun Kit said. That’s not normally the adjective to describe Christians in Malaysia, where he and Josephine live. Most of the population follows Islam (about 65 percent) or Buddhism (about 20 percent). Just 3.5 percent say they’re evangelical Christians.

Along with two other couples, Mun Kit and Josephine split off into a new small group. But this one was a little different.

In this group, many of the women were Christians and their husbands weren’t.

The odd part isn’t that the women were Christians. Around the globe, women are more likely to be religiously affiliated, pray daily, and say their faith is very important to them. In Southeast Asia, that split is even more pronounced—three to five times more women than men are found in church.

It isn’t even odd that, in Malaysia’s patriarchal society, nonreligious husbands agreed to come to a small group, even for a religion they didn’t believe. Within the Chinese ethnic group, men are the head of the household, but women often run the households, family finances, education, and religious activities.

No, the odd part is that, in an established church with comfortable rhythms, a leader tried a brand-new approach.

Odder still, over a year, every one of those men—some who’d been resisting Christianity for decades—gave their lives to the Lord.

“God really worked in that small group,” said Massimo Gei, whose father was saved.

“It’s amazing,” Josephine said. “In retrospect, you can see how God has been orchestrating everything.”

Mun Kit and Josephine

Mun Kit and Josephine first met in a high school chemistry lab in Kuala Lumpur. By then, they’d both already come to Christ. Mun Kit fell in love at first sight and persuaded Josephine to date him. After he graduated from medical school, they got married.

Mun Kit took a job at a hospital in Malacca, a port city through which traders introduced the region to Islam centuries ago. When the Portuguese took over the city in 1511, Muslim teachers fled outward, spreading Islam to the surrounding areas. By the time Mun Kit and Josephine moved in, about 65 percent of the city was Muslim. The rest were mostly Buddhist (24 percent) or Hindu (6 percent).

Mun Kit and Josephine joined the brand-new Straits Baptist Church, an English-speaking congregation planted by Southern Baptist Ian Buntain. He’d later teach at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and direct the World Missions Center. Straits Baptist would go on to purchase its own building, start a Chinese-language congregation, and plant four new churches.

From the beginning, Mun Kit was the one pushing for small groups.

“When we lived in Kuala Lumpur, I drifted away from my Christian walk,” he said. “My wife decided to go back to church. After a few years of marriage, through a small group, I came back to my Christian faith. So small groups are very important to me.”

He spearheaded the effort at Straits Baptist, eventually overseeing the birth of eight small groups. For 16 years, he led one.

“It was a very comfortable group,” he said. “So I said, ‘Why don’t we divide?’ One member took over with most of the existing members, and Jo and I and two other couples started a seekers’ group.”

Women, Then Men

It was Josephine who found the seekers.

She led the women’s ministries at Straits Baptist and never heard an evangelistic outreach idea she didn’t like. At the church, she held aerobics classes, cooking demos, beauty sessions, and picnics. She arranged marriage and parenting seminars, held a fashion modeling show, and hosted countless dinners. Every month, she invited local women to a breakfast where church members shared testimonies.

Josephine’s energy bore fruit: at her first outreach event, six of the roughly 20 attendees accepted Christ. Over time, as she saw more conversions, Josephine noticed that sometimes husbands would follow their wives to Christ. But sometimes they wouldn’t. After a while, some of the women began meeting regularly to pray for God to save their husbands.

One of them was Maureen Gei.

Maureen grew up Catholic but rejected the faith in her teens—religious rituals were so boring when you didn’t believe in God. After she got married, her husband’s job moved them around the world. Nearly 20 years later, they landed in China, where one of her neighbors was from North Carolina.

“She was a Christian, and kept talking to me,” Maureen said. “I was all about going out clubbing, dancing, to theaters, that kind of stuff. She kept talking about going to church and joining Bible study groups.”

Finally, Maureen agreed to go to church, and then to a women’s Bible study. “Within a few weeks, I felt compelled that I wanted to accept grace,” she said.

She told her husband, Michele. He was happy for her and liked that she was a nicer person. In fact, he thought religion was so good for her that on cold Sunday mornings, he’d warm up the car, make her tea, and drive her to church. But he wasn’t interested in salvation for himself.

By the time Michele and Maureen moved to Malacca and met Josephine, Maureen had been begging God to save her husband for a dozen years. In Malacca, she joined forces with a few other women.

“We got together and prayed twice a week—once on the phone, once face-to-face—for our husbands to come to Christ,” Maureen said.

Josephine told Mun Kit about them, and he started to wonder about starting a small group for those couples.

Unequally Yoked Small Group

It’s tricky to design a fruitful small group for unequally yoked couples. Especially when you’ve been leading a comfortable group in an established church for over a decade.

“Mun Kit was thinking outside the box, trying something unconventional,” said Massimo, who directs the Gospel City Network in Malaysia. In Buddhism and Taoism—major religions among the ethnic Chinese that Straits Baptist was reaching—even the practice of opening your home is unusual.

“Hospitality is mainly shown by taking people to restaurants,” he said. “You might open your home for a festival, but not regularly.”

Privacy is valued and family matters are kept internal to avoid shame, he said. “Harmony is often valued over true reconciliation. If someone has a conflict with another person, they will probably start avoiding them rather than try to have an honest conversation about it.”

So to invite Christians and their unbelieving spouses into your home not only makes you vulnerable but also invites conversation about underlying tension that may be lingering in their homes. Mun Kit and Josephine had to be both gracious and strategic.

“We didn’t want to have a separate group for the non-Christian spouses or they might not even come,” Mun Kit said. “At the same time, I didn’t want to make it too basic for the existing members or else the Bible study time becomes fruitless.”

He created a rhythm where everyone would sing together for 10 or 15 minutes, and then the women and men would break off into separate groups to study. After an hour, they’d join back together to talk over a meal.

Even then, it would take a little persuading for the men to attend.

When Josephine’s friend Elsie married CG Lee in 1990, she asked him to pick a religion for them to follow. CG had been raised by his grandparents, who were fervent Taoists. He didn’t mind it—since Taoists believe that children’s prayers are more effective, people would pay him to pray for them. Later, he was intrigued by the Buddhist idea of creating your own good karma by doing good things.

But when Elsie asked him what religion they should follow, he wasn’t convinced enough to pick one.

“I had a free thinker mindset, so I didn’t see any need to choose a religion,” he said. He was true to his word. When Elsie asked if their children could go to Sunday school—she told him they’d learn to respect their elders and live with integrity—he agreed. But that was as close as he wanted to get.

“I remember my eldest son asked me to try going to church,” CG said. “I said, ‘Do I force you to stay home from Sunday school? No. So please don’t force me to attend church with you.’”

No, it wouldn’t be easy to get CG into a small group.

Elsie

The first sign that something was wrong with Elsie came when she was tutoring the neighborhood children and dropped her whiteboard markers on the floor. She blamed it on fatigue, but it was the first sign of motor neurone disease, better known in America as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

When it came, the diagnosis was devastating—over time, Elsie’s nervous system would slowly waste away. There was no cure. She’d be dead within a decade.

Panicked, Elsie began trying every homeopathic medicine or religious ritual she could.

“Things were just getting worse and worse,” CG said. Eventually, after exhausting every avenue, Elsie quit trying.

Around that time, Josephine asked Elsie and CG to join the small group. The two women knew each other from school—their sons were in the same class. Josephine had invited Elsie to other outreach events. After a while, Elsie asked CG if she could accept Christ. Knowing her time was short and that it’d make her happy, he told her to go ahead.

Elsie knew CG wasn’t interested in Christianity, so when they got invited to the small group, she told him he could drop her off. But he didn’t want her to go alone, especially as she grew weaker.

“He would walk around my garden or sit a little bit outside the group,” remembered Maureen Gei, who sometimes hosted. “Then when she started to have difficulty holding a glass, he would sit next to her. He was such a loving, caring husband to watch.”

“I wasn’t interested in the Christianity talk,” CG said. “My English wasn’t good. I had zero understanding. I didn’t know what they were talking about, and I couldn’t be bothered to understand it. But after the study, they would have fellowship, and I liked that because they would have good things to eat.”

Going On with Christ

The social aspect was also what drew the other men—Michele, a doctor named KC Lim, and a retired postman named Jeff Saravana—to the small group. They’d met each other at church outreach functions they’d attended with their wives.

“I once asked my dad, ‘Why did you sign up for this?’” Michele’s son Massimo said. “He said, ‘Because for the first time, I wasn’t going to be the only one. I always got invited to small groups, and I would be the only non-Christian. I felt like I was a target. People would make jokes like “One day we’ll get you!” or “The Lord will work in you!” But this time, I was in a group with people just like me.’”

Mun Kit led the men through Going On with Christ: Studies for Young Christians, first published in 1975 by the Scripture Union in Malaysia. The chapters covered basic Christianity, explaining things like God the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, baptism, and prayer.

“The men were quiet, absorbing,” Mun Kit said. “I didn’t know what was going in.”

But the four men kept showing up. And after a few months, Jeff gave his life to Christ. He had been curious and open, so Mun Kit wasn’t surprised. “I could see it coming,” he said.

He didn’t have the same expectations for Michele. “He was a man who knew his own mind,” Mun Kit said. An international businessman, Michele had lived all over the world. He was smart, sophisticated, and skeptical. He already knew about Christianity—Maureen had been talking to him about it for 15 years. But he didn’t believe it.

This was hard on Maureen. “Sometimes I am called by pastors to talk to young ladies who want to marry a nonbeliever,” she said. “They say things like, ‘He’s such a good man. And he is open to faith. And he lets me go to church.’”

Don’t do it, she tells them. “It is so painful to lie in bed at night, and you look at him, and you realize he’s not going to heaven with you if he dies,” she said. “He is going to hell. When you hear a sermon about the rich man asking Lazarus to warn his brothers—for you, it is a prick into your heart. You go to church alone, and you see families together, husbands and wives looking at each other. Those things hurt. How can you choose that?”

About eight months after the small group began meeting, Michele asked Maureen to invite Mun Kit over for breakfast. After eating, the men went into another room to talk privately. Twenty minutes later, Mun Kit emerged.

“Maureen, your husband just accepted Christ,” he told her.

She stared at him.

“I have never seen you speechless,” Mun Kit told her.

“You know what it’s like, when you have been waiting for something for so long, and it’s there, and you don’t believe it?” she said.

Later, she asked Michele what changed his mind.

“It was not a verse,” he told her. “It was not a sermon or a Bible study or more information. It was that I saw real Christian family. I witnessed Christianity. It was so lovely, and it touched my heart, and it won me.”

It wasn’t that Michele had never seen a Christian before. After all, he was married to one. Over the years, Maureen had hosted scores of Bible studies at their home, and Michele had always been happy to pop in to eat and chat at the end. He’d seen Christianity.

He’d just never experienced it like this.

Church Community

Every day, Elsie’s body was getting weaker and her witness was getting stronger. She reminded Michele of 2 Corinthians 4:16–17.

“I’m seeing her wasting away, and every time she’s at church, she’s smiling,” Michele told his son Massimo. “When she is at small group, I can see her joy. And that is so strange, because how can you believe in a good God when this is happening to you?”

Michele watched the group rally around her, bringing her food, caring for her children, and praying with her. The faithfulness and tenderness of their love was enough to win him to the Lord.

But not CG. As he sat in the small group, helping Elsie eat dessert or drink coffee, he told them, “I will only accept Christ when he heals my wife.”

That was part of an experiment CG was conducting. When he first began accompanying Elsie to small group, he was uncomfortable—with both the English and the religion. He didn’t want this group to cramp his free-thinking mindset. He wondered if he should continue and asked his 16-year-old son, Eugene, what he thought.

“Do you believe in God?” Eugene asked him.

“I don’t know,” CG said. “I don’t see any god.”

“Do you wish there was a God? A good God?”

“Of course,” CG said. “Why not?”

“If someone told you there was a God, would you believe him?” Eugene asked. “If not, you could challenge him to prove it to you. You could start to think like a scientist. They start with what they believe, even if others don’t believe it yet.”

So for more than a year, CG put God on probation. He was waiting for a miracle to prove God’s existence and his love.

As he waited, Elsie grew worse. Church members “would sometimes come over to my house to play the guitar, to worship, and to pray for her,” he said. “I have siblings, and they don’t do that. I have neighbors, and they don’t do that. But these people do.”

When Elsie got too weak to leave the house, the small group came to her. They celebrated her birthday together. They brought what she needed. They prayed for her. His Buddhist friends, even though they’d been close for years, didn’t do that.

That’s not strange, Massimo said. “Social good is an important aspect of the Buddhist faith. But it is rarely personal. So you can get help at their food kitchens, but it is only the monk or a medium who may pray over you—often in the temples, and rarely at home.”

Periodically, Mun Kit would ask CG if he was ready to accept Christ, and CG would say no. And then one day, CG told himself, Give me one good reason I shouldn’t accept Christ, who showed so much love and care to people. Is he a liar? Does he do bad things to people? Is he trying to cheat me?

He couldn’t think of a good reason. So when Mun Kit next asked him, CG said yes, he was ready to accept Christ.

“My wife was very happy,” he said.

Aftermath

After Jeff, Michele, and CG, KC also prayed to accept Christ. So did two women who joined the seekers’ group along the way.

God didn’t heal Elsie’s body. In the months after CG was saved, she lay on her bed and listened to the worship music or Bible passages CG played for her. When he wasn’t sure how to pray for her, she taught him by asking the children to write prayers on the whiteboard for him to say.

Toward the end, she spent a few weeks in the hospital. Josephine mobilized the small group—the women who could cook Chinese food were dispatched to cook for CG and the children, who were used to that cuisine. Other women who were young and mobile brought the kids to school and picked them up. Somebody else helped with their homework. Maureen and others took shifts with Elsie at the hospital, reading the Bible and singing softly. Elsie passed away in October 2011.

At first, CG’s friends wondered if he might have prayed the sinner’s prayer to make Elsie happy before she died.

“But they were in for a surprise,” Maureen said. “He was such a fervent believer immediately—like he had been holding back but had already started to believe.”

CG grew in his faith, became a deacon at Straits Baptist, and now leads his own small group. He’s remarried to a woman he met at church. “My children can see the transformation in me—I talk gently and pray for them,” CG said.

His advice to pastors: don’t underestimate small groups. “The small group is like a small church,” he said. “The trust is built there.”

Small groups are also more flexible and transient than churches. After a few years, this group disbanded. Michele and Maureen moved to Kuala Lumpur and joined First Baptist Church Subang Jaya, where they began ministering to international college students. Many were baptized before Michele passed away in 2020.

Massimo, their son, came to Christ shortly after his father. He now leads the Gospel City Network in Malaysia, where he encourages his church planters to keep trying new ways to reach out.

“Christian innovation is so important in our context,” he said. “We need different ways to reach different people. Effective contextualized ministry needs a fresh restatement of the gospel for a particular time in a particular place for a particular people. Mun Kit saw a need and tried to do something. So I always try to push church planters to try something out of the box.”

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra is senior writer and faith-and-work editor for The Gospel Coalition. She is also the coauthor of Gospelbound: Living with Resolute Hope in an Anxious Age and editor of Social Sanity in an Insta World. Before that, she wrote for Christianity Today, homeschooled her children, freelanced for a local daily paper, and taught at Trinity Christian College. She earned a BA in English and communication from Dordt University and an MSJ from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She lives with her husband and two sons in Kansas City, Missouri, where they belong to New City Church. You can reach her at [email protected].