Alfred Sheng just wants to be a good disciple of Jesus. After you meet him, so will you.
By Chris Simpson | President & CEO, CBMC International
I want to tell you about one of our own.
We serve in a loud, divided age, and the noise can make you wonder whether the church still grows quiet, faithful people. From where I sit, I can tell you it does. Alfred Sheng is one of them, and he’s the reason I wanted to write.
I met him at Osanri prayer mountain in Korea in August of 2023, and I’ve been receiving his messages ever since. They aren’t the messages of a man building a platform. They’re the overflow of a heart that wants two things and only two: to know God, and to love His people. He gave me his blessing to tell his story, and I want you to meet him.
One word of Korean
Picture a young man at an airport more than a decade ago, boarding a plane to a country where he knows exactly one word. Hello. That’s it. He’s Chinese, he’s alone, and his family told him not to go. No relatives waiting, no safety net, no language. Only a willingness to work and a quiet endurance that has never left him.
He’ll tell you God met him there. The scholarships came, one after another, enough to carry him through a university degree even though his Korean was poor and his grades, in his own words, were nothing to boast about. “My academic performance was not outstanding,” he says. “But I always kept a diligent and sincere attitude.”
Then the floor gave out. It was his freshman year, a collision on a soccer field, and his arm shattered. Two surgeries under general anesthesia, and he faced both of them alone in a foreign country. The one who hit him never apologized and never came to the hospital. His university, a Christian school, told him he would have to handle it himself. Not a single staff member came.
What happened next set a pattern that has held for the rest of his life. A Chinese-speaking pastor from his Seoul church walked into that hospital and secured his admission. Alfred had no insurance. They enrolled him in the national health program that same day, a process that normally takes three months. He calls it a miracle. I can’t call it anything else.
A few days after surgery, still bandaged and unsteady, he put on his hospital gown and walked back into class. He had to. Missing class meant losing the scholarship. His advisor stared at him. “You dare come to school like this?” Alfred answered, “I have no other choice.” That semester, the same advisor put his name forward for a scholarship that paid more than his tuition.
That’s the season Alfred met Jesus, bandaged and broke and far from home. That’s when the Lord found him.
The mountain
You don’t heal cleanly from something like that, and Alfred didn’t. He went into a long, dark stretch. Depression. A pulling away from people. The doctors back in China told him not to expect a full recovery. So he did the only thing he knew to do. He sat in the Word, two and three hours a day, reading and praying and waiting for God to speak.
In 2015 a pastor sent him up the mountain. Osanri. He went to fast, the first three-day fast of his life. And before God filled him with anything, God asked him for something first. Forgive everyone you have ever hated. That list held someone he had never even been able to name, the one who shattered his arm and never said he was sorry. Alfred forgave him.
Something broke loose in him. He puts it this way: “Forgiveness is not only about releasing the other person. It is about breaking the chains and lies of the enemy, freeing yourself from bitterness.” He describes the Holy Spirit filling him that day from his head to his feet, the fear in his chest lifting, the Scriptures opening, a peace he had never known coming to rest inside him. He walked off that mountain a different man, grateful, of all things, for the injury that had once filled him with hate.
That same mountain, years later, is where I met him. The first thing I noticed was his gentleness.
Into CBMC
His road into our ministry started small, the way most things with Alfred do. A two-day CBMC Vision School in 2015 gave him his first look. In 2018 a Korean leader brought him to a few CBMC breakfasts and prayer meetings, some of them in fine hotels. Alfred looked around those rooms and assumed CBMC was a place for great men. He’s come to a different conclusion, and it’s one I want every member to write down. “It is not CBMC that is great,” he says. “It’s the presence of Jesus and His true disciples that makes CBMC what it is.” Amen.
This is the part I most want you to see. Alfred studies with many CBMC groups now, among them Steve Garrison’s Connect-3 in Santa Ana, California, and Jeff Tullis’s in Hawaii. Steve opened that door in 2023, and Alfred hasn’t missed a week since. The clock is never on his side. While the rest of Seoul sleeps, Alfred sits alone in the dark at one and two in the morning, his face lit by a laptop full of men on the other side of the world. He logs on exhausted and glad to be there. He’ll tell you those hours with God’s people are worth more to him than sleep. By day he teaches Mandarin to Korean students. By night he’s the Chinese man learning English from a room of older American men who’ve become his teachers and his friends. Jeff Tullis is walking him through Operation Timothy now, our discipleship study. His English is still a struggle, and he says so without embarrassment. He keeps showing up. He’s set himself a goal that tells you everything about him: to study with these men for ten years.
“Those hours with God’s people are worth more to him than sleep.”
And then there’s what he did with the Monday Manna. When Alfred first joined, the devotional reached him in English, a language he was still learning. So he built himself a bridge. Every week he translated the whole thing into Mandarin, worked the questions, wrote his reflections in Chinese, then translated his answers back into English and sent them to his teachers. Nobody asked him to. Nobody would have known if he hadn’t. He did it so he could bring his whole heart to the table and miss nothing. When Barry Weir discovered what he was doing, he reached out to Ben Nan, CBMC’s Asia-Pacific president, and arranged for the Taiwan office to send Alfred the Chinese edition every week, to spare him some of the labor.
He went back through years of emails and wrote out, one by one, the name of every man who had ever poured into him. William Klumpp. Barry Weir. Ron Weber. Jeffrey Tullis. Nelson Cook. Mike Jones. Cliff Peloquin. Paul Huddle. Robert Tamasy. Brian Harmon. Aron Darling. Thomas Hansz. Steve Garrison. He memorized the ones he could, in a language that does not come easily, because these men matter to him that much. “You are much older than me,” he wrote to them, “but you meet every week, you pray, you read the Bible. You are a very good example for me.”
Why give ten years to a study? Because Alfred’s reasons run far past Alfred. He wants to understand American CBMC in its own language, so that one day the Asian church and the American church might understand each other more deeply in Christ. The verse he has carried since that first CBMC meeting in 2015 is Ephesians 1:10, God’s plan to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth. He dreams of the Lord’s disciples across the world becoming one in Spirit. “The future does not belong to whichever country is strongest,” he says.
“It belongs to the country God is with.”
The grace that keeps coming
For a man who calls himself poor, Alfred is quietly generous. Every month he sends part of his modest income to a South Korean organization called WayMaker that cares for orphans and children from single-parent families. He’s never met most of them. Last year a stack of their letters reached him, and he called it the best gift he received all year. “Doing good is not only for when you have money,” he says. “Giving when you are not wealthy can mean even more.” He’s convinced those children are the leaders Korea will need.
God has also walked this ordinary man into rooms most of us will never see, rooms full of some of the most successful business people in Asia. He’ll tell you about a seminar in Gangnam he couldn’t afford. So, he showed up to move tables and chairs, hoping to catch a little of it from the back. The host sat him down front as if he belonged there, and when the hotel proved too expensive, a cancellation opened a room, and Alfred slept under that roof on nothing but grace. He’s watched wealthy, accomplished people up close, and he didn’t come away envious. “Many of them are successful,” he says, “yet without God, they are still anxious. They do not have the peace that only He gives.”
And the grace kept coming. In 2024 another driver hit his little car and then sued him. Somehow the victim became the defendant. Alfred had no money for a lawyer and his Korean was still unsteady, so he walked into more than ten law firms until one agreed to advise him online for free. He built his own case file. He won. The matter was finally put to rest last year, the other driver found fully at fault.
That same year, he and his father, whose heart is slowly turning toward God, joined a church study program. They went out with a group of Korean believers who have served the homeless of Seoul for years, paying for the food from their own pockets. Everyone took a turn. Alfred and his father knelt on the pavement, looked men in the eyes, and told them Jesus loves you. A son and his father, kneeling together in the street. That is the kind of memory that reshapes a family.
Alfred has built a whole life in Korea. He married a Korean woman, and they’re raising a family. His own parents still live in a small city in China, and he goes home to see them as often as he can. There were no Christians in that family. Not one. Today his parents are coming to faith, his father’s heart softening a little more with every prayer. “It was because of me,” he says quietly, “that my parents slowly became willing to believe.” A young man who arrived in Korea with one word of the language has become the doorway his whole family is walking through, on both sides of the border.
The ordinary disciple
You could tell Alfred’s story for the miracles alone, and there are plenty of them. That’s not what stays with me. What stays with me is quieter. In all the messages he has sent me, Alfred has never once promoted himself. He calls himself “ordinary” on nearly every page. He’ll ask how he can pray for you before you’ve finished telling him what’s wrong. When he heard my own testimony, the first thing he did was ask me my son’s name, so he could carry him to God.
His prayers don’t stay in Korea. A message lands on my phone from Seoul. A young man who has never set foot in the United States is asking us to pray for Paul Johnson, an American CBMC’er, about to go in for surgery. “May his surgery be a complete success,” he writes, “and may he fully recover with the power of the Holy Spirit!” Whether he’s known you for years or for days makes no difference to him. Somewhere across the ocean, a brother is in a trial, and Alfred is on his knees for him.
“Greatness begins with the ordinary.”
That, right there, is the heart CBMC exists to form. In a world built on division and rage, here is a Chinese believer in Korea who wants nothing more than to be, in his own words, “an ordinary person who is a good disciple of Jesus Christ. Because greatness begins with the ordinary.”
Sit with that, because it is an invitation. You don’t need a platform to live the way Alfred lives. You don’t need a title, a fortune, or a fluent tongue. What you need is a heart that will stay awake at one in the morning for one more brother, and bend low enough to ask another man how to pray for his child. Most of us will never be famous. May we strive to be ordinary disciples.
There are Alfred Shengs among us. Thank God for that. Pray for this one. Then go and become another.
