ZHENGZHOU, China – A boy once lived in this city of nearly nine million people, sprawled out along the southern banks of China’s Yellow River, and dreamed of finding a medicine that would make his grandmother live forever.
This boy, Roger Qi (pronounced CHEE’), loved his grandmother and often lived with her while his parents traveled for business. He promised her that one day he would discover this elixir of life and bring it to her. But he never dreamed that he would find it in Missouri.
Nevertheless, in 2007, Qi traveled 7,000 miles from home to the southeast Missouri town of Bonne Terre, where he completed his senior year of high school. During that time, he lived with David and Lisa Gibson and their three children (Derek, Ryan and Camille), members of First Baptist Church, Bonne Terre.
“I ended up with a wonderful American family who are Christians. At the time, I didn’t know anything about Christians,” said Qi, who grew up as an atheist. “They never pushed me. But they lived in a way—and they still do to this day—that really, really influenced my decision to become a Christian. They are to me like a family.”
During his senior year in high school, David Gibson—Qi’s American ‘Dad’—taught Qi how to hunt deer and rabbits.
“Every time we went hunting and killed an animal,” Qi recalled, “when Dad gutted it and cut it up he would say, ‘Look at the animal and how it functions. How could you not believe in God?’”
Gibson also took Qi to Mizzou football games in Columbia, which enticed him to enroll as an international student at the University of Missouri after he graduated from high school.
“Dad took me to the Missouri-Nebraska football game in 2007, where we beat them at home,” Qi said, “and I kind of fell in love with the place.”
When he moved to Columbia, Qi soon made friends with Christians on campus, like Daniel Masters, whom he connected with through a mutual interest in soccer. “He would invite me to read the Bible with him,” Qi added, “but would never rub it in my face.”
Soon, Qi also met Bill Victor, a Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) collegiate coordinator, and became involved with Missio Dei, a Baptist ministry on the Mizzou campus.
Through the persistent witness of his American family and friends, Qi decided in the summer of 2010 to follow Christ. Afterward, he invested himself in the ministry at Missio Dei, and this summer he served as an intern for the MBC’s leadership development team. In this role, he helped prepare for such ministries as Super Summer and campus mission projects, and he also learned principles of living a missional life.
After he became a Christian, Qi also remembered the promise he had made to his grandmother at the age of 3 or 4.
“After I became a Christian, I was driving down the highway, and I started thinking about (how I had promised to find a life-giving medicine for my grandmother),” Qi said. “I started thinking about it, and I said, ‘Hey. I did find something.’”
So that evening, Qi called his grandmother and told her that he had found the medicine that would make her live forever: Jesus Christ.
Although his family members are not Christians, they’ve supported Qi’s decision to follow Christ, and Qi continues to share with his grandmother about this life-giving medicine. Moreover, Qi is amazed at God’s “grand story”—the way that He used the promise of a young child as an opportunity to share the gospel.
“I now have a perspective that I didn’t have before, which is looking at the grand scheme of things and seeing how God has been working,” Qi said. “I am just in awe that I am actually a part of a greater story, and I like to use the phrase that Tim Keller likes to use: ‘It’s a miracle that I’m a Christian.’”