Taiwan Church News
3358 Edition
July 4 – 10, 2016
Headline News
Walk Across Taiwan, Rogue Pastor Arthur Hollands Reaches Out To The Youth And The Addicted
Reported and Photographed by Lin Jia-jing
Carrying a 80 pounds cross on his shoulder, Rev. Arthur Hollands, a sixty-five-year-old Japanese pastor, launched a 15 days evangelical mission of Walk Across Taiwan on July 4th at the plaza of Taipei’s 101 building. This is an untypical evangelical ministry trying to reach out to the youth and the addicted. Rev. Hollands wished he could even go into the jail sharing the gospel with the prisoners.
Born in 1951, Rev. Hollands was born in a cross-nationality family with an American father(US marine) and a Japanese mother. When he was 20 years old, he returned back to US with his father. Though he was extraordinarily talented in wrestling and Japanese judo and got awarded with many trophies and titles, he was once lost in drugs and gang crimes. Thanks to his wrestling coach bringing him back to the church, Rev. Hollands was baptized at his 23-year-old and started his evangelical ministry after he went back to Japan. In 1990, he was officially ordained as a pastor by a San Diego church.
Except having preached to Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest mafia organization in Japan, Rev. Hollands spends 300 days each year at the streets of Shinjuku, Tokyo’s downtown district, proclaiming the good news of Jesus. In 2012, Rev. Hollands started to walk across Japan on foot, from Hokkaido to Kyushu, putting a 40 kilograms cross on shoulder. He walked across Japan and Korea twice each in between 2012 and 2013. In April 2014, expecting to bring an evangelical revival for his fatherland, Rev. Hollands walked across USA in a 5,000 km journey from Santa Monica(California) to New York.
Mr Lin Jou-en, who was Rev. Hollands’ main contact in Taiwan and an elder of Suan-lien Presbyterian church, revealed Rev. Holland’s amazing stories: at first he walked across Japan, Korea or America just for repentance for his mistakes in youth, but it became more and more people joining with him. Once, there were over 20 people baptized in the river along his journey in cross.
Translated by Peter Wolfe
