Pastor Wayne Chen, director of Radius Asia and a former missionary to the Biem people of Papua New Guinea, delivered the keynote address on the first night of the Arise Asia 2026 Congress on Monday, speaking to approximately 4,000 young Christians gathered in Manila from 50 countries under the conference theme "For the Joy," drawn from Hebrews 12:2.
Before Chen spoke, a video was shown documenting a milestone from the Biem people's story: after 17 years of sustained effort, the island community received printed Bibles in their own mother tongue for the first time. Chen referenced the footage during his address — an illustration of the hardship and joy he described from his own years on the island. His message centered on the assertion that the kind of joy a person pursues will determine the entire shape of their life, and most people are settling for one that is far too small.
A background forged in the field
Chen pastored in Northern California before he and his wife, Gail, moved their family to Biem Island in Papua New Guinea in 2009. The island is roughly three kilometers across, accessible only by small boat, and had no running water or reliable electricity when they arrived. For five years, Chen said, the family collected rainwater and relied on solar panels.
From 2009 to 2017, Chen and his team worked to learn the Biem language and culture, develop a written alphabet where none had existed, translate Scripture, and plant a church. By 2012, the gospel had taken root on the island and the Biem church was born. Chen now directs Radius Asia, the Asian arm of Radius International, a missionary training program focused on language and cultural acquisition, foundational Bible teaching, and planting churches capable of sustaining themselves under indigenous leadership.
A confession that keeps repeating itself
Chen then shared about a kind of encounter he has had repeatedly over years of speaking at missions events and churches. After services where he shares Scripture and about his time in PNG, older attendees — usually in their 50s or 60s — approach him with something that resembles a confession.
"They would say, when I was young, I attended this conference. Back in the days, I also had a calling to missions," Chen told the congress. "But when they said it, their face didn't carry any joy."
What those conversations share, he said, is rarely a story of opposition or trauma. "Usually they don't say their parents opposed them, or their church stopped them, or they walked away from the faith." The reason was simpler: "Life simply happened. They got a job. They got a promotion. They met a nice boy. They got married. They bought a house. They had children."
None of those things are wrong, Chen said. But the cumulative drift — one semester becoming one year, one year becoming five, five becoming thirty — produces the regret he keeps encountering. "Nobody stopped them [from going on missions]. They simply started living like everybody else in the world was living."
That, he told the delegates, is what Arise Asia 2026 is asking them not to do. "What matters more than the next five days is really the next five years and the next 50 years of your life."
The world in three parts
Chen showed a visualization of the global population dividing the world's eight billion people into three rough thirds to distinguish the reached from the unreached and also those who simply have not yet heard the gospel in their immediate context.
The first are those who identify as Christians — with access to churches, Bible translations, and believers in their own language. The second are non-Christians who nevertheless live where the church is already present. "Can you find a church in Manila?" he asked. "You can find a church in Manila." These people need the gospel, Chen said, but they live within reach of existing witness.
The last third are different. "They live in places where even if they want to find a Christian, oftentimes they don't know who to talk to," Chen said. "As they drive around their city, they don't see crosses on buildings. They don't find churches where they could ask, 'Can you share the gospel with me?'" He noted that before he and his team arrived on Biem Island, the community had lived for generations without any outsider ever learning their language. There was no Bible, no literacy in the language, no means of access.
"All the easy places have heard about the gospel. When a people group, when a region, when a country have no access to the gospel, it's usually because there's some sort of difficulty or hardship waiting for the gospel messenger," he said. Short-term missions, he argued, are not sufficient. "We need to go, some of us need to go and stay and finish it."
A bigger joy than the world offers
Turning to his own years in PNG, Chen told the congress that his time on the island was not enjoyable — and yet was marked by something he described as the deepest joy he had known. "Enjoying something is different than finding joy in something," he said. "None of those days were enjoyable. But man, there was a bigger joy that God had reserved for me."
He took the congregation to Psalm 67, reading the opening verse: "May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us." He asked what would happen if the psalm ended there. "Who is at the center of the universe? It's not God. It's us. God is simply a blessing machine." He argued that many Christians live only in that verse, treating God's grace as something that ends with personal comfort.
Verse two, he said, changes everything. "So that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations." The blessing of verse one exists for an outward purpose. "God does not exist for you. We exist to glorify and praise him. Don't build your life around a passion that is smaller than God's passion."
Faith sees. Hope endures. Joy finishes.
In the closing section of his address, Chen offered delegates a framework for how to pray over the five days of the congress — and over the decades that follow. He drew three words from Hebrews 11 and 12: faith, hope, and joy.
Faith, he said, sees what is not yet visible — as Abraham did when he left without knowing his destination, sustained by confidence in a better city and a better country. Hope, Chen said, keeps a person in the race once faith has opened their eyes. "Hope is not positive thinking. Hope is confidence that God's promises are true."
Joy, he said, is what finishes the race. "Once that joy captures your heart, obedience, obeying God no longer feels like a bad thing. Sacrifice no longer feels like giving things away. You are actually getting things from God."
He closed with a personal disclosure. One of his two daughters told him she wanted to be a missionary. "I cried," he said. "The first reason I cried is, out of anybody, I know exactly what she's getting herself into. She is choosing a difficult path. But the second reason I cried — because I am so proud of her that as a young woman she is choosing the greater joy than anything the world has to offer."
He added: "I am not standing here challenging you to do something that I will not challenge my own kids with."
'Don't let that become your story'
Chen returned, at the close, to the older men and women who carry the weight of a calling they did not act on — not to judge them, he said, but because he does not want the delegates before him to become them.
"30 years from today, some of you will be doing different jobs. That's great. Be faithful. If God doesn't pull you to the mission field, stay where you are," he said. "But it is my prayer that some of you, 30 years from now, would be spending your lives in places where they have not heard the gospel."
"My prayer is that 30 years from now, none of you will walk up to a young pastor in a mission conference and say, 'When I was young, I stood up at Arise 26 and I almost obeyed.'"
He closed with an appeal to pursue what he called the deepest joy there is: "The joy of knowing Jesus Christ. The joy of obeying Jesus Christ. The joy of seeing his name be proclaimed in a place where it has not been proclaimed. Brothers and sisters, don't settle for a smaller joy. Lift up your eyes to a greater joy."
Follow Christian Daily International's full reporting on Arise Asia 2026.
