To eat or not to eat — that was the question East Asian believers recently wrestled with.

Believers from East Asia met for a Bible class taught by church leaders from the U.S. At this class, believers learned how to correctly interpret Scripture. A church leader from Edgefield, S.C., taught led them through interpreting 1 Corinthians 8.

The passage discusses whether it is appropriate for believers to eat food that was sacrificed to idols.

“In the western context this is an issue that we do not deal with at all and so when I mentioned this I was trying to show them the distance between the text and where we are today,” the leader says. “When I asked, ‘Is this an issue that we deal with?’ I was expecting to hear a ‘no,’ and in unison they all replied, ‘Yes we deal with this.’”

Believers told him they often struggle with whether they should eat food that might have been sacrificed or dedicated to gods or given in honor to an ancestor. The South Carolinian and the believers had a good discussion about ways they could handle that situation with the Holy Spirit’s leading.

“It was neat to see how they had wrestled with this and the strong desire to want to honor God and his Word [and] to apply [it] to their lives correctly,” he says.

South Carolina Baptist churches partnering together through the Cooperative Program to provide support to international ministries.