In 1974, Peter Wang, a Baptist minister from Taiwan who was pursuing graduate studies at Wheaton College, was invited to lead Wisconsin Chinese Student Spring Retreat. He saw the need for a Chinese ministry in this State and responded to God’s calling by moving to Milwaukee with his family after he graduated from Wheaton.
For the first four years, he primarily worked among the graduate students from Taiwan. And because of his denomination back ground, Pastor Wang founded an association which was affiliated with Southern Baptist Convention. And the group was adopted by Brown Deer Baptist Church (BDBC) where they formally started a church.
In 1978, working with some new immigrant families from Taiwan, the association registered as Chinese Christian Church of Milwaukee (CCCM) and met for Sunday service at BDBC for 9 years.
AS church member grew from 23 to almost 90 in the mid-eighties, Pastor Wang went on looking for another location to accommodate a growing congregation. He found Trinity Community Church (TCC) , whose senior pastor had a mission heart and was willing to rent his church for a meager fee, where CCCM started to meet from 1987 to 1999. CCCM grew rapidly during this period and saw an increasing number of English-speaking Chinese coming to CCCM. Joel Christenson, then a Ph. D candidate at Marquette University, worked with Daniel Shyu who was serving as assistant to Pastor Wang, and they started English worship in 1993. Pastor Wang retired in 1998 and passed the torch to Pastor Andy Tso.
Pastor Feng Bing Cheng, who came to Milwaukee to do research at Medical College of Wisconsin, gave up his career and enter full-time ministry. He wrote the widely-acclaimed “Songs of A Wanderer” which became so popular among the Chinese readers that CCCM decided to support him as International Mission Minister for him to spread the Gospel messages around the world.
CCCM reached another milestone when it purchased a church building at its current location in 2000. Pastor Steve Chu joined to served in the English congregation along with Pastor Andy in 2001 after one year of internship at CCCM. The following year, Pastor Daniel Shyu returned to CCCM serving as Literature Pastor, working primarily with Mandarin-speaking and Cantonese-speaking congregation. In 2005, Pastor Steven Jihn, who served as elder at CCCM for many year, entered full-time ministry.