Pastoral Letters

Be Salt and Light in the Community

May 15, 2016 Author:Elder Liu Kerh Li
Community Gospel work has always been an area that we at TOLCC pay very close attention to.  Since we moved to Bukit Batok, we have mobilised the whole church twice to distribute tracts or to introduce the church to the residents in the community.  We also pray regularly for the community outreach work in our weekly prayer meetings.  Right from the beginning, we know that this is not going to be easy.  There are some critical questions that we always ponder about:  How are we going to get in touch with the residents?  How to ensure that what we do is sustainable?  How do we go about involving everyone in the church in this gospel work?  Nevertheless, we took a small step forward to develop a community outreach model that is appropriate for us.  In May last year, we visited residents in nearby HDB flats.  Although we only covered two HDB blocks, the unity that all brethren in church displayed during the outreach was especially encouraging.  If we were to be successful in the community outreach, this is a critical element that we can’t afford to lose!

One might ask how a church like us with around 70 people can bring about anything substantial to the community.   This reminds me of an account in John 6:1-15 where our Lord Jesus feds the Five Thousand.  A great crowd followed Jesus to a mountainside to hear him preach.  As there was not enough food to feed the multitude, the disciples were cracking their brains for a solution.  At this point, a boy came with five small barley loaves and five small fish.  With these, Jesus not only managed to feed the five thousand, they also had left over that was enough to fill up twelve baskets.  This demonstrated our Lord’s divine power that worked beyond human understanding.  In our community outreach work, we are faced with a similar scenario.  We are inexperienced and have limited resources.  We only have “five loaves of bread and two bread” but Jesus could multiply them to feed the large community in Bukit Batok.  Perhaps the real challenges that we face are whether or not we trust God enough to accomplish His will and if we are willing to give God our “five loaves of bread and two fish.”  The boy mentioned in the passage is a perfect example for us to emulate.  By giving out his food to the disciples, he has less or none left.  He could have kept them to himself but he did not.  Such is the kind of self-sacrificial attitude that we need in our service to the Lord.

Thank God for leading us in the Community Outreach ministry.  When we were clueless on how to effectively build relationship with the residents, He opened an avenue for us through a social service organization.  From here, we have something concrete to work on and we have also shared the idea in the recent ACM.  One of the plans is to participate in an ongoing children reading programme in the community.  For a start, once a month, three to four of us will head down to a nearby Residents’ Committee Centre to read English story books to the children there.  We hope that through this reading programme we would be able to have more interaction with the residents and offer them more assistance, such as workshops on topics of their interest or distribution of household items.  Ultimately, we want to befriend the residents and share the gospel with them based on the mutual friendship we have.  Through this, we also hope that the residents will find TOLCC a caring church that has their well-being at heart.  Please continue to pray for the church that we may tbe salt and light to the Bukit Batok community.