Pastoral Messages (Page 73)

By Not Known I recently attended a community group meeting where someone declared that ‘love is all we need’. This is an admirable sentiment. However, is a simple call for love sufficient? ‘Love’ is one of those words that means everything and therefore means nothing. ‘Love’ is a word that needs definition. What or who do we love? Why…

By Not Known Have you seen pictures of the October 4 sludge spillage near Ajkar in Hungary? The spillage is indeed colourful but also highly toxic. Eight people have perished, the river Marcal is ‘dead’, an area equivalent to 5% of Singapore’s land mass is covered by red muck and the Danube is being polluted. The blame game and cleanup will doubtless…

By Not Known 2 Timothy is an occasional letter designed to give encouragement amidst the discouragements of church life and leadership. The following words are amongst its many gems (2 Tim 2:13): If we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself. This is an unexpected saying. The logic of the preceding lines (possibly taken from an early hymn)…

By Not Known During recent days we have hosted several visitors from one of our regional mission partnerships. These people came from a difficult and an remote area where to be Christian is to be in a distinct minority and to be under a real and constant threat of persecution. They are humble folk who had not had the life opportunities common to most of us. But they are…

By Not Known I had a childhood friend, Peng Loong whose home was just ten houses away in the Chinatown neighborhood where we grew up. We used to play basketball together and Loong was a brilliant player. One day, Loong slipped and fell on the slippery court and was sent to hospital. He went into a coma for a month and when he did wake up, he was already…

By Not Known Back in 1997 there were a number of Christian organizations which had set a goal of reaching the world for Christ by the year 2000. Ten years have passed since then.   The Jesus film project had reported, “several billion people across the globe had viewed that film and…

By Not Known God’s mission is done through people. There are those who stay where they are to sacrificially pay, pray, promote and publicise. Then there are those who go. This going may be a sacrificial leaving of what the world calls ‘prospects’ and serving in some kind of full time missionary service in the home country. We have two examples of that in…

By Not Known Today is the start of our mission’s emphasis month. Being ‘mission-minded’ is on every church’s lips and in our statements of core values, ministry plans and such like. However, it is one thing to say we are mission-minded but another to embody ‘missions in motion’. It is sometimes true that the more we assert we are…

By Not Known Self-improvement books and DVDs are some of the hottest items to fly off the shelves in bookshops. It seems that we all want to lift our game in some area or another and are looking for tips and techniques to help us get there. Some of these resources are great. I’m a fan of the Dummies series with its no-nonsense approach, clear layout and plenty of…

By Not Known The recent monsoon has cut a disastrous swathe through Asia. China has been badly affected but seems to be handling it well. Not so Pakistan. Imagine a land area 343 times the size of Singapore under water. Imagine double the total population of Singapore being displaced by floods and now facing the danger of disease. And all this in a country ill-equipped to…