Celebrating Hope Together (and a podcast!)

Perhaps you share some of my initial reactions to the idea of a rally where Christians gather in the nation's only and massive stadium...for evangelism.

“Can we, really fill the stadium...with friends?”
“Mass things are so passe though”

These thoughts lasted a few minutes. A huge reason is because the person speaking to the few hundred of us pastors gathered for our annual prayer Summit was the Bishop of the Anglican church, a man I have huge regard for. He is known for his shining pastoral heart and prayerfulness. So I know this has nothing to do with grandeur.


Then I honestly struggled with the state of churches and Christianity in Singapore. We are far from a celebratory hope-filled people. I remember how as a young pastor I had to admonish my congregation about our obvious lack of joy, the way we come to church and leave as if by rote with low engagement and impact.

Not being a local church pastor who can rally the people, I also felt hamstrung about how to participate in this (leaders tend to think mobilisation, we can't help it).

My next huge concern was how the next generation, many of whom are now schooled in a postmodern milieu would take to this. They prefer more intimate settings which feel more authentic to them.

This in turn led to the issue of my age. For a few years now I have wondered about my role as an inter-gen person. In my fifties, and not being a senior pastor, I don’t belong to the older ranks of leaders. But I am certainly not a ‘young adult’ any more, no matter how much I feel like being a millennial trapped in a time warp, captured in this post: searching for my generation, in which I share about how the word ‘bridge’ came to mind. Clearly, I can be a bridge between the generations. I have grown up with the days of one guitar and praise songbooks, the overhead projector and cyclostyling stencil machines (you may need to google this), to donning a pager as a pastor (which my kids merrily drowned when they threw me in the pool once), and am now on social media et al.

My concerns began to be addressed!

First, there was an inter-gen session where we listened to four older brothers talk about their experience of the Billy Graham Crusade back in 1978 (I was twelve then!). All of us present witnessed the warmth between the men, two of them biological brothers… how the memories of those heady days of faith and sheer gargantuan hardwork to get a national level rally going in a mere eleven months, shone as they spoke. Most of all, all four of them still blazed with a fiery zeal for the Gospel. To say we were educated, humbled and inspired is an understatement.

(You can read about this gathering here: two generations talk about the BG crusade)


As I prayed and met with more people, I felt a genuine sense of conviciton and excitement growing.

We are not working towards an event. We are letting this vision of a people gathered in celebration catalyse us to ask hard questions, such as what is Hope to you?

As the gravity of our holy calling to seek and to love, to pray and to care dawns, may our spiritual poverty lead us to seek training, to pray, to believe afresh, and o unite deeper.

It is a beautiful journey that is propelling us towards our destiny, if we would see with eyes of humble faith.

A huge piece was this podcast conversation  with Bishop Rennis and Rev Tony Yeo. Their affable and genuine answers help capture a sense of all that God has in store for us through this! Be sure to listen.

Really, what is Hope to you?
Who around you needs Hope, and how can this Celebration be a part of sharing Hope with them?

You are the best parent(s) for your child(ren): #3. Build Competence

Stop and think about the things you are able to do.

Clean up after yourself
Make your way around
Find/make/cook/serve meals
Maintain hygiene
Laundry
Converse with others, even strangers
Find information
Resolve conflicts
Make plans and set goals
Self-reflect
Pray
Write

and on and on... Life requires us to have a wide range of competencies! We cannot always be there for our children, and so they must develop and master these competencies.

It's true that when they are older (assuming the Net remains relatively safe), they can learn most things from Youtube. But, they must find the impetus to learn, and there are only two ways: you desire to learn, or you get desperate. One will probably lack joy and lustre.

When it comes to helping our children to learn and master skills, there is this fine middle - it has to be a little hard or nothing new is accomplished, but it has to be do-able.


I went by the rule when the kids were little, that 'as soon as they can todd, they can tidy". Going further back, as soon as they discover their hands, they can jolly well hold their bottles, lift the spoon to their mouths and even do simple wiping.

Young children find all of this fascinating and fun, mostly. Of course, they can also get tired and frustrated if they aren't the most co-ordinated (and will most certainly give up if they are criticised!)

This is where your power as a parent comes in: you offer them the meaning by the story that you spin.

Your story will either enable them or disable them.

So clumsy

I don't have time for this mess

How old already...

are possible storylines, as are these:

This is hard for you, but we can try it again

You will get better

Your muscles will grow and you will be stronger to do this

It's alright, I can just clean this up

A sense that I am able to learn, grow, and develop competencies must undergird life, or we become inflexible, frightened and mediocre.

Even as adults, we need others to believe in us and cheer us on. We need a mentor, a good book, a promise from Scripture or a good friend to tell us we are on the right track and that we can trek through a new terrain. We need emotional boost and a sense of safety that even in failure, we won't completely crumble. (see earlier posts on #1 Emotional Bonds #2 Safety and Security).

We can think our private thoughts of panic, but as parents, we need to have enough self-control to speak upbuilding and empowering words. We won't do it perfectly, but we can do it adequately that it becomes the dominant message. After all, when they start going to school (part of a society that will measure and often give them feedback without the emotional ballast) the prevailing message will become internalized if they do not have a stronger, more embedded belief that they are able.

I wonder if this may be the reason that kids who do well at school tests and so forth, sometimes crumble when they face the occasional failure.

This leads me to another set of competencies we need to intentionally teach: the ability to be self-aware, to reflect, to choose the stories we tell ourselves, and to embed our lives onto something larger, grander and stronger.

Being self-aware requires us to let kids have space to share their thoughts and feelings with us.
Being reflective means we have to let them meander for a bit and guide them towards helpful conclusions.

When my son was bullied at school, I was naturally very upset and it was easy to stick to a story of victimhood where I basically tell him to be wary, to avoid and to report. Those bits are wise, but they are incomplete. I needed to first hear how he is processing it. This helps him to know himself, the running commentary in self-awareness. I let him share how he feels threatened, unsure, and at the same time hopping mad and wanting to get back (if he was bigger). 

Next I pull back back from his version of the story to consider other points of view: what the other student may be feeling and thinking. How teachers tend to perceive and respond to such incidences. We talked too about how God has called us to be forgiving and loving.

Finally, we talk about options and which he felt he was able to do. Then I told him what I would do for him. 

I wish I could say it did not happen again, but it did. Each time, the experience though broadly similar had unique elements. He had to learn where he was being vulnerable, how he may be attracting unwanted attention, and how to deflect them.

A few months later, at a bedtime conversation, he told me he had a plan! In his words, "I must have a group". I heard it as 'gang' (my Hokkien, poor-town background kicking in) and gasped a bit, but listened on. He realised that being isolated rendered him susceptible, and that the answer was to be proactive about making friends. It is much harder to bully someone who is moving merrily in a group! 

We thanked God for our brains and prayed for the strategy to bear fruit. 

This ability to reflect, think from various angles and come up with solutions is a critical life competency. It's good not to feel nervous about your kids when they are in new situations because you know that they can bear with stuff or make sense of it then or later.

The conversation I had which included the moral dimension was central to this. We live in a moral universe and competencies without a moral compass will not be adequate. In fact, having a sense of what is right and wrong, what is expedient and what is loving, provides the scaffold for sorting through the options. 

Payback is a human instinct. But as the old saying goes, "an eye for an eye, and the world goes blind", we cannot afford to give in to this instinct. The only way is to tutor and tame it with a moral value, a greater truth we believe in.

I want my kids to be able to navigate the world, their world.
I want them to be positive, contributing members of humanity.
I want them to love themselves and appreciate others.

They need life competencies, and it is up to me, the parent, to enable them.


Q: What competencies do you want your children to have? What is your plan to enable them?


More {click on the link to read related posts} ~

At times, we will bump up against the monster called Parental Anger, where we are hopping mad at our kids, but the anger can fizzle out and become the energy to do better.

Or perhaps we are anxious about having our kids ready for a future we cannot envision! Are our kids Future-ready? They can be, if you have these 3 Anchors for their bright future!

The First Christian Podcast in Singapore, possibly

Let me guess. You have experienced this:

You pause and you wonder ... why?
You face a new challenge and you ask... is this really the way?
You are dog-tired and your heart whispers.. what options are there?

Questions. We all have them. As rational beings, we want answers. This is why there will be no end to "the making of books" as the sage reminds us.

There are questions when left un answered, probably won't impact or define our lives significantly:

why did the chicken cross the road
what's the next big ice-cream flavour
who is cranking up the new fried chicken wave
when is the next blockbuster and what will it be about

But there are questions that can suck the life out of us if we don't grapple with them, even if we may not arrive at a completely knowable answer, such as

Did Jesus really rise from the dead?
Does God actually have anything to say about work and how I manage my finances?
What do I do with my motley and at times morose emotions?
Is faith and science in conflict?
What is church, really?

Come March, join me in a fortnightly Podcast where I will talk with different individuals, share stories, discern trends, explore Scriptural notions and more.

Why am I doing this?

1. God made me a talker and thinker

This podcast comes at a time when God has called me, now that my children are more grown, to pastor the city with my gifts. I have noticed that when God calls me, it often comes with a backstory that makes me chuckle at how he has prepared me. Here's the story.

When I was in Primary 1 ( yes 1!), my form teacher told me at the end of the school year that she hoped I would not be in her class the following year. I wasn't traumatised, just bewildered. I skipped off...and two months later, skipped right into her class! She put up with me for another year and triumphantly sealed my fate with these remarks in my report book: ... 'is talkative and busybody'.

As far as I can remember, I was always asking questions. I wondered about the aunties in the neighbourhood, the injections I witnessed my Indian neighbour gave herself, the rows upon rows of books in the library, and twice I was so lost in my thoughts I was hit by the swing! Two gashes to remind me not to stop in the middle of potentially dangerous movement while I got lost in my thoughts.

As a pastor, I was even labeled a firebrand for asking questions at a denominational AGM.

So I guess I am meant to do this.

2. God made us all to think

We all think, and there's plenty of fodder to fill our heads each day and there's a desperate need for correctives. There is so much politicised spiel, profit-driven messaging, destructive input...that we need to hear some good, provocative stuff to get our brains hitched to a more productive gear.

And our thoughts are really the gateway to our lives. We act because we think. We continue to act the same way because we believe (rightly or wrongly). And our thoughts can become trails, and patterns in our heads and our hearts.

So it is critical to look at our thoughts and to have fresh ones.

In one of my first sermons, about the Holy Communion, I adjured the small family congregation at All Saints that the 'unreflected life is not worth living' (that got us off to a great start as a church).

Thinking is part of our design and destiny as imago Dei. We have to think our way through to responsible stewardship of the earth, a productive life, a deepening communion with God.

This we have to do, each of us. My mother who never had any formal education, showed me that being reflective, honest and value-driven, really has little to do with any certification.


3. The nation/church maturing needs to think

We are at a powerful juncture nationally. We need to think about what kind of society we want. We need to think about how our attitudes, commitments and participation is helping or hurting the society we want.

It is a tremendous time for us as we are storyboarding for the coming generations. There have been many voices calling for us to be more thoughtful, gentle, resilient, united...

Equally the church needs to think. We need to decouple from being so dependent on answers (especially from the West) as we grapple with a social changes. We need to figure how intergenerational partnerships. We need to be ready to re-examine and dismantle certain things that just won't' work any longer.

At the same time, some persistent questions which we did not answer too well in the past (like, 'aiya, just believe, ask so much for what' or, 'see what Deuteronomy 29 says') require stronger answers today.

The Cathedral Podcast became a reality after Vicar Terry Wong from the Cathedral spoke to me about it in 2018. Over our meetings, another story returned to my memory. Many of you know that I go to the Cathedral grounds once a month to facilitate personal solitude. I prayed several times for this historic church to impact our city and beyond. Now it seems God is asking me to participate in the answer. So I said, 'yes'.

Join me in the Podcasts and write me with your questions! Let's think it through together - to a more vibrant, earnest and winsome faith!


The Cathedral website