ARPC Church Camp 2008 on 2 Corinthians "Strength in Weakness"

Just back from the ARPC church camp.

Thankful that the Shanghai negotiations ended fairly speedily which allowed for 1 whole day in Singapore before hitching a ride up to Malacca for the camp.

There're few things for rivalling the fellowship opportunities of a church camp that brings everyone together in one place so that if you attempted to go up to your room for a quick power nap, you'd still be found in the lobby 1.5 hours later, having only moved 5 steps closer to the lift, chatting with people you hadn't met for ages and tickling babies you were meeting for the first time.

We stayed at Hotel Equatorial again this year, across the road from supper staples:

Ramly burgers,


maggi mee goreng and


satay, and beside the snack haven that is Melaka Megamall.


Already, before we'd even reached the hotel, 60 crispy wantons stuffed with juicy prawns encountered a horde of hungry Singaporeans and fulfilled their tasty destinies.

But the greatly anticipated meaty stuff was God’s word. The guest speaker this year was Paul Barker, a man not given to much humour nor eye-opening illustrations but inspite of that (or, because of that?) the message of Paul's fourth letter to the Corinthian church (2 Corinthians) shone through gloriously.

More after youth camp which commences in a few hours!

ARPC Church Camp 2006 and the Early Church in Acts

What a brilliant church camp. We were all (except the driver and good thinking too) out like lights on the journey back to Singapore from all the excitement of the talks, fellowship, chendol, biceps-building baby-carrying, chicken rice balls, kids with Crocs, nasi lemak, laksa, preparing Bible studies, beer, strolls down the night market at Jonker Street, satay, late night discussions to edify the biblically-needy within ARPC, dispensing medicine, teasing Chappo, Ramly burgers, games, recaliberating priorities to God, wanton noodles, midnight prayers, Peranakan food, jamming, missions planning...

Interestingly, Luke does not describe the early church in Acts 2 as a missionary church. There was no rallying push to go out into the mission field and reach the unreached (which for them would have been the rest of the known and unknown world!). Instead, Luke records them as a family of God's people committed to the gospel, fellowship, community and prayer (Acts 2:42-47).

What is now labelled separately as "missions" was a natural consequence of their grasping and partaking of the wonder of being saved when they least deserved it. No one who truly understands their amazing change of status from being the hateful enemies of God to becoming his precious children will fail to talk about this unbelievable free gift of new life. So there is no one Christian who is not also innately a missionary.

In Acts 8:1-8 we see that the people who took the gospel out of their tiny ghetto in Jerusalem were not apostles. There weren't hands laid to commission them to be overseas missionaries. What those people were in fact doing was that they were running away, fleeing fearfully from persecution, for Saul was going from house to house and dragging Christians, both men and women, from them.

So as refugees in another country, scattered from each other, these cowardly non-martyrs spoke of the thing that most mattered to them: the word, gospel of the death of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins. And many people were saved through their testimonies.

Mission is primarily the Christian living his new life faithfully every day, not a special annual holy pilgrimage to a foreign land. An aeroplane trip does not make one a missionary.

John Chapman spoke of his conversion at the age of 13 through the faithful life of the boy who sat next to him in class. That boy was a freshly-minted Christian barely 3 days old, who was neither schooled in apologetics nor, we suppose, commanded to convert the heathens. But in living his new life faithfully, refusing to continue cheating at tests and wanting Chappo to share in this good thing he had received, God worked through him to change the heart and mind of a boy who would later be one of Australia's greatest (as if these things could be measured by humans) evangelists.

God works through the faithful lives of his children to win others for himself. And we shall pray not for God to be part of our work of evangelising others but that he accord us the honour of including us in his work of building his eternal kingdom, for his glory.

ARPC Church Camp 2005

Loved church camp. Like Chris Chia noted, it was almost a small slice of heaven: God's people gathered under God's word and praising God. How sweet like honey those days were. Miss them already.

It seems almost a lifetime ago that we could happily and freely talk about God with all and sundry from well-travelled oldies like Phillip Jensen to wet-behind-the-ear newbies who had just come to know Christ, praising him with our tongues and telling each other of God's faithfulness in all our own lives, the steadfast sureness of his hand upon us who trust in him in good times and bad times, marvelling at how he brought each person bit by bit, through links in the chain throughout our pagan lives, into true and living knowledge of him, and singing of the wonder of learning more and more about him and so finding greater and greater satisfaction and pleasure in our lives.

And now that we have come to know him, and acknowledge him as our Lord and Master and Saviour, how can we then live as if we did not know him and his ways? How can we live as fools, as complete idiots, as if we do not know that God made the entire universe and that he tells us in the Bible how to work it and get the best out of the world, of our lives and of our relationships with others?

To live wisely is to live in fear of the LORD in awe and reverence for him as our Maker and Saviour and in obedience to his word as the lamp that lights our feet in this dark chaotic world. To live in fear of the LORD is to live successfully. And to live successfully is to find great satisfaction and pleasure in life, living it to the full, sucking the marrow out of it.

In view of such a great and promising future, my conversation with a married lady on the drive back to Singapore was very very sad. She said that the talks on Proverbs at camp had inspired her focus on God not her career. But she took offence to the practical aspects of living according to God's words recorded in the Bible. She didn't think that was the best way to live and find satisfaction in her life.

It soon transpired that her God wasn't quite the One True God of the Bible. She was "Christian" because her husband was. He had pursued and married her while she was of the view that all religions were equally legitimate and that she basically needed just any one to fulfil the "spiritual" category of her life. Her opinion of Christianity had not changed since and while Christians were entitled to their own worldview, she wasn't too bothered about it and picked what she liked to hear from the self-improvement theories and religious buffets of the world. Her husband listened silently as she said this.

The waste.

She was obviously thirsty. In fact, it was as if she was dying of thirst in a desert, and in front of her was the purest, clearest water that she could drink deeply from and that would satisfy every part of her. Yet, she snubbed it and ignored it and so continues to choke and gag and poison herself with stagnant lava infested water clogged with rubbish, smelly industrial waste and pesticide run-offs.

That was the second time I teared today.

The first was when Joshua himself sobbed when, voice cracking, he told of his 5-year old's prayer for him before Joshua made the trip to Malaysia: "God, please help Daddy tell people about Jesus". The preciousness of the gospel. The wonder of the good news of our salvation. It is so valuable a thing that anyone with the tiniest bit of sense would sell all he had just to get it.

Yet it is free of charge to anyone who asks for it.

Even more mindblowing than that, God gives us a book of directions that guide us in negotiating the minefield of life. And on top of that, God gives us the Spirit who is always with us, helping us through the minefield.

Amazing.

How not to live wisely, successfully and pleasurably? Yet, some times, we in our stupid sinfulness insist that we don't want to.

arpc