With memories still fresh of our 120th anniversary celebrations, our TA family steps into a new year with new hopes and plans.
2009 has been a memorable year as we gave joyful thanks to God for blessings received, witnessing more outpourings of His goodness throughout the year. At the conclusion of each celebration activity, if you ask those in the organising sub-committee, you are bound to hear testimonies of God answering prayers in amazing ways. Truly, God has been gracious in affirming the faithful labour of our church leaders from the various congregations who stepped forward readily to join hearts and hands to plan, implement and evaluate the entire year’s programmes. On looking back, our 120th anniversary celebration has indeed blessed our church community even as we worked to bless others.
It is my prayer, though, that this unity of spirit and effort to be a blessing to others is not just for our 120th year, but will continue throughout TA’s history even in the generations to come. To do that, we have to nurture each believer’s relationship with our Saviour and Lord in order that each one of us will be willing to commit our time, energy and talent to love and obey Him. So, for 2010, we will be focussing on discipleship training with our theme, ‘Called To Be Christ’s Disciples’. Specifically, we want to continue to encourage all members to grow in understanding and applying God’s word so that we ‘may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God’ [Eph 3:19b] – what a challenging and yet glorious goal that He has given us!
The common project that the TA community will be participating in this year is the social outreach project spearheaded by the Methodist Welfare Services as part of the 125th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Methodist Church in Singapore that we belong to. Its objective is to raise a target sum of $1.25 million which is to be disbursed to chronically poor families in our community struggling with an average per capita income of $350 a month. In giving each family $125 a month for 12 months, the MWS hopes to galvanise the Methodist community into active service – not only to help the chronically poor with what they need most (money) but also to reach out and befriend them in the love of Christ through monthly visits to the family. I hope that our TA family will respond to this call to share our blessings with the needy by adopting and befriending at least 30 families in 2010.
So this year, may we continue to seek to be grounded in God’s word not merely to grow in knowledge, but in wisdom, obedience and compassion. ‘And let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.’ [Gal 6:9]
Rev See Ping Eik
Pastor-in-charge
Telok Ayer Chinese Methodist Church
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