Our Broken Church.

Don’t tell me how broken your church is. I have heard enough of it. There’s nothing new here.

Who doesn’t know that your church is far from perfect? Who doesn't know that you have pastors who are quietly hoping for others to fail in their ministry so that they can get ahead? 

Or, that you have programs that are more worldly than godly, seeking only to impress and wow, with music and pyrotechnics working on the emotions while leaving the hearts unmoved.

Charles Colson once said: “As has been said, the church of Jesus Christ would be like Noah’s ark; the stench inside would be unbearable if it weren’t for the storm outside.”

True, some churches reek; if not all of them to some extent. Their leadership is divided. There are two, three or even five warring fractions within with each tribal fraction fighting for the attention of its founding-pastor. And in turn, the discerning members are disillusioned, with some going with the flow, and others thinking of calling it quits. 

But wherever you go, you will be deceiving yourself if you think you can escape from the same stench that plagues other churches too. 

Unless you get rid of the human population, or separate the whole body from Christ as her head, you will not see the end of this toxic human drama when you offer your time and services to this invariably fragmented body of Christ.

Over time, the flaws and bruising ego will show. The disappointments will surface. The fault-lines will emerge. 

Mind you, the raw reality is not a dreamy one. It may look good on paper or charts, but ground zero is not going to be as appealing. And I doubt you will ever be surprised when you find the human environment in another church differs little from the one you’d left. 

In the end, the decision to settle down in a church is nothing like your experience of booking a holiday abroad where you check out their reviews or star ratings for the best accommodation and service.

While there may be a dream holiday package tailored just for you at the right price, you can’t expect the same dreamy community in a church where the diverse elements of needs, attention, socioeconomic status and personalities often clash. 

That is why Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: “Anyone who loves the dream of community more than the Christian community itself (warts and all) becomes a destroyer of the latter even though the devotion to the former is faultless and the intention may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial.”

Before the perfect comes, we will just have to contend with both the occasional dreams and nightmares expected in the Christian community; yes, warts and all - lest we destroy ourselves and our faith in our insatiable, deluded appetite to embrace the ideal and scorn its reality.

Needless to say, the experiences this side of heaven is substantially different from the other side when we will one day cross over. 

On this side, we are called to die to self, to overcome, to love one another, to show compassion, to walk the narrow road, to count the cost, to bear the cross, and to follow in His footsteps. They are all the formative steps of our sanctification process, that is, we are a church on the way, a soul still work in progress. 

Truly, how many of us struggle with all the above? Admittedly, even the best of us or the best in us fails to live up. Transformation indeed takes time; sometimes, a lifetime. 

What then is amiss? 

Well, according to Edmund Chan (author of the book "A Certain Kind - Intentional disciple making that redefines success in ministry"), he wrote: - 

“Chronic spiritual infancy is the ecclesiastical norm. Superficiality, immaturity and carnality characterise many Christians. Many church members don’t grow towards spiritual maturity, much less reproduce spirituality. The focus of the Church has shifted from making disciples to merely making converts.”

That is why many of us still struggle with the price and pathway of discipleship. The church, or any church, is thus a melting pot (or frying pan) of all these imperfections looking for a resolute outlet or struggling to overcome the indecision to take that long obedience in one direction. 

It is said that if you find a perfect church, don’t step into it lest you contaminate it. Well, I propose that you see it another way. 

When you do find such a church, step into it if you must, but trust me, you will feel really out of place. You will be ill-suited for it. 

With all your flaws and ego, you will feel inadequate, lonely and isolated. You will be struggling with yourself, wondering how do you even match up. And if your conscience is still intact, you will be tormented by your own guilt, your own carnality. 

After a while, you may even wish to go back to your own less-than-perfect church, which you once can’t wait to escape from. 

Alas, home for you may just be a place of fellowship among broken souls on the path to healing, reconciliation and hope rather than a place of the gathering of already perfect saints; should one even exist in the first place. You can then turn that "destroyer" mindset that Bonhoeffer talked about into a "healing" mindset by doing something about the brokenness instead of complaining about it, endlessly.

After all’s said, on this side of heaven, you will always be work in progress. And whether you admit it or not, you still fall short in your thoughts and actions. 

But the difference is that you are set apart post-Calvary wherever you are placed to do good works, to be peacemakers, to stand in the gap, to show mercy, compassion and love to those in need, those in pain and those in quiet carnal desperation, lost in the struggle between an emotional betrayal and a marital oath, or between a lie to get ahead and the integrity of his faith.

So, unless your calling is to serve in another church, you are placed in your current church for a purpose, or for a season. Your church may not be perfect, if not far from it, but that’s why you are there. You are there to bridge the gap and make a difference, starting with your own life, and from there, the lives of others. 

Pastor Peter Scazzero, author of “The Emotionally Healthy Church”, once wrote: “Everyone is broken, damaged, cracked, and imperfect. It is the common thread of all humanity - even for those who deny its reality in their life.”

But in our brokenness, in the bruised reed and smouldering wick, we will find our total dependency in God. We will find a vulnerability that is covered by His stripes, restored by His love, and uplifted by His joy. 

Let me end with an extract of a letter written by a father to his son, and the full letter can be found at p. 199 of the book “Why we love the church” authored by senior pastor Kevin De Young and Ted Kluck. Here goes.

"Church isn't a magic pill that you take, that punches your ticket for heaven. Nor is it a glorified social/country club you attend to be around people who talk/think/look/act like you do. It’s a place to go each week to hear the Word of God spoken, taught, and affirmed. It’s a place to sing songs to our God, even if those songs do sometimes feel a bit awkward. It’s a place to serve others. It’s a place to be challenged. Sometimes you’ll feel uncomfortable with those challenges, because sometimes your life will need to change… It’s about more than fund-raising, or networking, or meeting a girl, or even great things like serving the poor and reaching out to the community. I hope you’ll always know that the Christian life isn’t about what you can do for God, but rather about what God did for you on the cross. If this message isn’t central in your church, again, you may need to find a new one.” Amen.

A God for the Poor.

A God for the poor?

I always wonder, is there a God for the poor? By poor, I mean those who struggle with minimum wage. They come in all roles conceivable - that is, husbands, fathers or mothers who are largely making ends meet. They also struggle with their mortgages and kids' education expenses. They have little savings because they do not earn enough. Most times, they get exploited and are taken advantage of. They live from hand to mouth.

Is there a God for them? Is there a God for their children who have to depend on hands-me-down, skip lunches as they barely have enough for meals, and work part-time as they study to support their family? 

I write this because I often hear televangelists telling their congregation that following Jesus’ footsteps means expecting great things, mainly endless material blessings. 

Mind you, the Duplantis, Osteens, Roberts, Tiltons and Copelands of the mega-prosperity gospel have all happily jumped into the hundredfold bandwagon to equate faith with fortune, belief with blessings and devotion with possessions. 

It is often said that believing in God comes easy when success shadows the believers, especially for those who come to their wealth via family inheritance. 

For those who are successful, God can’t help but seem closer, more real, more tangible, and this reminds me of the Bible study session conducted by Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) in opening scenes of the movie Crazy Rich Asians in the comfort of her multimillion-dollar mansion.

And how often does one hear this from the rich and prosperous exuding much envied humbleness: “God is blessing me. I am nobody without Him. All I have is His, my possessions, my promotion and my wealth. I wouldn’t be here without His strength, His guide and His help. I am just a servant, a humble steward. I own nothing. Indeed, all is His.”

But, what does a believer who has little (the poor) have to say then? He can’t claim prosperity the way the rich and prosperous can so humbly disclaim with infectious modesty. He has nothing to his name. He is more worried about how he is going to pay the bills, hold down a job, and save enough for the near future. 

Well, at this juncture, I want to add that it is almost second nature for the already prosperous to tell them that if they truly believe, their time too will come. In other words, they can be equally rich too. 

But good intention aside, that kind of name-it-and-claim-it gospel might just turn out to be the glittering hundredfold bandwagon sailing pass the rest of the struggling world as they trumpet the prosperity gospel from their first class seats. Can you then blame the poor for thinking that maybe God has forgotten them?

So, what is the everyday reality? 

At some point, we have to come to accept that, for every person who succeeds, there will be dozens who do not make it. The ratio matches the leadership, that is, one leader or employer to hundreds of workers - give or take. It is never the reverse. The system we have to contend with is invariably skewed that way. 

It is a socioeconomic pyramid with the handful at the top and a very broad base at the bottom. This is the way it is even if there is high social mobility, and this explains why Jesus said that the poor, we will always have with us. Although he meant it another way, the identification in the majority is just about accurate throughout history. And most of them will leave this earth the same way they came.

So, where does that leave the poor then? While there is a God for the prosperous (so claims the prosperity gospel), do we have a God for the poor, the struggling, the deprived and the disadvantaged for all their life? 

My thoughts on all this came to an illuminating point when I met a client this week. He came to me because his wife was seeking for a divorce. It was a long 27-yr-old marriage with two young adult daughters doing reasonably well academically. 

They were also reasonably well off running two businesses earning a high monthly income. They in fact have two properties, though mortgaged, but were worth quite a lot in the market. At one point, he even told me that they once owned two luxury cars and were living large. 

But he told me that things went downhill when he lost big in the stock market. After that, he met with a tragic road accident when he rear-ended another vehicle. He was hospitalised for months and could no longer run his business as before due to his serious injuries. He now earns close to minimum wage and is struggling to make ends meet with a divorce to worry about. 

I am not here to write about the divorce because there are many factors involved in a marriage of 27 years, but what he shared was that he found his faith after he met with the accident. He told me that he thought he was going to die, but he miraculously came back to life. He said that God gave him a second chance and he has learnt his lesson. He is now a devout believer but he has little to his name - contrasting with what he once had before. 

At this point, he admitted to me that he was nevertheless happy. Despite everything, he has found a certain reassurance, clarity and hope in his life. It was not something that he had when he had money. In fact, he told me that his happiest days were when his wife and him were struggling to make ends meet when they first got married living in a small rental flat. 

I said that that was ironic and he nodded. He recalled a time when he was travelling in his luxury car with his two daughters arguing behind, and across the road, he saw a family with kids crowding at the back of an open lorry, laughing as they were sharing heartily. 

This encounter kept me thinking about the God that the poor has - like the client of mine. It is a God who is different in form and substance from the way the prosperity gospel has painted or airbrushed him. 

I felt that the greatest misconception is to equate God with prosperity as if such blessings is the only aim of His redemptive plan for His people. 

We often make God into our own cultural image because we want to make him the reason for our prosperity. Somehow, that adds a certain sacred and religious glow to our status. We therefore sell God in a way that fits our image of what we want him to be. This misattribution gives us a sense of control, entitlement and uniqueness (or specialness). 

Now, let me be clear to say that I am not saying that prosperity and godliness are incompatible. What I am saying is that godliness is much more than prosperity, even at times, to the exclusion of it. For the greatest amongst us is often the least amongst us. The disciples of Christ come to mind here, right?

In other words, it is not necessary the case that you are rich, therefore you are godly, and you are poor and you are (so-called) god-less. Most times, I dare say that God is the least concerned with your financial status because His blessing is about a life that bears fruit, and the fruit is never one-dimensional, that is, material success. 

So is there a God for the poor? Of course there is, just as there is a God for the rich. More relevantly, He is the God of the harvest and in the harvest field of redemption, we all stand equal before Him, the rich and the poor. For at the end of the day, the ones who are truly rich are those who unfailingly strive in their lifetime to bring the fruit of the Spirit in their life to full bloom. Amen.

The suicide of a loved one - surviving the loss.

I feel comforted to read that Prof Chong Siow Ann, a psychiatrist and vice-chairman of the medical board (research) at the IMH, did not give easy answers to why people commit suicide. 

In his article “Living after a loved one commits suicide”, let me fast forward to his conclusion, which I thought would unveil some 5-step or 10-step solution to the issue. But it didn’t. 

He wrote: “And we should continue to talk openly and widely about mental health and what is it that makes us despair and question the meaning of life to the point of wanting to end it, and more importantly, how we can pull ourselves and others from the edge of that abyss.”

Of course, I would expect Prof Chong as a psychiatrist to give advice to his patients on addressing depression and stress which are the most common causes of suicide, but in the article, he did not give any advice, just observations and understanding. 

Because if you think about it, a life is a journey and this journey is filled with stories, and these stories come with layers after layers of most times raw and unprocessed emotions at every crossroad, which are personal and intimate to the sufferer. And this is made even more complicated by the fact that no two lives or experiences accumulated are alike. 

Therefore, an advice to one may not apply to another, and an advice at one point can lose its effectiveness or resonance with the same person when he or she is at another point of his/her life or crossroad. 

The journey that is life is too complicated to be resolved by a series of seminar or a 5-day life-improvement camp or a few interrelated sermons on a Sunday.

But I have to say that the focus of Prof Chong’s article is the suicide survivors, and no, it is not written for those who have passed on, but those left behind. 

He wrote: “many people think the term “suicide survivor” refers to those who have tried unsuccessfully to kill themselves, but it actually refers to family members, friends, co-workers and mental health workers who have lost someone, with whom they had a close relationship, to suicide, and whom the suicide has also traumatised in various ways and to varying extent.”

To the suicide survivor, he is left with the stinging guilt and stigma of not being able to help to step in at the right time and place to save the life he loves deeply. 

Prof Chong wrote: “That act of self-destruction is, after all, also an act of abandonment and rejection and a reproach that somehow you were not powerful enough, had not loved enough or were special enough to keep that person from choosing death over everything and everyone else.” 

Most times, if not all the time, it is the whys that haunt the suicide survivor. While the pathologist performs a post-mortem on the deceased and it generally takes just a day to confirm the cause of death, the suicide survivor does his for almost a lifetime to find the whys of it. 

His post-mortem is not only to find the whys but also to struggle with the anger, the pain, the guilt, the blame, and the self-reproach. And not only that, the suicide survivor, according to Prof Chong, has to deal also with being the “object of gossip, morbid curiosity and speculation” about why the loved one committed suicide. 

Admittedly, most of it may be imagined or exaggerated, but the suicide survivor’s compromised mind often plays tricks on them and the bitter regret or mental script for not doing enough will always come back to them in some form or another even when they have thought they have moved on. 

In the article, Prof Chong quoted this apt observation by Dr Edwin Shneidman, founder of the American Association of Suicidology: -

“The person who commits suicide puts his psychological skeleton in the survivor’s emotional closet - he sentences the survivor to deal with many negative feelings and to become obsessed with thoughts regarding his own actual or possible role in having precipitated the suicidal act or having failed to abort it.”

And that explains why many of them become victims themselves. “Research has shown that suicide survivors are more prone to developing symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder; they are more liable to get into accidents and develop alcoholism, physical illness and a variety of problems.” 

...and I suspect one of the problems is the contemplation of ending their own life too. 

Lesson? I think life for the living and those thinking of ending it is, most times, too complex to be captured in one or two well-intended advice or seminar notes. 

At this juncture, let me bring up another relevant news today to illustrate my point. 

Mr Henry Antoine Nicolas Sebastien, 34, recently received the Public Spiritedness Award at a ceremony at Clementi Police Division for saving a teenager’s life. 

It happened on 4 Nov at Skywalk, Sentosa Island. The assoc game director of Ubisoft saw the boy “perched atop the metal ledge of the bridge” and he seemed to be in great distress. According to Henry, he also looked “extremely tense”. 

Henry then distracted him by speaking to him for 15 minutes while his wife called the police. At one moment, Henry “lunged forwards and grabbed the teen by the waist...Henry then held on to the distressed and sobbing boy, until the police arrived on the scene.”

One passerby said: “The teenager is lucky that there was a Good Samaritan who was there to save his life.” (Ms Christine Yap).

Henry shared the same sentiment when he said upon receiving the award: “I am happy and humbled. I was just in the right moment, in the right place, at the right time.” 

Well, being there at the right moment, place and time is often what it takes to save a life contemplating suicide. And ironically, it was the same for the boy who wanted to jump down the Skywalk. 

For him, I believe it is also the perfect storm of being at the right moment, the right place and right time for him to resolve in his mind and heart to end his life. When that perfect moment comes, it usually takes either a nudge or a grab to end or save a life. 

But not every act of suicide crosses the path of the timely presence of a rescuer. Hundreds of successful suicide are committed every year and none of them were as lucky as the boy Henry met that fateful day. And who is to ensure that the perfect storm would not happen also in the future to go either ways? 

After all’s said, the most ironic question is, how do you save someone from himself? 

For them, the right to live also comes with the right to end it and the reasons for it is too multivariate for enumeration. 

Most times, even the suicide survivors are helpless to prevent or stop since they too cannot be present at that point when the living is helplessly hijacked by that compulsive-possessive act to take his own life. 

So, in the end, Prof Chong’s conclusion is the best way forward, and let me repeat it here: “we should continue to talk openly and widely about mental health and what is it that makes us despair and question the meaning of life to the point of wanting to end it, and more importantly, how we can pull ourselves and others from the edge of that abyss.” 

Hopefully, this continual talk and openness, and this search for the meaning of life and how it can empower one to overcome his or her demons can save more lives in the future. 

And my takeaway from it all is to never take anything for granted. I can never be too sure of anything, or anyone, including my own loved ones. 

My relationship with them can never be on autopilot, left to its own devices. For this reason, intentional living is more than just being aware of how I feel, but how others feel about how I feel, and how it affects them for good or bad. 

And I strongly feel that everyone of us has a responsibility towards life, and every conversation we have with our loved ones, every unspoken word even, ought to be not only consciously evaluated by us but also consciously acted out to make sure that it encourages a soul towards life, and not condemn him or her towards, well, otherwise. Cheerz.

N Levels, Streaming and a father's love.

My son will be taking his N level results this afternoon. I am proud of him. He is confident that he will do well. That’s enough for me. 

In the papers yesterday, the burning question is this: “Has streaming run its course?” 

And yes, it is about how the society views those who struggle at the academic bottom. Because if you think about it, “education policies don’t exist in a vacuum, they exist in a social context,” so says NIE don (Assoc Prof) Jason Tan. 

He added: “It makes some educational sense to sort students based on their ability, but the different options have differing social prestige.” And how the society addresses this “differing social prestige” is what makes or breaks the society. 

It is sad that students like my son don’t often get the encouragement that they need to do well in school. The stigma is real. It goes deep. It discourages most of the time. 

In fact, those at the bottom struggle not because they can’t keep up. They struggle because a part of society has given them up. 

In the papers, one student Ng Yi Xun (Sec 5 N(A)) said, “Express students look down on us, they think there is an intelligence gap, we’re not smart and we don’t study. We know they may talk among themselves but we just ignore them. Let them say what they want to say.” 

FYI, Yi Xun has secured a place in polytechnic to study digital media. 

Another student Goh Jia Hui said: “In a cohort, you know you’re at the bottom. There’s definitely some discrimination, even in co-cirricular activities (CCAs). You feel the teachers prefer Express over Normal stream students.”

Now, the good thing about streaming is that it allow students to stay in school. They are able to cope. They are learning at their pace. Therefore, they feel they are making progress.

According to the data, “the current drop-out rate is virtually zero, down from 5.3 per cent in 1997 and 3.6 per cent in 2002.” 

A secondary school teacher said: “Streaming is not an unsound concept. The reality is that not all teachers can handle a mixed-ability class, and streaming is one way to structurally optimise teaching and learning.” 

Lesson? I actually have one, and it is captured in the words of Denise Phua when she said: -

“Schools ought to be a microcosm of society, where there is a healthy mix of students from different socio-economic backgrounds, abilities, race and religion. We can tell a lot of a society from the types of school it has. We will also lose the golden opportunity to have students mix socially daily and be educated in the desired attributes of honouring the differences and helping each other out, regardless of backgrounds, on a daily basis, not in artificially created opportunities.”

Denise understands that “streaming is efficient”, but she said, “it downplays the fact that people have different intelligence and highlights only academic strength as the most important differentiator. It is not rocket science to allow students to be unlabelled and have them take subjects at basic, intermediate and advance levels.” 

In the end, in my view, it is not the streaming that is to be faulted (though it has a lot of room for improvement). It is how the society sees those who get streamed that is the issue. The mindset has to change, from top down, that is, parents have to take the lead here because it is a classic case of monkey see, monkey do. 

If the school ought to be a microcosm of society, where there is a healthy mix of students, regardless of race, language and different learning pace, then what keeps the society from division (or disunity) is not only the students’ attitude but their parents’ attitude too. 

I know it is an uphill or upstream climb for many because the implicit labelling and stigma is almost second nature or unavoidable. 

Clinical psychologist Carol Balhetchet said: “When you stream according to students’ grades, you are already labelling who’s better and who’s not as good. If you put students in track B, it’s telling them you’re less than A. Maybe a few will fight to cross to A, but the majority of B-grade students will settle.”

But we as a nation, as a society, must take this leap and make this sure footed progress to measure ourselves not by what we own, what accolades we receive, and what scores we get in our report cards. 

No doubt, those things are important to the extent that they serve a self-monitoring function. They keep us motivated and inspired. They encourage us to better ourselves. 

But when we allow them to define us, when we make it indispensable for our self-esteem, we also enthrone them as a competitive status symbol and hail them as inseparable from our self-worth. 

This is where we lose a defining part of our humanity, that is, the compassion, kindness and understanding for others who may develop differently from us and have equally treasured strengths and gifts that take a longer time to nurture and grow.

I feel that nothing is more divisive in a society than one that is suffering from a certain form of myopia, that is, a society that is conditioned by the system to arm itself quite neurotically with a magnifying glass to focus on just one aspect of human ability like heaping up the grades, and relegate the rest as secondary traits or worse, insignificant (to be looked down upon). 

And if the school is a microcosm of society, then regardless of grades or streams, my hope is for everyone, students, teachers, and yes parents included, to always take a firm standing on a vantage point to look further into what every student can achieve in one lifetime, and not at one particular academic point in time. 

Our measure shouldn’t start and end at one or two crossroads in school, but stretch over a person’s lifetime post-school. 

That way, we give everybody growing space and opportunities to excel in their own pace, and to bloom at their own time. And at most times, with an attitude like that, we are seldom disappointed. 

That way, we also break down the dividing walls of stigma and discrimination, and learn from each other what amounts to a humane society, that is, it is one that is kind and understanding and embraces differences, and not allow it to set us apart. 

So, tonight, I am having a simple celebration with my son. For at the end of a hard day, whether in school or at work, the results do not define our relationship, but the relationship defines our relationship. 

Sometimes, we parents need a little reminding about that.