Although Safehaven has been in existence since 1998, we count FCC’s beginnings from Sep 2003 when Safehaven’s worship services moved from Clarence’s home to Keng Hock’s art gallery, Utterly Art, with my father preaching the first sermon on 14 Sep 2003 appropriately titled “God is Doing A New Thing!” So FCC as a church is five years and 3 months old. Five years may seem like a long time to some of you, but in the life a fledgling church it really is not that many years. How successful have we been as a model of this “new thing” that God is doing?

The measure of success of any organisation is how far it meets its target customers or clients’ needs. However, before it can even talk about success, the organisation has to identify the particular needs that it is in business to fulfill. What needs, are FCC, as a Church, here to meet?
Asked the other way around = Why do you need church? Why do you need FCC?

Before we attempt to answer this, let’s take a look back at 2008. (slides 1-5) Coming back to the question, Why do we need church?  Maybe we all have different answers to it. But I believe uppermost, people need church in order to come to know that God loves them, that they are of special value, that their lives have significance, that they are not alone; they are surrounded by a community of grace, of faith, of love. That we do not need to figure out entirely by ourselves how to cope with our problems, doubts, despair or temptations (those temptations that may hurt us or others).

People need to know peace, joy, hope and love (as the Christmas cards all proclaim). But that peace runs deeper than an absence of conflict; that joy is much more than personal happiness; that hope is that which sustains us in times of pain & despair; that the love of God is what people need to experience, as God’s beloved, the love that transcends all understanding, that we can never fully understand – the love that is deeper than the deepest ocean, wider than the sea, higher than the highest mountain … as the song goes.

There are many more things that we need. We need to learn how to share this love God has for us, we need to learn to offer and to accept forgiveness, to serve and to be served.  We all need a sense of belonging, we all need a home. We need to be connected with people, we need others to share our lives with. We need to love and be loved in return.

Having said all this, I know the last thing one wants is to be told what one needs! So inviting your friends to church does not mean telling them what they need, should, ought to be or do. Most people slowly discover their needs as they experience – we discover our need for God’s love as we experience receiving it; we discover our need for genuine community as we experience the bonds we share in our cell groups; we discover our need for connection with God as we engage in spiritual practices, as we worship; and there are those of us who discover purpose in our lives when we start reaching out to serve those around us.

So when we come to church, or invite a friend to come to church, we are merely providing an avenue for the Spirit of God to shape our minds and our souls. We don’t say, Here’s FCC, here’s what we are, what we do, let’s see how you can plug in. We say, here’s who we are, what we do, let’s find out who you are, what you do, Let’s see how we can become community together.

And, I dare to think, that we do that at FCC. That FCC is a model of the gospel of true inclusion to which Jesus Christ calls all of us.   We have, tentatively at first but now more boldly, begun to model a way of working which tries, in spite of difficulties, to be genuinely inclusive, to be sure that all voices are heard equally and the differences in points of view are respected and acknowledged, and then to take steps to be community and despite our differences, even to celebrate our differences.  
Take out Communal Preaching Sundays, like the one we had last Sunday. I know that Communal Preaching does and did freak some people out. But life in church is no different from real life. We have encounters with those with whom we disagree, both within FCC and also without, and we are familiar with how people can really fight and squabble, even in churches. But we have tried to model the church as it should be, not as it has been, or is.  We try to truly love our neighbour as ourselves, treat each other with respect, acknowledge the “God in us” in each of us. I remind you of Jaime’s monk story .. the messiah is one of us. And Yock Leng tells me the refrain in her head as she walks the streets is the song .. what if God is one of us? Just a slob like one of us? Just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home?
So, after five years, we are still here, warts and all. To me that is the first achievement we should be thankful for. But there is still a long way to go, many more miles to go, before we can claim we are the truly inclusive church we proclaim to be, not just inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, but all marginalised people -- the poor are still outside our gate, so are the lesser educated than us, the sex workers, the domestic and migrant workers, the sick and handicapped, we are largely chinese in race, largely professional, largely young.    There is still a long way to go.  And much more we can do.
Yes, there is much more we can do. But we do not need to try and do everything because we are honestly not a large church. We’ve got to look at our resources in our members in our church, look at what solutions we can already provide. They’re a LOT of needy people and projects – we need to figure out our ability and capacity.  We can do what we can realistically sustain, it may be a few things, but it’ll be a few things that we can do well.

Many of our current outreach programs were birthed out of necessity, out of personal connections, out of what was already happening. Dan encountered an HIV+ prison inmate who was abandoned by his family and that birthed our HIV medication fund. God placing us in Lorong 23 Geylang birthed Sista Magdalene. Our search for a charity for our Christmas05 connected us with H.O.M.E.

After the sharing of your thoughts and comments at last Sunday’s communal preaching, we talked at our Council meeting about the focus for the new year and pinpointed 3 specific areas:  (slide)
1)  SOCIAL BONDING : Much has been brought up about bonding between members, between the men and women in particular, and this was reiterated in our sharing last Sunday. I think we do well in our cells (which is natural) but not so well between cell and at large. We will up our efforts to promote cell gatherings, more participation at our Retreat, and learn how to genuinely relate and engage with each other, how to listen and connect, how to treat each other as real persons. I remember how Clare, at a Council meeting last year, recited a passage from the Velveteen Rabbit about the very tattered stuffed toy horse having a conversation with a new soft toy rabbit: (slide)
“What is real?” asks the rabbit.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the horse.
“It’s a thing that happens to you. When a person listens to you for a long, long time, not just to play but to really listen to you, then … then you become real.”
It is not just a matter of being polite and friendly to each other, although it is important that we are. Our relationships need a quality of spiritual practice – the practice of an active and genuine love, a graciousness unaffected by self-interest, an opening of ourselves to receive others, and a giving of space to others to be themselves. And yes, this practice can be cultivated, and I believe will almost naturally happen as we intentionally grow in our faith and spiritual development.
2) SPIRITUAL GROWTH : (slide)
In response to the perceived lack of spiritual food in this church, we are planning to consider a study of Richard Foster’s classic book, Celebration of Discipline, this year. In his work he uses two metaphors to illustrate the purpose of spiritual disciplines: a field and a path.
A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain. This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit.
The spiritual disciplines are, "a means of receiving God's grace. [They] allow us to place ourselves before God so he can transform us." He goes on to say, that the spiritual disciplines are like a narrow ridge with a sheer drop-off on either side: there is the abyss of trust in works on one side and the abyss of faith without deeds on the other.

On the ridge there is a path, the disciplines of the spiritual life. We must always remember that the path does not produce change; it only places us where the change can occur.
The task for us, then, is to cultivate our daily lives into fertile ground in which God can bring growth and change. This is what the spiritual disciplines are all about.
3) SERVICE TO COMMUNITY : (slide)
You may or may not be surprised to learn that service is part of spiritual discipline, but not merely a spiritual discipline -- it is a way of orienting one's entire life. However, practicing service as a discipline will help in directing that orientation. Jesus taught us to be servant of all. He illustrated his teaching by putting on the dress of a lowly house servant, and washed the grimy feet of his disciples. How are we to do less?
We are not just to keep our doors open so that people can come in, we are to keep our doors open so that we can go out to serve. Service is rooted in our faith tradition, and nothing is more central to our identity as Christians than the traits of mercy, compassion, justice, charity and love for the neighbour. To love and serve others is a direct call from God. All the teachings, stories and parables of Jesus consistently point towards God’s love for the poor, the sick, the outcasts, and Jesus himself acknowledged from the very start of his ministry that he was anointed to bring good news to the poor, release for the captives and oppressed, sight to the blind. We can do no less.

And, remember even if you are not serving in any of our outreach ministries you are in fact, able to extend the outreach ministry our church in the communities of work and play that you belong to. I look around us and I see lawyers, social workers, therapists, teachers, accountants, those in finance, technology, sales, art, drama & music, cooks and bakers, doctors, nurses, pet carers.

We are each called to ministry, to represent Christ in and to the workplace, office and classroom, home and street.  You can most certainly serve wherever and in whatever situation you are placed.

So these are the 3 areas we will attempt to do our best and utmost at this year.  Let us together really focus our positive energies on these 3 areas (slide) – genuine hospitality to each other; we not just bond with each other but we do so with genuine intentions affirming the other person as real and as God’s beloved; (slide) deep and meaningful spiritual faith development - we don’t just feed on spiritual food, we dig deep for the true meaning of spirituality and engage in spiritual disciplines to grow into Christ-likeness, and in turn, reflect these qualities in (slide) risk-taking service to the community, our outreach is not simply service to the community, our outreach really stretches us, takes us out of our comfort zones to zones of real discomfort and resistance.  I believe God uses our outreach efforts to expose us to people and situations and needs we would never ordinarily encounter to reveal the spiritual qualities and talents we have but may never discover otherwise.
These adjectives I have added are important because we will not settle for and less, we will not settle for mediocrity, we will not settle for just being friendly, sociable or helpful. Instead, we resolve  to be genuine, deep and meaningful and we want to take on risks, to offer our best and our utmost because we want the best for FCC, because we want the best for those we serve, because we want the best for God, because God has first given the best and the utmost. And these adjectives are not just words, we must allow them to really push us to take our intentions seriously. We want to live up to our reputation of being that scandalous church that people label us to be – scandalous in our hospitality and welcome to all people, and scandalous in our service to our neighbours.

Please join me as I close with a prayer by Walter Brueggemann: