This past month that I have been back in Singapore, after a stay in China, has been an eventful one. As soon as I got back, we had our annual Mid-Autumn Festival celebration. We started doing this not long after we started the congregation in Woodlands, and it is perhaps the event that gets the best attendance this year, usually with lots of visitors. This year we had a somewhat smaller crowd than in previous years, but it was still a time of warm and happy fellowship. Several of our regular visitors were able to be with us.
This past weekend, we were able to participate in an inter-congregational singing session at the Pasir Panjang church. They had hosted a singing workshop for 5 days, which one of our guys was able to attend. The Sunday afternoon fellowship was really good. I appreciated the work the PP members put into organizing the event, and we from Woodlands really enjoyed both the singing and the fellowship.
We have had several visitors with us over the past month during our Sunday worship services too, and that has been a real encouragement to all of us. There have been several guests who were friends and family of some of our own members. This past weekend, we were happy to welcome a family who has recently moved into our area from the Philippines. It was very good to have them with us. I don’t know if they will decide to worship with us for their entire stay here, or if they would prefer to join the Filipino fellowship at the Pasir Panjang congregation (for the comfort of a more familiar cultural and language environment), but we enjoyed getting to meet them and are happy to have them here in Singapore.
Our regular small group studies have continued to go along well. We are studying the book of James, starting this week. On Friday night, all of those from the congregation who are able to be there will read the whole book together. We’ve been doing this for the past several months, a habit one of our members learned from the congregation in Seremban, Malaysia, when he visited there. What we do is read through the whole book together, aloud, before we start our study of it in our Bible classes and worship together. We don’t have a lesson that night, but simply a time of reading and prayer. Any thoughts that someone has, of course, are more than welcome, but there is no expectation of a formal lesson of any sort. The casual atmosphere has been a very pleasant environment for reading through the Word together. It’s been going very well, and I am thankful that we’ve learned this habit from our brethren to the north of us.
I will be leaving tonight for my regular trip back to the U.S. I will be in League City till mid-November, and plan to make visits to all of those congregations that support me, and hopefully visit Oklahoma Christian University during that time too. I will look forward to seeing many of you then.
