Steven Sim

One of my elders, Dr. Khong preached a real good sermon today, simply titled “Love and Change”.

He challenged us to see that while God is eternal, the world is not, human beings are not and definitely church traditions, however cherished, are not. These are all subjected inevitably to changes.

He was questioning, without mentioning the specifics, whether some of our traditions are still relevant today. And the Church needs to ask this question again and again because we are called to response to the changing times.

It was a short and sweet sort of sermon, with three main messages kept flickering to the congregation on the projector screen (trust me, he must be doing the advert ppl thing, the same words kept appearing as if to hammer it hard into our minds):

1) God is eternal
2) We are not
3) Changes are inevitable, embrace it with love and enjoy the process

I found the sermon entirely refreshing. Someone told me this was the first sermon that she didn't yawn for many many weeks. And truth to be told, this is the first sermon since many many sermons where I didn't bother to “play” with my dopod.

And coming from a brethren assembly, my elder actually challenged us to ask ourselves, what IS the New Testament Church? Was there a standard template? And his answer was given in three changes which the ancient church underwent as their needs arose or as the church matured:

1) changes in leadership structures (addition of deacons and latter, elders)

2) changes in the “allowables” (i love this word he coined, i.e. loosening of the requirement on circumcision, then later the kosher food laws, and later the ”idol meat” laws) and 

3) changes in “meeting practices” (meeting daily, to meeting on first day of the week, to meeting on any day - this last one I didn't know till now, probably will check it up later)

Towards the end of the sermon, Dr. Khong asked another question, does the Church has monopoly on wisdom? He quoted Jesus' parable on the shrewd manager and saw that the parable implied we don't.

There are many things we can learn from the “world” and one example he gave was how Corporations can handle their organization well. This is coming from a senior executive of a large MNC. He even gave us some tips from “Who moved my cheese” on how to deal with changes. Loved it!

It was a cool sermon through and through. I wonder what the others in the congregation would think.

JR asked me why people liked propositions more than narratives - it seemed that someone was still questioning the “orthodoxy” of our Christmas play. She also said it is easier to process propositions in point form rather than stories. I told her stories are dangerous because they invite people to explore and think. Yes, they are more difficult and people can go astray, but life in all its complexity must be told in the complexity of a story and when we go into the narratives, we will discover truth, wild beyond our imaginations. And that, that is dangerous…too dangerous for the powers.

Anyway, yeah, someone said today to another person and overheard by one of the young adults that our play is based on Dan Brown's DVC and I presume it was sort of an uneasy comment from that person. Even while we were rehearsing for the play, another person actually told us the play may give a wrong impression that we are denying the “V” birth.

Gosh, I wrote the monologue, and I wasn't even thinking about the V-birth. It was a fictional story, loosely based on the gospel of John where the woman who was caught in adultery is now pregnant - we gave her the name Mary (I mean, throw a stone in the 1st AD and chances are if it hit a girl, she'll be a Mary).

Mary came into the scene as a sad, isolated, despised single mother, crying for the hopeless tomorow, not only for herself but for her yet to be born child. The effect was supposed to let the audience think that she was the pregnant virgin Mary.

And then suddenly, the twist is when the former adulteress Mary crying and downcasted recalled her experience of being dragged to the feet of Jesus to be stoned.