Celebrating 25 Years of Missions

This year, we celebrate 25 years of missions work and we thank God for His love, grace and abundant provision. It has been and always will be our privilege to serve alongside you. Through your availability, countless lives have been touched and blessed by God our Father, and many have come to know their saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ.

This video is a short chronological summary of the mission fields we have been serving in through the years. Let us look forward to many more exciting years ahead as we continue in our journey with God in obedience, impacting the world for Christ through godly families.

Looking Back & Soaring Ahead

We had an emotional and heart-felt last prayer meeting of the year, and are excited at all that 2012 promises to bring. :) For those of you who missed it, here are some recaps on our last Taste Missions event. May the new year bring Christ's love, joy and peace to you and your families!

Feature story on 4/14 in The Philippines

The crowd descends! Everyone wants a taste of missions! ;)

Tasty yak meat from Yunnan, China

Getting to know more about the work in Lijiang, China.

Explaining the whats and wheres and whys.

Could it be? Someone from the Yi minority tribe from the mountains of rural China?

Alas, no. We were fooled by the costume!

Our Thailand booth with their very creative pop-ups!

Chefs at work!

The Thai salad was a hit!

Captivated by the myriad of Cambodian street food.

Cambodian street game for the young and old alike!

Cambodia church planting and iAim programs.

Cambodia children homes support.

Mala hotpot from our China City Church team!

"Only one each please!" ;)

Something for everyone!

Last but not least, our feature missions location - The Philippines.

Tasting Filipino delicacies! ;)

Arise To Missions!

That's all from us for 2011! Please keep your contributions and feedback coming, and write to us if you are interested in knowing more about our mission fields or going on a mission trip. Drop us a comment or e-mail us at missions [dot] editorial [at] gmail [dot] com! :) See you in 2012.

For those of you who missed the newsletter back in October, you can read them here:

Missionary Updates from Thailand

It's been a busy few months for us -- mission trips, Christmas celebrations, catching up with old friends and making new ones. :) Our schedule looks to have finally settled down, and we hope to bring you more regular updates here. For a start, we have now included an email subscription feature (scroll down to the bottom of the right panel)! Yes, now you can sign up to receive an email whenever a new entry goes up on the blog. Yikes, has it been a whole month since the last post? :S

Today we thought we'd catch up with our friends Vincent and Judy in Thailand. This is a rather belated update, but here goes anyway... Let's check out what they've been up to in the later part of 2010! :)

Every Friday afternoon, the church runs a class for training and equipping cell group leaders and potential leaders. As Vincent is part of the team that runs the training, it has been gratifying to see the leaders gain more confidence in leading their groups. At the same time, God has also blessed the cell groups with new members.

Leaders' training

Since August Vincent has been reaching out to a group of boys living in the Don Pathana slums, which is one of the poorest slums in Khon Kaen. As Vincent is already acquainted with these boys aged 10-15 from previous ministry work, he is now working on strengthening his relationship with them.

Most of these boys are school drop-outs and live in a very harsh environment. Many of them come from broken families, while some have alcoholic parents who are addicted to gambling. With no one to care for or teach them, their literacy level is very low. Their priority in life is solely to have fun, which can sometimes lead them to danger. Presently Vincent hopes to share God’s love with these boys and impact them someway somehow. Your prayers are much coveted in this work!

Outreach to slum boys

The English youth cell that Vincent and Judy oversee have seen many changes over the past few months. They have found ourselves competing for the time of the youths alongside with their many extracurricular activities. Like the typical Thai youngster hailing from a well-to-do background, these youths have many commitments such as extra music classes, tuition, cheerleading, etc. Often cell attendance has been reduced to but two or three persons.

Also the cell now consists exclusively of girls as the boys have either moved away or dropped out. This means that the cell is now mostly under the charge of Judy, who unfortunately struggles with meeting even the basic communication needs of the members. Please continue to keep this cell group in your prayers.

English youth cell

Please continue to keep Vincent and Judy in your prayers, for them, for their ministry, and for their family back home. And just to add an exciting piece of news... God has also blessed them with a precious baby girl, the proud father-to-be has uploaded her ultrasound pictures on his blog! ;)

Finally, here's leaving you with a clip of the women's ministry work that went on in the past month. Tammy and Ps Yvonne were there, and looking at the photos, I wish I had gone too! :P

You can read more about Vincent and Judy's work from a previous update here, or on their blogs found in the sidebar. :)

Cambodia Camp Slideshow

Highlights from Cambodia Children's Camp earlier in September:

If you'd like to know more, feel free to leave a comment or drop us an email at missions [DOT] editorial [AT] gmail [DOT] com or check out the COSBT Cambodia Orphans Sponsorship Programme. :)

Christmas is coming! Jesus is the reason for the season... Have you shared Jesus with anyone recently? :)

The Difficult Questions

One brainstorming afternoon, five interview sessions, three full days of video edits, across six different congregations, in various languages and dialects, and countless emails later, this video finally went live during our church's missions weekend last month.

Our first video was a series of interviews with our missionaries, this time we wanted to hear from YOU. We think that our church is a missions-minded church, but how much do we really know? Do we even know what missions means?

We have received very kind words (and much laughter) on the video, and many requests for the actual answers to the "Do You Know" questions. So for everyone's info, our church's missionaries are Chin Leong & Alice, Doris & Alvin, Vincent & Judy, and Siew Ling. Our missions coordinator is Adrian (he cried a little when he realised how few people knew him), and our missions budget for 2010 is $530,000.

The interview sessions proved to be a humbling and refreshing (and sometimes baffling) experience for us on the missions editorial team; some answers we expected, many we did not, but all of which gave us a greater insight into the church as a body of Christ. A huge shoutout to all the interviewees (even those whom we did not choose to feature due to lack of time and variety)... THANK YOU for taking time out of your busy schedules to do this. We know it was harrowing for some of you, but you have all been a STAR in your own way, and God bless you for your courage and honesty. :)

At the end of the day, we were never really looking for the right answers, only that the video would help us to ask ourselves: What is our role in The Great Commission? What have we done today with the opportunities and resources that God has given us?

We hope this video challenges you as much as it did us. :)

Heartbeat of God

After months of preparation, we have finally begun the work on our next video production. On our previous project, we were tasked to put it together in about two months -- from the time that the team was formed to when the video was to be shown during our church's Missions Week -- which was insanely tight, to say the least.

This time, we hope to give ourselves a little more room to breathe, juggling this with our respective full-time jobs, and perhaps manage to have some fun along the way. ;)

For posterity's sake, I wanted to post our previous video up. This video was shown in all our church's congregations earlier in March, with the intent to give a light-hearted insight into the lives of our missionaries, and what they do so far away from home.

There's always room for improvement, but speaking as someone who's never been involved in a media project other than print, it was extremely fulfilling to see this come into fruition. :) We had so much fun interviewing the missionaries as well, and I believe I speak for the rest of the team when I say that they have inspired us. Our upcoming video aims to do something different, so look out for it in a couple of months, but for now, here's an intro to the people who are Making A Difference.